The Good, The Bad, and the Bitcoin

October 13, 2022

Each quarter, we make a point to celebrate projects, builders, and innovations across the Bitcoin ecosystem - and there are always plenty of stories to go around. But as building on Bitcoin grows more popular, it’s also worth recognizing some of the struggles along the way (and remembering there are likely more still to come).

Building on Bitcoin…meet growing pains. We saw some of this pain manifest on the Stacks layer for Bitcoin this quarter as the network struggled mightily at times under demand load, Sovryn was badly hacked, and even Lightning addressed a major bug on its network. And of course, Bitcoin’s price remains below what we’d all like to see.

Here’s some of the good news. Driving some of the recent congestion on the Stacks layer was a surge in BTC domain registrations. Registrations were up 191.32% in Q3 vs. Q2 and are off to a meteoric rise in Q4, seeing more registrations in just the first 10 days of the quarter than the entirety of Q3. On the developer side, Clarity Camp from the Stacks Foundation brought over a hundred new developers into the fold during the quarter, with a healthy waitlist and new course in partnership with Codecademy driving continued interest. And, the Lightning Network surged over 25% in the last four months, reaching $100m in capacity.

Last but not least, Titan’s recent analysis gives Bitcoiners some validation:

In a sea of red, Bitcoin ($BTC) has comparatively been a strong performer in terms of risk/return over the last year. And, with institutional capital flowing out of Ethereum ($ETH) and into Bitcoin, we’ve elected to trim our Ethereum position and add to our Bitcoin position with the proceeds.

All this points to Bitcoin remaining a strong, steady place to build. With Stacks 2.1 and Subnets on the way, we’re excited to get Stacks ready for primetime and welcome the rest of the world to building on Bitcoin. 🚀

-Mitchell Cuevas & the Stacks Foundation Team

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🚀 Stacks 2.1

🙌 Featured News

🏗️ Stacks Builders

🙌 Quick Hits

🥳 Events, Conferences, & Parties

🌈 New Tutorials

➕ Much more

Try nearly 100 decentralized apps built on the Stacks layer for Bitcoin. There are apps for finance, collectibles, blogging and many more.

🚀 Stacks 2.1 is Coming

As a community, we see the incredible potential of Bitcoin and are committed to building the best tools to make it more useful. Stacks is the top Web3 project on Bitcoin today, and this is just the beginning. We’re excited to highlight the updates proposed for the network in Stacks 2.1 — an upgrade that will strengthen the connection between Stacks and Bitcoin.

In advance of the launch of Stacks 2.1, we will be releasing posts that provide a closer look at each of the key updates for the network. For a quicker breakdown of what’s coming, check out our first post about 2.1 updates.

What developers need to know about the upcoming Stacks 2.1 upgrade. For developers working on wallets and related clients, 2.1 brings a number of important changes to how stacking is handled.

🙌 Featured News

On September 7th, QuickNode, the leading Web3 cloud platform for building blockchain-powered applications, announced beta support for Stacks. QuickNode makes it easier to build blockchain applications that scale and offers a variety of tools including elastic APIs, analytics, and SDKs.

QuickNode aims to serve the developer community by providing the best tools and the most reliable blockchain infrastructure offerings possible, notably providing blockchain infrastructure for crypto and tech heavyweights including OpenSea, Adobe, Twitter, DappRadar, PayPal, Coinbase, Chainlink, and 1inch.

As you know, Hiro has been working on a high-throughput, low-latency scaling solution for Stacks called hyperchains. Check out a new hyperchains demo here and stay tuned for another blog update on our progress later this week, but today we have a different kind of community update: we need to rename hyperchains. The trademark for “Hyperchain'' is already registered, and in order to avoid any potential issues, we want to make this change as swiftly as possible.

In partnership with Codecademy, we’re proudly revealing a new, completely free course for blockchain beginners: “An Introduction to Blockchain and Crypto.” The course will offer their over 45 million users (and anyone else that’s interested) a clear path to learning the basics about blockchain–no oaths or commitments to a specific protocol required!

Back in June, Blockchain.com listed Stacks (STX) in the Blockchain.com Wallet enabling you to buy, sell, swap, and earn 2% annually on your STX. On September 29, the team announced Stacks network support. You can now send, receive, and store STX on-chain using your new Stacks Private Key Wallet.

Over time, Clarinet has evolved as the Hiro team has rolled out new features, talked to developers, and adapted to the changing needs of the Stacks community. In this post, we’ll look back at how Clarinet came to be and discuss what we have planned for the future.

The new Clarity design was the result of an open process started by long-time community leader Brad.id aka BradleyBaker.btc aka @fluidvoice and supported by Will Corcoran at the Stacks Foundation. A big thank you to them, and of course, every single designer that submitted options. The community voted overwhelmingly for this new look; the winning submission came courtesy of Ginny over at Hiro Systems.

🏗️ Stacks Builders

After 10 weeks of immersion, 10 teams made their pitches.

The Stacks Web3 Founders Lab is a venture that includes a 2-month “bootcamp-style” pre-accelerator for Web3 startups. On Sunday, July 31st, 9 teams finally presented their learnings and work at the pre-accelerator's Demo Day. Meet the 10 teams and learn a bit about each of their projects in this post and check out the demo day video here.

Chiente Hsu is the founder and CEO of ALEX, a DeFi platform on Bitcoin (via Stacks). ALEX provides liquidity bootstrapping for emerging token launches and aims to pave the way as a DeFi innovation that rewrites finance for Web 3. In our discussion, we learn more about what ALEX unlocks for users, how Chiente first got involved with crypto and the Stacks ecosystem, and more.

ALEX is building Stacks Bridge, connecting USDC on Ethereum with xUSD on Stacks. Stacks Bridge is a wrapped bridge, with Tokensoft as the tech partner. USDC has a marketcap of over $48B and Stacks…

Orlando Cosme is the Founder of StackerDAO Labs and part of the 2nd Stacks Accelerator Cohort. StackerDAO Labs is a one-stop shop to create and manages DAOs secured by Bitcoin. In the below conversation, we learn more about his vision for the project, his experience in the Accelerator, and what's next for StackerDAO Labs.

Ragnar Lifthrasir is the Founder of Trajan, a professional community for Web3. When Ragnar was increasingly frustrated with professional sites like LinkedIn and Glassdoor, he started brainstorming how professional representation could be different on Web3. In our conversation below, we talk about the vision and philosophy behind Trajan, the different problems that the project aims to solve, and the future of social capital and identity.

John Ennis is a PhD Mathematician, former founder of an AI services company, and current founder/CEO of NeoSwap. In the below discussion with John, we learn about his vision for NeoSwap, an NFT liquidity platform that hosts "parties" enabling NFT trades and sales.

🌈 Tutorials

This time we’re partnering with our friends at Stacks to bring you this tutorial on building a decentralized exchange on Stacks. We’re going to learn about Stacks, Clarity, and DeFi, and build something awesome!

This guide will demonstrate how to create and deploy a Clarity smart contract on the Stacks Testnet using Clarinet, a command line tool for developing, testing, and deploying smart contracts.

Byzantion, an NFT marketplace for Bitcoin-secured NFTs, walks through a contract enabling one of the first true order books for NFTs.

Hiro's Subnets update covers an NFT use case on devnet as well as instructions and guides for how to write Subnet contracts and spin up a Subnet node.

In this guide, we will take things a step further and learn how to create and deploy a SIP-009 compliant NFT contract to the Stacks Testnet. Once deployed, you will also learn how to mint the NFTs through the Stacks Sandbox. Let us get started!

Generate Web3 projects in just a few clicks with our latest templates for the most popular Javascript frameworks.

➕ More

Xverse, the most advanced web3 Bitcoin wallet, is thrilled to announce that users can now purchase Bitcoin (BTC) and STX, the native token of the Stacks blockchain, directly in the app. This is…

Listen to the full stacker chats on your favourite podcast channel: https://podcasts.bcast.fm/e/r8kw5my8-how-trust-machines-is-bringing-in-more-builders-to-t...

A trillion dollars of native Bitcoin capital is waiting to be made into a productive asset. DeFi opens the door to a fast, free, fair and borderless financial system, removing associated risks, costs and barriers of traditional banking.‍

Why Hiro is donating to the OpenSats Legal Defense Fund.

Today, we are excited to share that CoinList, one of the leading platforms for new crypto offerings, has added support for Stacking following its listing of STX earlier this year.

Equity, noun: the situation in which everyone is treated fairly according to their needs and no group of people is given special treatment. What is the whole point, the long term […]

📅Events: Recaps & Upcoming

“The #BuildingOnBTC party rocked🔥 with extra vibes at the #Xverse DJ booth/bar 😁🎶 and a swanky @trygamma #BitcoinNFT gallery. Great to see the community!

@hirosystems #Bitcoin @stacks @trustmachines”

In a recent workshop, Hiro’s Developer Advocate Max Efremov broke down the differences between two popular smart contract programming languages—Clarity (of the Stacks and Bitcoin ecosystem) and Solidity (Ethereum and EVM-compatible blockchains)—so you can make an informed decision on which language is right for your application.

Coming Up:

The team behind Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin 2022 are going global in Amsterdam October 12-14.

Eventbrite - Stacks Foundation presents ZEST, FLOW TRADERS, MAVEN 11 & STACKS brings you Bitcoin Unleashed - Friday, October 14, 2022 | Saturday, October 15, 2022 at Soho House Amsterdam, Amsterdam, NH. Find event and ticket information.

Disclaimer: The information shared in this email is strictly for informational purposes. You should not take its content, opinions, and/or descriptions provided as technical advice, legal advice, financial advice, or investment advice. See full disclaimer at stacks.org/terms.