This week in sBTC ✨

Week of February 17, 2023

Author

Andre Serrano
February 17, 2023

Hi Everyone,

Happy Friday! We have a packed update this week. Let’s dive in 👇

Ordinals continues to drive momentum for Bitcoin builders. Our view is that sBTC will be imperative for scaling ordinals long term, so it’s worth covering this trend closely.

The Facts:

  • There have been nearly 130K Ordinals inscriptions to date.

  • Cumulative fees spent minting Ordinals is approaching $1M.

👉 Why it matters: Ordinals is reviving the Bitcoin fee market, which could help ease concerns around Bitcoin’s security model and diminishing coinbase rewards.

Highlights from this week:

  • Gamma shipped Ordinal inscriptions (Link)

  • Xverse launched first class support for Ordinals in wallet (Link)

  • Hiro is building an Ordinals explorer, Ordinals API, Ordinals support in chainhooks (Link)

  • BNS-X enables the community to inscribe .btc names as Ordinals (Link)

👉 The bottom line: While the crypto industry collectively became bearish on building on BTC, the Stacks community stayed focused and is now leading charge on Ordinals development.

sBTC Proof-of-Work 👇

💻 Developer Updates

  • Welcomed stjepan as the new member of Trust Machine’s Core Eng Team.

  • Kicked off planning for sBTC Technical Roadmap with the leadership of jude. Scoped about 30 projects.

  • FriendsFerdinand and Tycho delivered on a proposal to significantly improve the sBTC user experience. Learn about it in the OP_DROP wire format proposal.

  • mårten landed the PR for the original OP_RETURN wire format for peg-in.

  • fjs landed critical functionality for sBTC Alpha that integrates stacks.js with Rust.

  • Ӿoloki published updated p256k1 and wtfrost crates with full documentation.

  • Ӿoloki discovered and fixed a critical endian bug in p256k1.

  • donpdonp prepared a draft for frost and bitcoin integration. This work is critical to unlock work on Decentralized Mining Pools.

  • donpdonp and Ӿoloki landed minimum viable product for distributed key generation and distributed signature generation.

  • Aaron B reviewed critical PR’s on messaging and neighbor discovery.

Join us for our regular sBTC Engineering Meeting on Feb 20 to learn about our roadmap for sBTC. sBTC Eng Public Calendar.

⚒️ Go-To-Market Updates

  • Hosted sBTC community town hall with 100+ attendees

  • Jonas and Rena kicked off conversations with [redacted] key partners

  • Andre drafted marketing plan for sBTC brand identity and website

  • Elena drafted sBTC persona messaging framework

  • Will reviewed feedback from developer survey and presented preliminary findings to working group

  • Albert presented plan to recruit 100 founders to Bitcoin DeFi

  • Rena completed project budget draft

  • Gina kickstarted critical research into sBTC tokeneconomics

  • Andre outlined public sBTC roadmap and aligned with engineering

  • Tycho published thoughts on making sBTC ready for primetime — a discussion around the sBTC supply cap. (Link)

🌍 Around the Ecosystem

  • Chris Burniske on sBTC: “It's finally time, where people are so bearish on building on BTC — that I think it's time to be bullish on it.” (Link)

  • Why Bitcoin Builders Are Excited About sBTC (Link)

The team is heads down, focused on shipping. We’re planning regular releases this year, and you can follow along here every week.

Signing Off,

Andre 🚀