The theme this past quarter, and seemingly the foreseeable future?

Bitcoin L2s. But let’s go a layer deeper, shall we? There was no shortage of interesting perspectives offered on the, dare I say, suddenly trendy topic of scaling and building on Bitcoin.

• Venture Capitalist Tim Draper says he’s excited about Stacks and explains his Bitcoin thesis.

• a16z lists Babylon chain and the Stacks layer as Big Ideas for 2024 and expands on the breakdown in this piece.

• Web3 Venture Studio “Thesis” shares thesis on Bitcoin & Bitcoin layers.

• Portal Ventures shares Bitcoin thesis including Stacks as leading L2.

• Digital Asset Investment Firm North Rock Digital releases thesis on Stacks.

• Foundation Capital lists Stacks as an effort to give Bitcoin additional scalability and functionality.

• Messari publishes the latest edition of the Crypto Theses for 2024, including thoughts on Stacks & Bitcoin L2s.

• Coinbase releases 2024 Crypto Market Outlook predicting elevated activity for Bitcoin on secondary via L2s like Stacks.

• Investment Firm VanEck publishes 15 Crypto Predictions for 2024, including Stacks. 

Degens deliver

It wasn’t just the VCs getting deeper into Bitcoin L2s, either. Builders kept right at it as you’ll see below, but I have to take a moment to celebrate those degen legends that launched STX20 as a holiday treat for the community. The Stacks layer sure felt the congestion, but we made it through and were even treated to a huge Nakamoto update.

Bitcoin Magazine covered STX20 here and I offered some perspective on the Stacks Foundation blog. They asked for proof we need great Bitcoin L2s and the STX20 folks delivered it. 👏

Nakamojo: Fly your Bitcoin flag

Safe to say, the ‘secret’ is out: The world is coming to build in Bitcoin. We want to celebrate this momentum and fly the Bitcoin flag high as we head toward halving. To join us, ‘show your Naka•mojo•’ and maybe even win something neat along the way. At worst, you’ll have fun, so throw up those 🟧's and 🧡's.

Reviewing the rest of Q4 2023

Below, we’ve collected the biggest news from the past quarter, but don’t forget, you can keep up every week with Stacks Snacks too.

To keeping your Naka·mojo·,
Mitchell & the Stacks Foundation Team

🟧 Upgrades Ahead: Nakamoto & sBTC

In early October, the sBTC working group officially announced the sBTC Developer Release live on stage at Bitcoin Unleashed 2023. In parallel to hundreds of developers immediately starting to build with the sBTC testnet release in London, over 150 developers and users officially started testing sBTC via the incentivized testnet program. Builders were eager to start trying out sBTC and have since brought multiple sBTC apps to testnet.

 🚀 Nakamoto

The Stacks community is gearing up for the Nakamoto release, aiming to deliver fast blocks and transactions secured by 100% Bitcoin finality. In late November, the Stacks Governance group published the Ultimate Stacks Nakamoto Guide to educate the Stacks community and prepare every stacker for the SIP voting process, and before the end of the year, core engineers officially announced the controlled testnet release of Nakamoto (named Neon).

So what’s next? Check out the following helpful resources:

• 👉️ Technical milestones & release strategy for Nakamoto & sBTC

• 👉️ Nakamoto and sBTC launch communications and events

🥇 First Integrations of sBTC

• Hermetica successfully integrated with the sBTC Developer Release and has had over 150 people test the application

• Bitflow reports on sBTC swaps now being live on Bitflow testnet and the Bitcoin Frontier Fund breaks down Bitflow Finance and the benefits of integrating sBTC.

• Velar has successfully rolled out an sBTC Testnet Pool.

• Papaya DAOs Liquid Stacking is now active on testnet with sBTC rewards.

🆙 Other Integrations & Improvements:

• Figment announces that it will enable Bitcoin L2 rewards with upcoming support of the Stacks layer.

• Interim Executive Director of the Stacks Foundation Mitchell Cuevas & Copper Head of Sales, Michael Roberts share Copper’s integration of Stacks and upcoming support for Nakamoto and sBTC.

• Oracle Network Pyth’s Price Feeds are now supported on the Stacks Layer.

👀 Looking at Stacks

In addition to the VCs and thought leaders in the introduction, several others took a deeper look at Stacks this quarter and shared their thoughts:

• Stacks Creator Muneeb Ali shares the Bitcoin Layer 2 trilemma and Trevor Owens picked up from there, publishing a Bitcoin Magazine article on the Bitcoin L2 Trilemma, featuring sBTC & Stacks

• House of Chimera publicizes one-pager on Stacks.

• NewsCrypto lists top 5 Decentralized Finance protocols on Stacks.

• Hiro Systems shares comparison between sBTC and wBTC.

• Figment shares first look research paper on L2 Stacks.

• Investment Firm VanEck publishes 15 Crypto Predictions for 2024, including Stacks.

• Flagship Analyst publishes an article on the top DeFi projects on Stacks.

• CoinDesk highlights Stacks after comments from VC Tim Draper.

🏗️ Builders

• The Stacks community votes for their favorite community members and best projects in the ecosystem. Listen back to the 2023 Stackies.

• STX20, an experimental protocol as a version of Bitcoin inscriptions was introduced on the Stacks layer.

• Bitcoin DeFi protocol ALEX has another phenomenal quarter:

  • Rebranding to the Finance Layer on Bitcoin, launching Bitcoin Lab ecosystem fund.

  • Passing 500 million in transaction volume.

  • Tansitioning the ALEX Bridge into XLink, bridging Bitcoin to the EVM finance world.

  • Founder Chiente Hsu brings ALEX' official Bitcoin Lab Ecosystem fund, pledging financial and technical support for builders building on the ALEX Finance Layer for Bitcoin L2 Stacks.

  • Launching the ALEX Launchpad Beta Testing program.

  • Bitget Wallet announces support for Bitcoin Decentralized Finance project ALEX.

  • Ending the quarter with a milestone Monthly Active Users of 20,000.

• StackingDAO launches stSTX on mainnet.

• Stacks Multisig Asigna announces Mainnet release, partnering with ALEX and Leather.

  • DeFi protocol Arkadiko reveals Asigna integration to access Arkadiko securely with the Asigna extension.

  • Stacks Multisig Asigna surpasses $100K in TVL.

• Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocol on L2 Stacks Bitflow surpasses 17.5K waitlist milestone for BTC swaps.

• Hiro releases new API toolkit, simplifying API development.

• The Decentralized Grants stewards announced the first six projects getting funded through the new program’s pilot cohort.

• Bitcoin Finance Layer ALEX' AMM DEX is now fully integrated with Leather wallet, including native SIP10 token swaps

• Celebrating its 2nd birthday, Bitcoin DeFi protocol Arkadiko shares the details of Arkadiko 2.0, with sBTC, liquid stacking and more. They also provided a 2023 recap and 2024 roadmap.

• Hermetica launches the Bitcoin Bull Vault on testnet.

• Oracle Network Pyth partners with Arkadiko Finance to ensure that users’ positions as well as the general protocol remain healthy.

• Bitcoin L2 DeFi protocol Velar reveals H1 2024 Roadmap.

👷‍♀️ Working Groups, Critical Bounties & Governance

• Zest Founder Tycho Onnasch publishes forum post on enabling sBTC as a gas asset on Stacks.

• sBTC Resident Andre Serrano shares article about understanding sBTC’s Security Model

• The Stacks Foundation facilitated a community discussion on network emissions.

• Tycho Onnasch, Friends Ferdinand and Kenny Rogers publish an article that explores OP_DROP and its upcoming role in sBTC on Stacks.

• The Stacks Governance group published the Ultimate Stacks Nakamoto Guide and accompanying quiz.

• The Brand working group (WG) is finalizing a refreshed look for Stacks to complement Bitcoin better.

• BD WG had several wins this quarter, including securing Figment, Copper, and others as Signers for sBTC and Nakamoto.

• The Data WG has signed two new partners to make data more accessible for the community and builders.

• The Nakamoto, Testing, and Quality of Life WGs celebrated the successful launch of Nakamoto Neon, the controlled testnet.

• The Clarity Wasm WG finalized the Clarinet pre-release supporting Clarity-Wasm in the console and devnet.

• The Clarity WG shipped Clarity-Bitcoin-v5 to Mainnet and made progress on multiple Nakamoto Public Testnet PRs.

• The sBTC WG released sBTC on Testnet and successfully delivered a testnet version for the sBTC Hackathon.

• The Liquid Stacking Critical Bounty was completed by StackingDAO releasing on Mainnet and Papaya DAO released Liquid Stacking with sBTC rewards on testnet.

• Degen Lab fulfilled their Critical Bounties for Decentralized Stacking & Mining Pools on Stacks, visible on their new website.

• DCL link has completed the implementation for supporting Ordinals in DLCs in the core Rust-DLC library and will integrate these features into the DLC link platform.

• The Critical Bounties for a Stacks library for Rust and Python were both completed.

📆 Events & Builder Initiatives

• Bitcoin Unleashed Live in London: watch back the live stream, Day 1 & Day 2. The separate sessions and Developer Den workshops will be published on October 24th.

• EasyA released their 60 days of Stacks developer challenge, had over 250 developers working with sBTC during the EasyA London Hackathon, and shared that over 2500 developers have completed the Stacks developer challenges.

• The Spartan Group wrapped up an afternoon of incredible afternoon of thought leadership at Bitcoin Builders Thailand, co-hosted with the Stacks Foundation, ALEX Lab and Xverse.

• Gamma organized the Nolcha Shows Ordinal Edition in collaboration with Stacks, Xverse, Trust Machines and others.

• The Stacks Australia community held the Bitcoin Layer 2s “future of the Bitcoin ecosystem” event in Melbourne.

• Community leader Binaya shares collaboration with the National Innovation Center in Nepal to bring the Clarity bootcamp to students.

  • In addition, Binaya Tripathi (SF and Pokhara, Nepal) launches Builders Academy on Oct. 6th. Free program for students in Nepal to learn Clarity, e-ship, and Bitcoin.

• Hiro Systems announces the Hiro Hacks for Bitcoin builders, starting December 1st.

• Stacks Workshop led by Kenny and Dr. Phillip Bradford (U. of Connecticut) to students in University of Geneva’s blockchain program.

• STXLDN Chapter activation at Zebu Live + a Stacks & Coinscrum Happy Hour following the 2 day conference

• Stacks London held its first Developer Breakthrough Program.

🟧 Join us Feb 15th • 10AM ET • Building on Bitcoin Virtual Event 🟧