This Week in sBTC - July Recap

July 31, 2023

Author

Andre Serrano
July 31, 2023

Dear Bitcoiners,

Bitcoin Summer is here and sBTC is sprinting ahead. There’s been a lot happening over the last few weeks, so let’s dive in.

ICYMI:

🏃‍♂️The sBTC working group kicked off a ten week sprint, focusing on critical areas of development and streamlining core engineering efforts.

The goals for the sprint are as follows:

  • ✅ sBTC v0.1 goes live as a smart contract — without consensus breaking changes. This will allow us to simplify the go-to-market and start testing under live conditions.

  • ✅ Nakamoto consensus changes, which significantly improve the speed and security of the Stacks network, go live on testnet.

  • ✅ Improvements to testing infrastructure

🎯 There has been significant operational changes to improve communication and collaboration across all contributors in the working group; as well as increased organization and clarity on project scopes.

🧠 This will allow us to ship safer, faster, better code.

🔗 The sBTC project board has moved to the new Core Engineering Github repo.

👉 For more information on the current sBTC engineering initiatives, check out the following documents:

Ready Layer 2: Bitcoin Pitch Competition

Ready Layer 2 is a Bitcoin Pitch Competition focused on generating new ideas and business models for sBTC. The event will be hosted virtually on August 18. Register here.

Q1 2023 sBTC Objective & Key Results

Here’s an overview of the objectives for Q3 2023.

Objective 1: Deliver sBTC Developer Release

sBTC version 0.1 is a developer focused release to enable early testing in live environments. This is a key step on the way toward the Nakamoto release that will support sBTC without consensus breaking changes.

Objective 2: Create an sBTC SDK for developers

This will allow us to validate and test future sBTC versions, and make it much easier for developers to integrate their apps with sBTC.

Objective 3: Engage participation in early sBTC releases

We aim to get early and iterative feedback on sBTC, to improve the core product and build sustained momentum over time.

🌎 Around the Ecosystem