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Meet in the MIDL // BTCFI Omens /w Omnity Network
Recorded: June 27, 2025 Duration: 1:06:00Space Recording
Short Summary
In a recent Twitter Spaces discussion, Omnity Network's Sheldon shared insights on their innovative projects and partnerships, highlighting the growing trend of Bitcoin DeFi. With new user-facing applications and strategic collaborations, the future of Bitcoin as a versatile financial tool looks promising.
Full Transcription
Thank you. I The Thank you. I'm going to go to the next video. Thank you. Music Thank you. I'm Thank you. Okay, while we wait for everyone else to gather, I think we can slowly start as usual.
Thank you so much for coming, everyone.
This is a usual Friday episode of Mid in the Middle Twitter Spaces.
Here with us today, Manic Pixie and Midlanders Cat, your hosts.
Today we have a very special guest, Omnity Network, which we will very soon introduce.
For now, let's hear a hi from Midlanders.
Midlanders, how are you doing today?
All good, all good, guys.
I need to start with a little complaint. I was thinking and I was really relying on that our tune today would be some awesome tune of Italo disco.
But it wasn't. So I'm a bit of disappointed of that.
Yeah, no, you're a fan. I actually tried a new tune for today.
It told me that it's going to be some jazzy music, but I don't know how much you can count it as jazz because basically this one's very sad. I think we're on our way to making our own jingle. So maybe we'll get inspired by you and make it Italo Disco or something.
Yes, please.
Okay.
Thank you everyone for coming.
As usual, stay till the end if you are one of our Discord members.
And as we have a special quest for you to follow,
we will be dropping our usual magic word for you to fill in
and get some gears for this. Otherwise, I think we can start. Omnity, let's just check
the tech details. Try to say hi. Let's see if everything is okay today with the Twitter spaces
because sometimes they crash. GM, it is a busy day on spaces.
There's a lot of live streams going on.
There's a lot of spaces going on.
Am I coming in okay?
Can you guys hear us?
Yeah, everything's good.
Yeah, I've actually seen you guys hosting your own spaces like an hour earlier.
So thank you so much for coming.
Thank you for hopping on our spaces as well.
Thank you for such dedication. I think it's going to be a great hour. Wouldn't bother you too much
because it's definitely hard to speak for two hours almost simultaneously. But Sheldon,
almost simultaneously.
But Sheldon, thank you so much for coming today.
Today we have Sheldon, ecosystem director of Omniti,
representing the project today.
Sheldon, I think we can start talking more
and like diving deeper into Omniti right now.
Basically, I guess let's start with like a short intro
on you and on your background. What brings you to Omniti? What brings you to Bitcoin?
And just stuff like stuff like this. Sure, I'll try to keep it concise. So
I've been a blockchain researcher and active in cybersecurity for a little over 13 years
now. I was working for a couple of big companies. I had Yum Corporation as my client in 2012.
And someone walked into a Taco Bell and used what's called a rubber ducky. They plugged in a
little USB drive that fried the USB port. This was back before, you know, point of sale computers were all PCs, right?
So it was a regular desktop.
And somebody loaded in a simple warming script for CoinHive.
So when all these Taco Bell franchise computers at three different locations started mining
Bitcoin, we had to spend about a month and a half, two months doing research and providing
information to YUMCorp
to explain to them like, hey, we can't control your computers. We're your network security
partner. This is what's happening to you. Your computers are mining Bitcoin. They would say,
this is your fault. You have to fix it. I would say, look, we can limit on the network,
but your computers are all melting each other because they're trying to mine Bitcoin.
So the research that I did to build that playbook with Cato Networks was kind of my pill.
Ever since then, I have not let off the gas.
I've been quiet for the majority of that 13 years.
But yeah, there was a project that came across my desk shortly after COVID era started.
And, you know, it just it hit me. It was like, wow,
this is really cool. I love the light client work. I love the multi-chain thesis with, you know,
Bitcoin emphasis. And yeah, I've been on staff at Omniti for I think more than four years now.
And yeah, we've been building light clients on more than 20 different blockchains for a long time.
We're a big fan of app chain theory, which means that specialization by one chain doesn't take away from the value of another generic sort of L1 blockchain.
And yeah, that's led to our work on ICP.
That's where our Lite clients are hosted and built today. So we actually have a lot in common.
I've been reading through the middle documents and we also use threshold Schnorr and we support EVM and there's some
interesting parallels between us. So really happy to join you guys. Yeah, amazing. I've actually
also noticed that there might be some similarities um for our missions for sure i think you guys are more
focused on like expanding the ecosystem in-house but we'll definitely talk more uh about it during
the spaces because there's a lot to discuss especially for like non-tech people um including me uh so we'll ask a portion of
dumb questions for sure uh because like the more you learn on Omnity the more you feel like
okay I'm not quite understanding what is it about we actually um have Tuxedo right now on our spaces.
He's our ecosystem guy.
Don't know if he's just tuning in to listen or, but Tuxedo,
if you want to speak out anytime during the spaces,
if you're not busy with something,
maybe traveling or some working stuff, feel free to raise a hand.
I will give you the speaker permissions.
Sheldon, thank you so much for the intro on yourself.
I guess we will need a short info on Omnity as well.
You can keep it concise as well,
and we'll move to more detailed description after that.
Sure.
So I'll keep it pretty high level.
Obviously, I'm an engineer, so sometimes I get excited.
But I know that's not where everybody's background comes from.
So at Omnity, we have sort of two halves of the product suite.
One half is user-facing applications like our Runes bridge and the first open source runes dex, which is hosted on ICP.
So that's if you want to swap runes or you want to bridge runes.
We've got a nice UI for you.
We've been building UX and refining UX there for a little over a year now.
And the other side of our suite is based on developer tools.
is based on developer tools.
So we basically take the Bitcoin full nodes
that are built into ICP
and we try to turn that into tooling
that's valuable for developers
so that BTC Phi can come to EVM applications,
to Osmosis, TUN, Solana,
a bunch of other places
that really need the Bitcoin pill.
So that's the short version.
Okay, I guess we can try to dive a bit
deeper um on like how it works from a technical standpoint but if it's possible for you to keep it
also high level using the like human terms for not non-tech people this will be absolutely amazing because this will give
us the opportunity to understand it a bit better so i guess first of all i want to speak about maybe
omnity hop because this as i understood this is infra
as i understood this is infra
yeah it's it's user facing infrastructure so anybody can build it into their application
there's a couple people out there who i'm not supposed to name who white label it you know they
sort of rebuild it themselves because the the stuff that's on the blockchain itself it's
permissionless if somebody else wants to use it we we can't stop them. It's just,
you know, whoever wants to use the service can. There's no API rate limiting. If you hit the
absolute performance limits of that tool, then you'll just have to wait a moment and then you
get at the performance limit again. Usually when you have something like an API provided by a
company that's centralized, they protect that resource.
They might blacklist you if you overuse it.
But that's not how we work.
We're just on-chain infra that try to be useful for everybody.
So the way the hub works is basically a product of our many years of light client work.
And that's the type of bridge infrastructure where you sort of teach one blockchain to talk to another.
And that's the type of bridge infrastructure where you sort of teach one blockchain to talk to another.
So instead of having off-chain or secondary validator services, what we do is we take light clients that are initially published by one of these other chains, small amounts of code that do basic interactions with those chains, and we refactor it so it can fit on ICP.
And we refactor it so it can fit on ICP.
And at the hub's peak, we had, I think, 22 chains integrated.
We've now reduced that to closer to 12.
But, you know, you can imagine every blockchain wants to innovate and do cool stuff.
It's difficult to keep up with.
So we've decided to keep it a little bit limited for now.
And that means that those features and functionality for other
blockchains that aren't shown in the user interface, like for example, Rootstock, you can
still use the Omniti bridge to get rooms over to Rootstock. But if you want to do that for now,
you need to kind of build your own front end for it. So the hub is designed both as a user facing
tool where we give you guys a, you guys an easy UI to work with,
but it's also quietly in the background a developer tool because anybody can call the bridge.
Anybody can use that tooling.
And yeah, that's our style is just open source, on-chain, permissionless.
Okay, great.
So if we compare Omniti Hub, can I call it a bridge? Or do you guys not prefer to use this term?
Yeah, little b bridge, big h hub. Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, so if we compare it to REE, I guess REE is something that might be more similar to what Middle is doing from the description I see on the website.
Correct. So instead of using an independent validator network to accomplish this,
we're just using the infrastructure on the IC or ICP as it's called.
And, you know, that has some advantages for us because they have a non-monolithic blockchain structure. So there's a section of ICP that's specialized for Bitcoin, and that's where we're helping people refine, and we're also helping people utilize some other features that are built into ICP with that.
For example, that spaces we were on earlier today, that live stream was actually about the Solana RPC canister.
So the idea is that if you wanted to build a Solana application with Bitcoin DeFi, you could call three different RPC providers or three different sort of gateways to Solana and still be able to call Bitcoin full nodes or fully functional Bitcoin software from the same place.
So there's also an underpinning there just really shortly that every time something is
attempted, a record is created.
So when you have a centralized computer or even a secondary validator network, there's
stuff that's going to happen in the background.
And that's how it's supposed to be.
But we don't give ourselves that privacy. You know know if there's ever something that happens with our software
there's an on-chain record of it whether it's been updated or been used there's always a sort
of verifiable record so we love that audit trail okay sounds honestly a bit difficult. But yeah, I guess we'll get into it during the spaces.
Basically, if I'm, let's say, a DeFi user, I don't know, of a landing protocol or of a DEX,
and basically I use an application that uses Omniti's solution.
From the user standpoint,
what's new you guys bring to the game?
So it's the main thing is the Bitcoin on chain.
So it sounds funny in our marketing
and we've been struggling a little bit
with how to make this sort of easy to digest.
But usually when you have a Bitcoin service,
there's another node or another computer somewhere outside of the Bitcoin
blockchain that has to do something.
And that's also true for us.
But in our case, that something is the ICP blockchain.
The ICP blockchain can kind of act like a centralized computer.
It's really not.
But those virtual machines that exist on the IC,
that's the way that we distinguish ourselves by saying,
hey, look, you know, anytime you want to take an action,
here's a Bitcoin full node.
Here's a, you know, fully up-to-date version of the Bitcoin blockchain
that you can talk to and get data from and send transactions to
and, you know, monitor the result of those transactions. You can do all of that stuff without having to
sort of trust a third party or find a provider that isn't going to give you a confirmation
record. You know, when you pull up with Mara or Maestro or any of these other services that are
based on a Bitcoin miner, for example,
they'll give you a similar offering where they say, hey, look, we're mining Bitcoin,
so you know we care. And that means that we've got these computers for you that have
really, really detailed Bitcoin data, and you can use that. It's true that those two things
can accomplish the same result, but the difference is that verification, that audit trail. To know
that someone changed the software, to have a proof or a record that someone tried to use the software,
that's what makes our bridging possible. Because instead of having to, let's say,
wait for two blockchains to talk to each other, as soon as we start initiating an operation or
trying to do anything where Bitcoin is participating, there's already a record.
We've got to wait
10 minutes for bitcoin blocks so in the meantime for that 10 minutes it's important to have a record
that can be verified okay gotcha uh you also mentioned that you guys have rich swap basically
that's your um in-house dex solution uh but if we're talking about like
external teams building with omnity uh what what's in your portfolio guys what kind of
products we're looking in maybe we can already use some of them or maybe maybe we even heard about them already.
Yeah, yeah.
So our two biggest technical partners are Odin Fund and Liquidium.
When you use the bridging service or the etching service on Odin Fund,
those are both Omidy canisters.
When you do the instant runes loans on Liquidium, that's also our runes index are talking.
So there's a pretty you know, a pretty
big following for those dApps. Those are doing pretty good right now. Block Miner Fund is also
an interesting one where you can set up a sort of virtual proof of work and mine your runes out
instead of having to create runes and then fractionalize them and decide your splits and
all this. So there's a few different products that you
could try today that use Omidy's infrastructure in the background, but that's our model. We're
here to sort of do the work. We're not exactly here for the song and the dance, you know?
So it's been interesting to focus on infra in the background while also having,
you know, front-end applications. But I think there's a point about REE that we can touch on with RichSwap coming up
because there's a pretty good sort of like secret menu item there
that a lot of folks find useful.
Okay, well, sounds interesting.
Sounds like we should follow Omnity to see what's in there.
Do you guys maybe have some plans to launch some more products
as like re-swap as an in-house team?
Like will we see the ecosystem of Omnity expanding?
Sure, sure.
So there's at least one other external partner
who I owe a tip of the hat to, and that's Tykee. They made a minigame infrastructure that now includes the RE integration. And the benefit they get from that is being able to borrow 100% of liquidity on RixSwap to be able to use for their dApps. So if somebody wins big in their, you know, sort of minigame casino
or minigame, you know, little interactions of different types, then there's no reason to make
your own liquidity pool. You can use the existing liquidity. And that makes a lot of cool things
possible. Like you could win in one coin or rune and then swap into another really quickly or even
automate that in the background so that people could, let's say, you know, be playing a minigame, earn a sort of backend token or some, you know,
representative record keeper placeholder kind of token, and then come out of the other side
with the very popular dog rune. So there's some interesting things baking. We've been talking
about launching a sort of polymarket type product
as well. We're hesitating a little bit because betting markets can be pretty volatile, but
we're also thinking about some interesting Oracle implementations because we can use that same sort
of verifiability on ICP to make Oracles a little bit more trustworthy. Okay, sounds also interesting. Why not? A bit contradictive, but for sure for retail
might be interesting as well. Like from the ecosystem standpoint, Tuxedo might want to tune in for this one if he is able to speak uh like we uh I think
like we are on a mission both metal and Omnity uh to bring more teams uh for us building on Bitcoin
or Omnity enabling what Bitcoin can bring to multiple chains
as we are mostly only focused on the EVM.
So the question is, as for already existing Bitcoin applications,
the path of talking through why this or that solution is great is pretty easy because these folks
understand what what's what's it like to build on bitcoin or with bitcoin power
for like external builders who are building on other chains there is some double explanation why it might be interesting
so like the ecosystem and bd path is more difficult for this type of teams
what's your vision on how we bring more interest to bitcoin as an ecosystem of growing dApps, of teams building, and of teams being interested
in building and unleashing Bitcoin as a network.
So first of all, I'm not sure if he made it to the stage, but I'll give Tuxedo a shout
out because he's how I found Metal.
And he got me started reading pretty quickly, had the links in bio, and I just went into
So appreciate that.
But that's part of the kind of thing that we have to see more of is developer experience. You know,
I should be able to get curious about something, go read documents about it, and then go get hands
on. And I'm thinking that Omnity has a little bit of work to do in that category, because like you
said, we offer a lot of things that can be confusing. But at the same time, we've been looking to optimize that recently with ICP's Caffeine AI product.
And that's how we think that most development teams going forward are going to be getting into BTC Phi.
You know, they're going to recognize that they have a small gap between what they're already doing, either with EVM or with SVM.
And they'll say, OK, I want BTC Phi in my application.
How can I do that without wasting a bunch of time and money and not delivering on product?
So we think that there's a pretty straightforward path in front of us where, you know, people will
use LLMs. They'll use, you know, chat GBT wrappers in some cases, but they also need a chance to test
those applications. So that's why caffeine is the solution that I'm hoping will wrappers in some cases, but they also need a chance to test those applications.
So that's why Caffeine is the solution that I'm hoping will be valid in the next, let's say,
two weeks. There's a sort of mainnet launch happening on July 15th, and we're going to have,
you know, toolkits integrated there. We've been part of the testing there.
So that means that when developers want to integrate BTC5, we've got to make that available to them. And honestly, Ethereum Denver this year, there was a pretty heavy appetite for Bitcoin DeFi. Like Ethereum ecosystem is very, very wide and it's kind of like the AOL of the Internet that we're just going to keep getting those CDs. But, you know, is it really going to be valuable?
Yes. But will it be the pinnacle of performance and, you know, market leadership?
Maybe not. So we're not trying to get rid of EVM.
But we think if we can help folks augment EVM and some of these applications that are a little bit more mature or just have been around for a while building, you know, they'll have easier opportunities to integrate BTC Phi.
They'll have reasonable resources for calling a Bitcoin node without having to run one and justify that to their token holders.
space for a long time, do you see a growing gradual interest for BTC5 within the space
across the builders? I do. And I think there's a really easy argument for it, and that's block
space security. So Chia and a couple other chains are going to show like really high Nakamoto
coefficients, and they'll say, hey, this is where the most secure, you should use us.
But Bitcoin is still the best balance of block space security and economic security.
Plus, you know, obviously Bitcoin is in law all over the place.
Even Litecoin hasn't made it to most legal environments.
So there's a really easy, you know, world computer sort of approach for Bitcoin.
But that comes with the challenges of
10 minute blocks of no native smart contracts of, you know, op codes that are not necessarily
processed by most operators. You know, there's a whole deep, deep, you know, second side of
Bitcoin that just isn't being used today. And one of the reasons for that is that it was always
considered expensive and, you know, sort of painful to operate. But if we can soothe some of those pains
and provide something that matches the same level of transparency as Bitcoin, then,
you know, that's a pretty big leg up, right? So if you think of the Bitcoin mempool as the standard
saying that, hey, when I broadcast a transaction, I need a universe of
people to see that I did that and notice that my transaction is coming and then watch my transaction
get confirmed and start settling to the Bitcoin blockchain. If you see that as the base standard
of how we need to operate on Bitcoin, you'll see that Middle and Omniti and many other infrastructure
teams, we understand that there is a value
for Bitcoin that others are just starting to appreciate. And that means that we have to hold
ourselves to a high standard of, you know, hey, Bitcoin can do this. We can't just dilute trust,
right? There's this simple concept from network security engineering that you should justify any,
you know, high trust to lowust environment interactions with some limits.
But going from low-trust to high-trust, that's a lot more difficult to justify, right?
Like if you're at home and you're behind your home modem or router right now,
you want to be able to get to the internet through that router,
but you don't necessarily want people to come find you randomly over the internet through that router. So that level of high trust, low trust interaction, that's how we see Omniti
being a good fit for a universal world of people who want to trust Bitcoin, but really need that
confirmation to see, hey, this is what's happening on chain. This is what has been attempted outside of Bitcoin. And that is preserved by, let's say, you know, 30 or so different validator operators.
And, you know, I see middle on that journey also that you guys are trying to build up a really rich validator set so that when you're doing things in order to orchestrate Bitcoin, that you have this level of auditability.
And that certainly makes sense to us at Omnidi.
Yeah, 100%.
If I may jump here.
First of all, hi, Sheldon.
What's up, man?
You good?
Yeah, bro.
Good to see you on Spaces.
Good to see you as well.
One thing I want to make clear is regarding the differences between middle and Omniti.
regarding the differences between middle and Omniti.
Well, even though I would say our end goal is the same,
which is to expand the Bitcoin native ecosystem
and to make a glorious Bitify summer
like the ones we experienced with Ethereum in 2017
or with Solana 2020, 2021.
This is the end goal. Our approach is a bit different. At MIDDLE, we don't obviously support
any of the cross-chain bridging that Omniti is capable of at the moment. Our main focus, our primary focus is to provide this, let's say, this accessibility to EVM-based decentralized applications to access and build on Bitcoin natively, because we realized something that was, we cannot compete with Ethereum. So actually, we cannot compete with anything that is happening across EVM networks.
And there is no reason actually for that.
The transactions, the users, the EVM networks had at least six years
advantage to build whatever they have built in terms not only of applications but especially
user base. So there was no reason to compete that's why we found a way to invite those guys
over. There is no reason to compete. There is no reason to compete there is no reason to compete between networks because if
at the end of the day we realize that our common target is to have a happy user i will say that the
word customer even though i don't like it but uh that's the end goal the user experience and how
much the user can do doesn't matter't matter if the user is active on any
VM network or is active on just Bitcoin's network. The user must have as many possibilities as he or
she potentially can have. That's why I so much appreciate the work you're doing over at Omniti
providing all these capabilities to the users.
A lot of times, from a business perspective, we fail at our industry to understand what is our end goal. We think that we are on a race between each other, like middle is on a race with Arch
or Omniti. No, no, no, it doesn't make sense at all. We are so early. This is such a small industry.
I'm happy you guys exist.
And our common target is to have happy users that have a ton of possibilities.
That's my take, basically.
Yeah, excellent.
I mean, I certainly appreciate the approach and the wisdom that comes with patience because there is a large amount of teams, whether it's EVM or BTCFi, that are, you know, kind of stuck in this new era of venture capital and, you know, new era of trying to execute really fast and build something cool really fast. And, you know, I think we have the patience to say, hey, this is about having a happy
user base that can do a lot and has a lot of that sovereignty.
You know, there's a, I think, a confusion in Web3 that we need to be the new era of
SaaS products.
But people don't understand that SaaS products aren't very profitable until they become
really, really large and have the chance to optimize and do all kinds of other things in the background, like merchandising
and professional services and all of that. So I think there's a really clean path in front of us
to just provide good tools and good products to users. And that means that we won't make as much
money as a SaaS company will. We might not be the best investment of the century,
but we will still be a critical part of this, you know,
rising need for blockchain usage across multiple environments, right?
The focus for middle doesn't have to be multi-chain
to serve a user in the same way that Omidy would want to serve them.
So I really appreciate the vision, Tuxedo.
Thanks so much, man.
Likewise, man.
Tuxedo, yeah, thank you so much for joining.
And actually, this space is a courtesy of Tuxedo as well,
because he actually invited Omnity and Sheldon to join us today.
Super grateful for Tuxedo2 making it happen.
But yeah, I guess let's continue the retail topic and the user topic a bit
because basically what we're all understanding now is btc5 needs more products
uh needs more uh tooling uh to make these products come to life and that's what both metal and omnity
are doing um but basically uh i would like to hear both sheldon and Tuxedo's approach to one thing.
Tuxedo, if you want to join one more time as well.
What do you feel will be the breakpoint
for a wider retail coming in to BTC5?
If we're not talking to the like existing Bitcoin community,
how do you feel we approach more,
well, not approach,
but we interest more people
in coming from different ecosystems?
Well, first I should comment
that there's a culture of Bitcoin
that's a little bit lost these days
that, you know,
there used to be Bitcoin faucets
where you could go
and just get a small amount of Bitcoin for free and try it out and see if it's something interesting to you.
And I think that there is still, you know, obviously there's still a sign that for and there's things that people can do as developers to test this.
But that user oriented era of, hey, just try Bitcoin.
It might be useful to you.
You're going to like it if you learn about it like that. That needs to come back. So to that end, I've purchased about 600 NFC chips, just really small,
little blank chips. They cost about 10 cents a piece. And whenever I go to a mom and pop shop,
whenever I get in a taxi or whenever someone provides me a good or service as a person and not as
a corporation, I make sure to tell them like, hey, here's an NFC chip.
Next time I pay you, I would like to pay you in Bitcoin.
You know, please take this.
Here's how you program it.
If you don't want to program it for Bitcoin, here's another tool.
So I think there's a culture that we have to bring back in order to recruit the next
generation of BTC users.
Because in order to be BTC DeFi user, you have to have some comfort level with Bitcoin first, right?
Like, even if you are, you know, in the EVM environment and, you know, you're not caring about your UTXO footprint
and you don't have to think much about the Bitcoin mempool and things are executed more fast
and nice, there's still this sort of like grand question of like, what is Bitcoin? What does
blockchain mean to me? And I think especially in the modern world where there's so much stress
among governments and economic uncertainty, it's important that we remember that the birth of this
whole movement was based on, you know, the 2008 banking crash.
And people know about that. If there's someone in your life who's only heard of Bitcoin,
doesn't know what it is, they've heard of the 2008 crash. They've got some sort of experience
of their life financial that was affected by that. You know, odds are very high that they were
affected in some way by the, you know the absolute abuses from American banking corporations.
So instead of trying to get into a really political conversation with folks,
we just have to be willing to give them a little bit of Bitcoin.
And at Omnity, we do have a really reasonable user acquisition and developer acquisition rate.
We're pretty comfortable being above industry average on that.
But nobody wants to meet me in a coffee shop and talk about that, right? rate. We're pretty comfortable being above industry average on that. But, you know,
nobody wants to meet me in a coffee shop and talk about that, right? Like, I can't just be trying to pill somebody on my startup and how it's a good business endeavor and how I'm idealistic, blah,
blah, blah. Just give people stuff, you know? So I think that's the next era of Bitcoin DeFi users
is people who get curious about Bitcoin when they sort of
rediscover the old school sovereignty that made Bitcoin cool in the first place.
I 100% agree and back this opinion, Sheldon. From my side, I will add, I will start with a small funny historical fact. So over at Bitcoin side, we have two challenges.
One is obviously to onboard the users, build the tools, provide this infrastructure from
all aspects so that our users have similar experiences to what they're used to across
EVM networks and also new users coming in.
We are very close to doing that. Every day, every week we have something new, like last week or a
couple of weeks ago, Sats Terminal went live, which was this aggregation tool is something that was was missing and now is like you know every week we are we are solving all these problems that people
were nagging for years across btc5 you don't have that your transactions are slow uh you have price
fluctuations and whatnot okay we are solving that but we need to understand that we came to the space
But we need to understand that we came to the space, to Bitcoin's network, and we were greeted
with hostility. Because a good thing about Bitcoin is such a strong asset. But this strong asset was
held by Bitcoin Maxis, people that they want to do nothing with Bitcoin's programmability, they just see it as a store value.
So when you have these people, which by the way, they scared off Vitalik probably and other builders, and they said, OK, you guys are not friendly.
I'll go create something of my own. And they probably, if that wasn't the case, we would have had BTC5 exploding years ago.
But as I said, these Bitcoin Maxes, they are not the friendliest of people.
But now we are convincing them.
I see less and less voices of hatred that I used to hear back in the day.
Now it's settling down.
Now we have the communities, super strong communities,
like look at dog, look at pups, look at magic internet money.
It's super, super strong communities.
We have the tooling.
And guys, we are revolving around Bitcoin,
which is the most secure network
out there the only thing now that we are missing is i would say uh for the people to realize that
this is where the next wave should be once we have convinced every bit of
user from the other networks it will be easier to onboard new users.
Because let's face facts, today, if a new user comes to the crypto industry overall,
in general, it's a bit harder to join BTCFi, it's a bit easier to go and make transactions on Solana.
I hate PAM.fun, but I have to admit it's super easy to use. And sometimes it can be fun if you're not
right. So we had a lot of battles to give, but we are getting there. I'm very positive.
Agree. And I just wanted to chime in on this very quickly because I've had Bitcoin Bernoulli and a
bunch of other people shout at me and
complain at me. Like before we had spaces, we had Clubhouse, right? And Clubhouse was a great place
for Bitcoin maximalists to sort of show up in the same rooms, keep people out of the conversation
who want to talk about Bitcoin as a utility or as a functional compute mechanism. So there's a
really critical fact that I used at the Bitcoin conference in Vegas recently,
and that was that the majority of the mempool over the past year's time has not been flat
Bitcoin transactions. It has been op return and non sort of native sat interactions. So some of
that is bitmap speculation. Some of that is runes. A lot of
that is ordinals. But I think that we're finally in the era where Bitcoin holders understand
that if you just want to buy and hold, the velocity of that money goes to zero.
You know, if Bitcoin becomes the greatest asset on the planet and nobody is willing to spend it,
then it's dead. It's done. You know, I don't think
Bitcoin is going to die like this. That's the point of this silly exercise that I'm suggesting.
But I have been talking to more and more Bitcoin miners who understand that they need to include
Operaturn transactions. And maybe they're a little bit nervous because the artificial cap
on Operaturn from Bitcoin core has been revoked.
But this is just from a current core update.
And of course, that's something you can manually configure for your node.
So to say it in a less technical way,
the larger Bitcoin world is gradually getting used to the idea
that Bitcoin needs to be useful, not just as a store of value.
It doesn't also have to be a medium of exchange
as that main point of value. It just needs to be useful. And that's why, you know, I think BTC Phi
is rising very quickly. And I should also give Middle a shout out because you guys are due for
some flowers for integrating MetaMask by BTC Snap. I don't know how many teams are doing snaps with MetaMask, but if you guys haven't heard
of this, MetaMask has the ability to adapt to other blockchains. I remember back in the day,
one of the earlier ones that we saw was from Near Protocol, who we worked with in the past.
And MetaMask snaps are, you know, not the most easy thing to get used to. And obviously,
they're still relatively young. They need some optimization and refinement. But to meet users where they are, to integrate popular wallets to use tools that are
easy to get those sort of like, easy user interaction things like Solana. I think that's
the future that we're going to hit before the end of the year where, you know there's a a lot of these wallet providers like metamask like phantom
that see the opportunity for btc phi and they say well you know maybe we don't want to dedicate our
business to this new possibly risky endeavor but btc phi is rising so we have to be there we have to
show up so i think there's a um a greater patience for showing up for Bitcoin among the non-Bitcoin
blockchain networks. And I only see that getting better over the next year. I would consider
sort of promoing this one feature request that I made to Phantom. But I would say just search
Runes on Phantom in their feature request forum, which is, I believe, feedback.phantom.com.
You know, there is I think that's probably
the best market to be targeting for that sort of balance, because although Metamask has a really,
really big EVM footprint, Phantom has been growing more actively. Solana's been growing a little bit
more than some Ethereum networks have been recently. And part of that is that Ethereum
needs to figure out how it treats L2s. And I think that makes for a very interesting discussion about middle because you don't have to consider middle as an EVM L2. It's really not. But if there is a adjustment in the wider Ethereum L1 blockchain for Bitcoin, I would expect that there would be some room for, you know, projects like middle who utilize EVM but don't have a need to connect to Ethereum's economy.
Like, they should be giving incentives for you guys as users of EVM, as integrators of EVM.
And I think that will be part of the better cohesion between, you know, Ethereum, Bitcoin, and Solana in the future where you don't just have to depend on these third parties like a Soul Flare
or a Phantom or a MetaMask. It's not fair to just put the pressure on these organizations to lose
money to try to speculate and meet their best customers. It makes the most sense to make
protocol upgrades so that you get rewarded in ETH for using EVM or so that you get rewarded in Sol for using SVM, like Solana L2s.
They're trying to figure out what that's going to look like for them economically because Tully
wants to learn from Vitalik's mistakes. And Vitalik also obviously wants to move things forward and
make a better economy. To tie things off without sounding so buzzwordy, because I do hear myself,
there is an obvious need for block space security,
which is why Bitcoin is such an important place for DeFi.
But there's also an important need for economic security,
which is why Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains,
I think right now at their foundations,
they're having these difficult discussions about,
hey, how can we make this sort of value system where it's worth it to interact with us and people can have
incentives and disincentives for you know doing cool stuff with multiple blockchains together
100 i'll just add here first of all thank you for the uh for the compliments uh especially
towards our development team these guys are doing a really
amazing job for well over a year now and uh regarding what you said yes middle is not a layer
two uh i i don't know how many times i had to explain this to people but this is true we are
not an l2 middle is an abstraction environment for every transaction to exist on
middle a transaction must exist on Bitcoin L1 we are not a separate layer we never aimed to be one
and regarding the wallets discussion well we could discuss about that probably for days but in a very small sentence I would say that I really appreciate how Phantom is easier to
to connect communicate and get your ideas across compared to Metamask Metamask is great Metamask
is huge and maybe maybe that's also the problem that it's so big that sometimes it's hard to get things going towards a certain direction
but we will get there thank you for your kind words Sheldon
Sheldon also thank you for such kind words about middle I think it was a great overview to kind of start wrapping the spaces up because we don't really want to like take more than an hour from you.
And yeah, save you some time to work, to bring a BTC5 closer to us uh a classic question we usually ask the project uh how first of all you see
omnity and what's the your grand vision let's say for five years ahead uh so you can keep it a bit
bizarre maybe tell us some crazy ideas that you have in mind and what's your vision for btc5
that you have in mind and what's your vision for BTC5? Let's say also five years. Five years seems
such a long period of time for like blockchain space so maybe we should shorten that but you get
the idea. I'm cool with five years out. We definitely think in terms of the long term
at Omni we've never been a short form kind of project.
So I think that five years from now, if Bitcoin DeFi is wildly successful, a few things will happen.
One, you'll have regular payment processors accepting PSPTs or partially signed Bitcoin transactions in substitute of credit card networks, because the general,
you know, ability to broadcast a Bitcoin transaction, this is something that I'm sure
that is part of the middle stack. It's part of the ICP stack that we utilize and refine.
And it's a very simple tool that's a really critical part of our infrastructure. And it's
been a standard for a few years now. So I think that partially signed Bitcoin transactions being used for important day-to-day payments, like let's say
down payment for a car, you know, that means that someone can very quickly see that you are
broadcasting a Bitcoin transaction. They see that it can't be replaced by fee, which means the
transaction is not going to be replaced by some alternative or modified output or anything like that.
And I think we'll also see a more popular usage of SIG hash all, which is where you sign the inputs and you know the outputs of a operation.
So I think that that means that you're sort of starting with a known system, reaching a known system,
and then ending up with settled Bitcoin in the long run. That doesn't just describe payments.
That also describes a lottery. That also describes an insurance contract. That describes a lot of
different things about modern asset handling, where you need to expect a certain result and you have to be able
to trust the person that you're interacting with while also distrusting them enough to get your own
sort of receipt. You know, in a world where receipts are no longer law because in many states
in the US you're required to print a receipt when you do a transaction, there still needs to be a
record of the transaction being submitted or initialized. So I think that replacing receipts is probably the Valhalla for Bitcoin that we'll see in five to ten years,
which is a, you know, it's a difficult pill to swallow.
But the idea that we would transition to a cashless world is already kind of painful.
And I'm not a fan of going 100% cashless.
But if we are going to stop using these printer papers for no reason, if we are going to save Bitcoin DeFi is definitely still going to be used for
community, for speculation, for art, for things that we're using today. But there's a whole world
of Bitcoin traditional Phi sort of converters that I've seen active in Miami, that I know are
active in Hong Kong and other places. And it's really reasonable to say, hey, we want to use
tools on Bitcoin like those unused opc codes and borrow them for our own purpose.
If you want to get an EVM take on this kind of tooling or business need, you can look at the way that Visa has joined the Ethereum network because Visa has validators.
Visa can sign their own transactions that their own validators process.
And that means they have to wait in the ETH L1 mempool for that transactions to settle.
If you're doing that, then why wouldn't you also consider the same thing on Bitcoin as an alternate network?
Because Visa, like any enterprise company, has got to have backup systems.
You can't just have one way of doing business, you have to have multiple tools that work at scale, that are
verifiable, that don't just take a nap because the intern forgot to pay the cloud bill.
Like you have to have these kinds of systems that are resilient when you combine them together
and really, really permanent and well scaled when you operate them independently.
So I think replacing receipts is probably the peak of what we could expect,
but also, you know, more standard financial transactions being, you know, useful with
crypto that that makes a lot of sense to me. Like, I don't know if you guys have ever worked retail,
but if you've ever been that person who has to take a bag of cash to the bank,
it sucks. It's uncomfortable. You know, like you're probably not going to get robbed.
You're probably not going to get stuck up for five hundred dollars worth of cash.
But it's really uncomfortable to have to take that cash over to a third party.
You know, doing a transaction with a company like Brinks, who provides you a cash counting system locally, which then broadcast a transaction to the Bitcoin networks that you can get that money into the company's account without having to move that cash physically. Like there's a world right in
front of us where all of that is possible. So I think there's a larger Bitcoin DeFi that we can
see that's more like what we see today, like, you know, shout out Pup's World Peace. Obviously,
there's other great projects out there, but we really need some world peace right now.
I think part of that future is going to be, you know, smart integrations of PSPTs.
And that means that people will expect Bitcoin transactions to be made in a certain way.
And that expectation is just the same way that we have today.
Receipts, you know, databases and cash handling.
So there's a there's a lot to look forward to.
And shout out to Seth'sinal for joining us as well.
Really appreciate the work those guys are doing.
I think they're going to be a big part
of that forward-looking future for Bitcoin DeFi as well.
Maybe not in replacing receipts.
I think we'll let that be somebody else's responsibility.
But data aggregators and people who understand
different types of transaction formats at scale,
like Sats Terminal guys get it.
So appreciate y'all joining us today as well.
Sheldon, by the way, just answered also the age old question, when should I sell my Bitcoin?
I believe Sheldon is one of those guys that will tell you, you don't sell it,
you just use it. Just, you know, live with it, pay, buy, whatever. Why sell it? When the time
comes, my sentence will make sense. I'm sure it makes sense already to most of the audience.
And yeah, shout out to Sats Terminal. What's up, guys?
to such terminal uh what's up guys yo I was just listening to the space yeah and then
like oh sub terminal shout out to the guys okay okay I'm requesting the mic straight
away after that I'm actually going I'm actually going to meet someone IRL I'm doing an interview
in like 30 minutes so I'll hang out with you with like five five ten minutes and hey guys thanks for the shout out
uh thanks for our beautiful partners both both companies we're we're working with omnity particularly with with rich swap right now we're exploring how we can integrate rich swap is one
of the routes to um such terminal and thanks guys for sending the docs our devs are looking into that and once we
are done with the unisad integration for all games which should go live on monday monday maybe
tuesday uh yeah yeah i think i think i already said about that last week so it's like 20 alpha
yeah and also like since we are since we are patting each other on the back, let me also say a couple of good words about middle.
I know that our team and your team just recently met at New York and we're having a couple of big, big discussions. can't can't reveal anything right now but we will definitely be working with these guys on some
crazy ass stuff that everyone in ecosystem would only benefit from so shout out and hugs and kisses
from me that's Stan on the mic and thanks for giving me the opportunity to steal a little bit of your time on this space man i challenge everyone to go and find
twitter spaces across any other network apart from bitcoins network where three companies can come in
at the source such short notice pat each others in the, have a great time. This is the culture that is missing. We might be missing
some tools, but we are developing. We are going there.
We're on the right track, but we have the culture. Sometimes
I feel like whoever came to build BTC5
is all the, let's say,
the highest moral intellects across all networks.
That's who we are.
I absolutely love it.
I actually think the same because the crowd is so cool
and everyone kind of agrees.
Like, you know, no one wants to fight
because it's still very, i would say like young and
new industry like the whole bitcoin d5 bitcoin fight industry so uh yeah i think everyone is
friendly and nice like i think that's just amazing if you go for example to other ecosystems and you
want to build a product like any of the products like we're
building with you guys that we would have a much much more difficult point of entry to the market
right stan is implying that we will be fighting each other in three years time but not today
no but but actually actually that's that's that's very smart and right eventually like i
believe that bitcoin five is is growing like exponentially the year to year and we see a lot
of signs for that and eventually it would be a big business but it's not about like fighting
in the end of the day i honestly believe that there is always a piece of pie for everyone
if you are just like building hands down, like heads down,
you're just building your product, you're pushing the distribution out.
And then you see, for example, that there is a competitor on the horizon
or someone is entering the market with a similar product.
That's amazing.
That's perfect.
Because only through competition, you would be able to produce the innovation.
Only through competition, you would be able to improve your product. Only through competition, you would be able to improve your product.
Only through competition, you would be delivering faster, right?
So I think that's great.
We, for example, we have a little competition, yeah?
We believe that there is at least one product that is slightly similar to what we are building.
For us, it's not like, oh, we hate these guys.
Let's fuck them up or something. similar to what we are building for us it's not like oh we hate these guys let's let's
them up or something no it's more like we we see what they are doing and this is amazing
we acknowledge that and for us that gives like energy to you know build more build better
I got you man you you know Sheldon today I have to say congratulations to Omni Team, what you have built and achieved so far, but don't expect those words tomorrow. Tomorrow, it's a different story.
We'll be here. Appreciate it, Tuxedo. Thank you. Looking forward to more from middle for sure.
Looking forward to more from middle for sure.
Seth Sternal, thank you for joining us.
You actually should have joined like an hour ago for the main party.
But thank you so much for the magical appearance.
Would love to stick with you for some time more,
but I think we should set Sheldon free.
Because he's been doing the second base in a row for the last few hours.
So I think this friendly vibe is a great ending for the spaces. Decided to not fight today.
Let's gather tomorrow to see what's up. Sheldon, thank you so much for coming. Seth's terminal, thank you so much for joining us.
Tuxedo for making such a great impact on these spaces.
And for all of our regular listeners who are active on our Discord,
the magic word of today is hub, inspired by Omniti Network.
Hub, H-U-B, super easy, three letters.
Feel free to jump to our Discord.
Thank you very much for coming in.
We will wait for you next week, same time.
Might be same time, but I'm not sure.
But yeah, track our announcements.
And see you next week.
Thank you so much for coming once again.
Thanks for having us, guys.
We'll come listen in.
Cheers.
Ciao.
