Hey y'all, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Is my sound coming through okay?
Thank you all so much for joining. We're going to kick things off in just a minute here.
Okay, I think when Eve is connected
Uh oh. (laughs) Paul G's for the technical difficulties. We'll get kicked off in just a moment.
All right, I just requested you to speak, Neb. Hey everyone. How's it going? Good. How are you doing? I'm good.
Excellent. Cool. So I think we can go ahead and get kicked off. Thanks everyone for joining here. We are here with Muni Bali.
co-creator of the stacks. I'm Gina Abrams, Chief of Staff at Trust Machines and we're doing sort of a casual AMA with Maneeb. Thanks y'all for the incredible questions. We have a number of them compiled here that we
can get kicked off with. And then we would love to obviously reserve some time to have some of you up and ask your questions directly. So yeah, with that, thanks again for joining. I would love to start with just a little bit of background on human eb.
Obviously, your co-creator of stacks, the Spitcoin layer, for some more contracts and CEO trust machines. But, you know, we frequently mention how stacks is this decentralized ecosystem. Can you say a little bit more on that and in what capacity you're doing this AMA?
Yeah, happy to you. So I think it's sort of like interesting that I find myself emphasizing the decentralization of stacks like more than I would have taught that I would because I think the reason is that
People are sort of like used to crypto protocols where, you know, there's some open source code and there's there's a big company kind of like in the project, right? And most people are just looking at that company for doing, doing
the bulk of the workers and stuff like that. Whereas Stax is just absolutely not that way. It's not designed that way. The project decentralized pretty drastically before the launch of the main net and decentralized because of really good reasons. At the end of the day, it is about
decentralization and building these open protocols where anyone can come do whatever they want and that wouldn't really be true if any individual or any entity has too much control over and that's right. So I feel like it's a unique time in the industry where
I feel like in Bitcoin circles that lesson is very well understood, but maybe not as well understood outside. And I think given that some of the early team members, they do their Bitcoiners, they've been working on the Bitcoin ecosystem for a while. I do think that they take a decent level and pretty seriously.
Let me give you a little bit of a background context. So the early team members, including myself, the project was, I would say, cool created and I used the term created instead of founded because I think there's a little bit of a difference, right? Like I think,
If I say like I'm a co-founder of the project people might assume that I have some ongoing responsibility or power on the product like I sort of don't right like I have founded a new company that's building Bitcoin application. There's a nice thing that you know we actually use stacks as a tool. We contribute some code
to it, but I don't see myself as being actively responsible for the stack ecosystem. It's decentralized, so many people are working on it, which is great. On a daily basis, I focus on my company in Trust Machines, I'm the CEO, that's my daily
So that's why I think I prefer the term co-creator because the creation is now independent of the creators. And I think that's a good thing. That's a healthy thing. Instead of thinking of myself as a co-founder. I think there's a slight difference there, but it's important.
project was cool created. It's a late 2017. That 2017 is a year of Bitcoin gaspies spiked and it was very clear that Bitcoin L1 is not the place where you can build these applications and you need separate layers. That's been starting, that's been stacks starting.
And the team behind the project, there's a little bit of a prehistory. And sometimes people confuse that, right? So the Intel framework that I like is that the team behind the project, they were really building on Bitcoin L1 previously for several years, outright building applications and protocols.
directly on Bitcoin at one and some of them are pretty successful. We, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we#
And a lot of our experiences and in some way it was pre-eitherium as well. So some of our experiences led to the creation of stacks. So it's like we have battle scars to prove like why Bitcoin L1 is not the place
where you want to build scalable applications or have, you know, full smart contract functionality and so on. And we have felt like firsthand the need for a separate Bitcoin layer. And we sort of like created it because we wanted it for ourselves. We wanted it for the applications that we
So that's the beginning of the project. Like, the last story, 17 is when we sort of raised the first round, did a bunch of R&D, invented this programming language clarity, invented new consensus mechanism. A lot of, like I would say, thoughtful work went in to the project leading up to
the mainnet launch. And at that time, yes, there was a company, right? Like there was a company that was doing, that was raising capital that was doing the R&D, that was writing open source code. And what we did at that time was we tried to be as compliant with regulations as possible. We did a SEC qualified offer.
like that company did, right, where all the disclosures were there during the time before the main net launch when you know, this company is actually building the open source code and so on. We've been doing filings and you know, try to be as compliant as possible. And then there is the
of decentralization, which we have been very, very explicit about, that before midnet launch, we thought hard about how to decentralize the ecosystem. And without getting into too much details, it's sort of like we, the early team members naturally wanted to do a bunch of different things. Ken is right here.
So Ken was part of the team in 2017 and now he runs X-Force. Gina is right here. Gina still works with me in a very different company now. So if you look at the original team, I feel like they all went off.
to do what they were interested in doing in the ecosystem with a very high retention rate as well. These people, like most of them, I would say are still working actively in the ecosystem. So that's why you have so many different entities. Some new people came in. So it's not just like, you know, there was a magical first 10 people, but a bunch of folks were actually
considered leaders in the ecosystem, just organically became leaders and they actually joined much, much later. They came in, they saw that they wanted to work in this open source project and I think that's actually very healthy for a open source project to not have those points of centralized
to have a healthy competition and have geographic locations, multiple jurisdictions where people are because that just makes your project that much more resilient. And I'm very glad that it happened that obviously there's overhead, there's so many different companies, different people are going to
the direction and we're just learning to work together as a decentralized ecosystem through these working groups and all. But I think I think I'm very confident in the long term to look back and say like that was the right thing to do because in the end decentralization actually really matters.
Awesome. Thank you so much. And so yeah, you're talking about obviously developments on the Bitcoin L1 and that brings us to one of the sort of topics of the moment, right, with Ordinals and all the inscriptions that we've been seeing there lately. And so
So how do you see stacks sort of relating to ordinals in all these developments in Bitcoin? Yeah, so I think the way I look at this is a lot of the builders in the stacks, ecosystems, just sort of like the broader Bitcoin ecosystem.
I don't think there's any, like, you know, straight line that divides them, right? Like, they're really big quite builders. They're always interested in whatever capabilities are available on the L1. All right, like, I think even when Taproot was starting, the stacks 2.1 would be, actually,
support, taproot, anything new that comes around on the L1 that gives you new capabilities. I think people are just like intellectually curious and interested in doing that. So this is different from the image that maybe in some of the maxi Bitcoin communities that people might have
that these people are only here to somehow benefit from Bitcoin. These are mostly engineers and developers who are actually coming and helping Bitcoin by building DevTools, by building wallets, by building infrastructure, by expanding the use case of BTC.
providing really this much needed developer community around Bitcoin. So when Ardinal started, people might have thought that the stacks layer for Oax might have felt competitive. But for me it was obviously they wouldn't, right? Like in the sense that they're all about Bitcoin
the protocol. If something interesting is happening at L1, they would just be so much intellectually curious in what's going on there. And then also, there's a natural extension for scalability, in terms of, let's say, or knows are sort of like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
There's a national limit to how much minting can happen at how much scalability or trading can happen. I think there will be some sort of a trading market. There already are some popping up. But in terms of like, you know, taking it to like tens of millions of users or
hundreds of millions of users. Obviously it's not going to scale at one. Everyone knows that. This is why people work on Lightning. When you talk about taking Bitcoin to a billion people, we know it's not going to happen on level one. Similarly, if you're talking about Bitcoin NFTs or Arnels, it's like becoming their
dominant, sort of like digital media platform reaching like hundreds of millions or a billion users is not going to happen just on L1. So it's a very natural sort of like extension from there that what type of Bitcoin layers would help scale this, what type of interaction
with exists. I think the first trustless atomic swap between an Arduino and a different asset basically happened through this stack layer because developers jump on that and they're I think they're just intellectually curious about what's going on. How can we use it? How can we integrate it?
So it's not a coincidence that some of the wallets are digressing a little bit, but here's an interesting instant. So wallets like X-verse or the hero wallet, they are sprinting towards
Better support for hard work. Like they're talking to their users. Imagine any typical Silicon Valley startup that cares about their users wants to give them a product that they actually want to use. Worse is I saw some discourse about
the sparrow wallet, which is kind of like the only one that supported Taproot and people are using it. And the maintainers or maybe someone from the community, I didn't follow up that deeply, it's sort of like yelling at people for using our notes. It just makes no sense, right? Like these are actual users for your wallet. They're here
to use your product and you don't like them, like that just doesn't add up to me. And I do think that sort of culture exists in various places in the Bitcoin community and I think the more like actual builders, like real builders,
I think it's going to get deleted down because it's a fringe concept. As Bitcoin becomes more mainstream, as more sophisticated developers, entrepreneurs enter the system, I do think the best teams are just going to have a very different professional attitude towards building
the right products, getting them in the hands of the users, growing the ecosystem. I think they're just, and we're starting to see, you know, glimpses of that, with the X-horse ball, and then hero ball, and so on. And I think that really helps Bitcoin, that actually on boards more and more people do it to Bitcoin and so on.
In some ways, the developers who were actively building in the stacks layer were the best fit for doing interesting things on Bitcoin and one. As soon as there was an opportunity to do that, they just jumped in and it sort of makes sense.
If the broader Bitcoin ecosystem just didn't have as many developers, that would be a weakness. Still think it's a weakness broadly speaking compared to other ecosystems. But the fact that you had this pool of talented people already working in a Bitcoin there was actually a very, very good thing for hard notes.
Absolutely. Definitely agree. And, you know, we have a lot of builders in the audience here, and you touched on some of the developments that are happening with the experts wallet and the hero wallets and beyond. But are there any other things that feel top of mind in terms of products?
experiences that you'd love to see builds for ordinals to continue to become more mainstream. Yeah, I think the the biggest thing right now is like the healthy trading market. It's beginning to emerge. I think these are the partially signed Bitcoin transactions that's
One approach, we've seen these atomic swaps with the stacks layer. That's another approach. A third one, there's a very interesting proposal, but Jude was talking about sort of like pegging in our notes. So you've heard a move your our note into the stacks layer.
Once you move it, you have full programmability, you have scalability, you can do whatever you want. And then once you're done, you can peg it back out. I think those are very interesting approaches. Right now, Ardino is still barely two months, maybe not even two months old.
the trading activity right now are literally like Excel sheets or Google Docs in various Discord channels. Like as much as I love the early days and you will be nostalgic about them at some point, this is currently just not even, you haven't even scratched the surface there, there's no trading market
I don't think there are a lot of tools available for creatives to come in. I don't think there is education content available for creators. It's also like Ornog's is given similar to many protocols and Bitcoin.
It was starting in a very organic way. My understanding is basically a handful of developers or some interns who kind of kicked it off and look at the impact it has already had. Now imagine that there are layers and layers of sort of
of awareness and documentation and technology and infrastructure that actually can be built around it to support a very, very large market and not just for NFTs. I do think there's something about our knows where they can be far beyond just NFTs.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. And so, you know, I do think we have a lot of familiar faces, but it's also been a moment where some folks have been curious and sort of entering the ecosystem and wanting to learn more about Bitcoin layers. And so can you share
share a little bit more in terms of background about what really makes stacks and what unique as a Bitcoin layer. You know, I think in general, there's a little bit of confusion about how the sort of security of the chain
is different from other chains and how you might compare stacks to other chains that might not be as connected, but say they were able to somehow take every hash and store it on Bitcoin. What are the material differences there?
Yeah, happy, happy to get into it. So I think the way to think about this is that the Bitcoin L1 has a very, very limited scripting language, which is a feature. It's there by default. Even the original implementation of Bitcoin, they've
some other op codes that were sort of implemented but then commented out. So you can clearly tell the intention of the early developers where they were trying to keep the op codes as limited as possible by design because then you get a simple protocol that's easy to reason about that
does one thing and does that one thing really really well. So Bitcoin, it's not literally one thing because it's the money supply, right? The payments, it defines hard money, but I do think it's also the settlement layer. And I think it's a settlement layer part that is under explore, right?
Or knows they're sort of doing it that they're literally doing something on l1 like here's your digital object right there on the Bitcoin chain but stacks does it in a different way you're doing thousands of transactions at a Bitcoin layer and then the set
But, taking a step back, this design was there even before Ethereum was born. And a lot of people have thought about this problem of how do you sort of like,
have other sort of extensions or layers of Bitcoin that's where you know merge mining was born. First, this is I'm dating myself, but this is like 2021 was the first fork of Bitcoin name coin with with a lot of
support from the Bitcoin builders, like even Satooshi supported the idea of namequing and that by the way has a separate token which is now a controversial topic and Bitcoin circle. It wasn't a controversial topic back then. And the idea is
is that how can you share the L1 by coin security and have multiple use cases or multiple chains if you go. And without getting into the details for why some of those systems haven't grown as much as the rest of the crypto industry.
Basically, we saw a bunch of developers who just wanted to start from scratch and have more programmability right at the L1. So that's how Ethereum started, which was actually a pretty controversial idea back then. Even I would admit, I was pretty scared
by the idea of curing complete languages at a blockchain's L1 level. It sort of like says that I'm running a node. Anyone in the world can basically run whatever program they want on my computer. It's sort of like remote code execution.
I mean, that sounds very scary, initially, right? That is sort of like, this is like giving someone access to run whatever the hell they want on your computer. And there is no limit to what they can program.
over time the lesson has been that the expressiveness of these programming languages were way more powerful than they were dangerous. They're still dangerous, right? Like we have seen so many hacks happen and so many other things, but over time these systems got harder and harder.
a lot more at least at the EVM level, but the superpower of being very, very expressive actually turned out to be something that a lot of developers and users can benefit from. So we have now clearly seen that. So in some ways that has
given more of a reason to have these fully expressive programmable layers in Bitcoin as well because Bitcoin remains the largest capital base, the biggest brand, the largest community and I think Bitcoin does not have a good way or there isn't a good way to move your Bitcoin into a Bitcoin
layer that is fully expressive. And I think a lot of people don't understand why is that? The fundamental limitation comes back to the Bitcoin scripting language. So the reason why the Lightning Network is simple and you can only do payments for that is because it is contained
within the Bitcoin script. You can close the channel using purely Bitcoin script and that's why Lightning actually benefits from 100% of Bitcoin security because you're not trusting the Lightning map. You can basically exit at any point you want. I'm not getting into the technical details. There can be some bugs you can
counter, but generally speaking, you can exit lightning only through bitcoin script, which is a really nice property to have. But that also means that because bitcoin script is so limited, these types of layers like lightning also need to be somewhat very limited.
If you look at Ethereum on the other hand, because Ethereum has much more programmability, expressiveness at the base layer, the Ethereum layers can be much more complicated and still be secured by 100% of Ethereum to carry. So if you have roll-ups, if you have
fraud groups like Arbitram, you're sort of like not trusting the L2. And because at the end of the day, you could always go to the Ethereum L1 and say that I want to withdraw my assets. And Ethereum L1 will enforce that, which is again a very nice security property to have.
And I think that's where some people basically go like, hey, stacks doesn't have that property. That is a valid true statement. And it's because it's not possible to do that on Bitcoin. You would have to change Bitcoin script to make it, you know, at least add some opcode.
that will give you that sort of flexibility. And maybe we get that in some years, but it's not there today. And Bitcoin moves very, very slow, very carefully. So the question to ask is, given that we know that these fully expressive layers are extremely
the only important and demand, the amount or use gist that they bring, what's the next best thing you could build? Which is basically more expressive than lightning. Because lightning basically gives you what's possible with the coin script.
So that's where stacks comes in. It's fully expressive, has a very safe programming language. It benefits from Bitcoin security, and in very interesting ways, and I'll explain. So, think of this as like in a traditional watching, when you're thinking about security, you're mostly thinking about re-Org attacks.
How secure is Bitcoin? When people talk about Bitcoin security, they talk about the hash power, they talk about how much money will require somebody to come in and change something on Bitcoin chain. Let's say a transaction happened and an attacker comes in and says, "It never happened. I'm going to re-org the history of Bitcoin." That's traditionally how people think about blockchain security.
how hard it is to attack the chain, how hard it is to re-organize. So, stacks have this really interesting property, especially the upcoming version, Nakamoto Revisas coming out there this year, where if a transaction happened on stacks, and there are some number of confirmations that it gets,
It is now secured by 100% of Bitcoin hash. Meaning if somebody wants to come in and say that, "Let's add register when you brought BTC." And someone wants to come in and say, "You'd never registered it. I wanted and I'm going to re-art the chain." Well, good luck because you'll have to go and re-art Bitcoin. That says a very strong security
property to have, it is, it is entirely possible that just because of that property, the reorg resistance of stacks now suddenly becomes bigger than I would say, maybe any other chain in the world, right? Because now it's Bitcoin security. So, so that
That's great. The criticism that we've been getting because of that definition is that people on the Ethereum side use the other definition, that if you want to withdraw your assets out of stacks, right? So it's a different lens. It's a different definition.
security of that. And that security is effectively the signers on the stack side. So it's a decentralized group of signers. They sort of lock their capital and they are signing the BTC that people are withdrawing. And why are they doing that? Because Bitcoin doesn't have
the opcodes. If Bitcoin had the opcodes, we would basically force these pegouts through Bitcoin script. So there wouldn't be any need for any signers. So it's the next best thing you could do. And yes, that is not as ideal as having a fraud proof or a roll up on a theory.
But in my view, it's pretty pretty good, right? Like if you just look at economic security, just looking at stacks market cap today, something like, you know, $500 million of security at today's prices is backing this. If you think Solana is secure, Solana is sitting at like
or 9 billion, you're staxes early, right? Like you're sitting at roughly 10X from here, just the security of the Pega, it could be as secure as well on itself. And this is before any off codes are introduced on Bitcoin, given how much
The developers in the stack ecosystem are contributing. It's entirely possible that there can be Bips at the Bitcoin level because the change is in that hard. It's just one or two op-codes that will be needed at the Bitcoin L1 level. And we can wait. We can wait years. We can work with the Bitcoin community.
And at some point you can get the op codes and then upgrade the security level from the the signers and the capital that they've logged, which I would say is actually pretty high level of security to direct the coin L1 security where the Bitcoin L1 would force the the peg out request, which is like the ultimate thing that you can do.
Right, thank you so much for that deep dive. I'll ask probably a couple more questions and then probably around 10, 40 or so we'll open it up to folks if they want to come on and ask questions. But you know you spoke a lot about the not
motor of release. And I'm curious in terms of any of the improvements you can speak about when it comes to scalability and user experience. So thinking about sort of transaction times and then also when it comes to folks actually utilizing some of the benefits and assets
related to the Nakamoto release such as SBTC, you know, what are some of the experiences that we can anticipate? Yeah, I think one of the, well, even before I get into the Nakamoto release, I'm going to connect the dots between the discussion we had earlier. I think we had less people there as well about how, how the
like, it actually, people should try to dig into like how many different entities and players and processes are involved. We're really growing an organic open source project and I'm very proud of that. The less I'm needed, the less, I even know what's
going on the better it is and I think we're getting to that place or have been operating at that place where many times I don't even know what's going on in the ecosystem and stuff. Stuff is just happening and I'm an observer or sometimes not a human observer. For example, this recent proposal about pegging in ordinates like I am
actually still haven't read the full proposal. I was commenting on it, but I haven't been able to even see, and I think people are just running with it. Like someone proposed it, people are having discussions about it, I wouldn't be surprised if someone is even writing code for that and whatnot. So for the Nakamura release, I'm actually more updated.
I did participate in the working group that proposed the release. I think a lot of people are happy with the proposal given the process and the working group, but it is still the proposal. It has to go through the stacks improvement, proposal process, minors which are
completely independent in the network. They have to they have to accept it. They will be voting at some point as well. I think last time there was a pretty active vote that happened. That is another indicator of how active the community is and making sure things are moving forward or not. I think I wouldn't be surprised if the
I can't really release. I suppose it actually gets a lot of participation and so on. Big shout out to Furo Gamer who's here. He did an amazing job during the last boot. It was kind of like the voice who was pushing the word forward. So please give him a follow if you want to stay updated on future.
big releases and he will make sure that you don't miss a boat. So for the NACMODER release, what's the proposal? I think they're two big parts of it. You can separate them out. They're both sort of like in the same proposal, but you can separate them out. One is
SPDC which is this decentralized Bitcoin tag. I can hear that the holy grail problem. Like moving BTC from the L1 into a Bitcoin layer using it fully programmable way and then moving it back in a decentralized way. That's the thing that my company Trust Machine has a
commercial interest in we actually building some applications that require that sort of a BDC peg and that's where we contribute to the infrastructure. We actually less involved in anything else going on in the open source project. We're very targeted towards this particular feature because we needed a
for our application and for our business. So SBDC is one part of it. The other part that actually I don't think gets enough attention and I do things very important is that there's a massive sort of like user experience and speed improvement that's not in the NACOMA release as well.
happens right now is that because stacks settles on Bitcoin, so transactions sort of happen at Bitcoin speed. It could be anywhere between 10 minutes to some time, even an hour. It depends on whenever there's a block, that is a Bitcoin block. And if you compare that to Solano,
or even Ethereum now, like after proven stake, that's horrible UX. All of the traction that is happening right now, people are excited, people are using things. I'm sort of surprised that people are putting up with it. This is not good user experience at all. And they're too
So one is just the time delay, like 10 minutes, waiting 10 minutes is very long. It's also it's unpredictable. You don't know if it's going to be 5 minutes or 15 minutes or 25 or 30, right? Or more. So it's unpredictable. So it's long, it's unpredictable. There's a second
problem and the third problem is actually the bandwidth. How many transactions can happen in a particular block because stacks nodes like they're really optimized for decentralization. So if you can run a Bitcoin full node on a Raspberry Pi, you should be able to run a stacks full node on a Raspberry Pi as well. So I think it's sort of like
Optimized for decentralization, but I do think there is room for improvement. So, so this working group, it's called the L1, like faster L1 working group. It's basically hitting all three things. Right. What is doing is that using a VDF, so VDF is our
for a variable delay functions, which can actually prove, like cryptographically prove, the passage of time in between two Bitcoin blocks. So imagine a Bitcoin block is like a clock pick. And right now we only have like, after one tick, we have to wait for the next tick, which is the next block for some new
state transitions to happen on stacks. But if you could prove that time is passing in between two Bitcoin blocks through the VDF, you can actually have a much more reliable block time on stacks. Let's say, you know, it's five seconds or three seconds, whatever number that is that the engineers sort of like feel comfortable with.
But then it's it's reliable. You know that every few seconds there is going to be a stack block. Your transactions are going to get through and all of that data when the Bitcoin block comes will get settled on Bitcoin and then benefit eventually benefit from Bitcoin file out from a UX perspective. I think that's huge because then
people can start getting a sort of like a familiar experience of fast transactions that they're used to on other chains, but now this is on Bitcoin. So even I would say this would improve experience of Bitcoin. Like once you pay in your BDC,
you'll get like a very reliable call at 5 second confirmation time if you're moving around SBDC, if you're deploying it in a smart contract, if you're trading it, whatever you're doing. I think that's good and the second aspect of that is going to be good bandwidth. So there is some work going on
where A there is going to be a natural increase in the bandwidth because now you're not wasting time for 10 minutes waiting for the next block. You can actually have much faster blocks and these blocks can contain more data. That's obvious. But even per block there's some work going
on where can be just increased the bandwidth of the data that can be part of the block. So I do think these improvements are actually, I know SPDC gets a lot more attention, but these are the things that users are probably going to really appreciate and really like these upgrades.
Thank you so much for sharing that. So I see one request for someone to come up and speak and ask a question. So if those do have questions, feel free to please request. Reminder to please ask questions that are about
this topic, Bitcoin layers, and stacks etc. And if not, we certainly have a lot of questions that have been compiled from the community. So with that, I'm going to allow you to speak.
Hello, hello, thank you, Jaina. Thank you, Mani. Happy to be here. Just had a quick question from the standpoint of trust machines. It seems
As long as the Bitcoin layers is in scope of a lot of different things that are being built from the standpoint of ordinals and SPTC, my question is, what are certain things that we should expect from you all in the near future from the standpoint of ordinals and SPTC?
Yeah, great question. So I don't think we have very we're not very actively looking at our nodes right now. A lot of the focus internally at trust machines is on DeFi like applications. So that's why SBDC is very
very much in scope. And there are other applications as well, like, you know, around decentralized chat and that sort of stuff. And I think Ornals, like, might play a bigger role over there. And I do think trust machine, especially when it
started, a bunch of people thought that it's a fun and I think it was we probably helped create that confusion because we did as soon as we started we wrote like some small investments into some companies that we really liked and I think that's why people started thinking that it's a fun it's actually like a like a startup like we hired
engineers and we build products in-house and now we've been more narrowly focused on that. So I would say yeah broadly speaking I would say 80% of the stuff we do is mostly related to our unlocking PTC capital so I would say Bitcoin DeFi
A bulk of the work is like our business interest is in a blank SPC because the roadblocker for a bunch of the applications that we want to build and then there's some other interesting applications that we are building and as far as being broad like I've said that many times would actually mean it that it's not just tax that we look at.
So we are done a bunch of R&D into DLCs. We discovered similar to any technology you'll pick in Bitcoin that to actually use it in a production system, like there's so much work to be done. Like you hear about these technologies like in theory, oh, you could just use a DLC,
doing X, Y and Z. And once you actually start looking into doing that X, Y, Z, you realize that there is so much more to be done to be able to get there. So if you've looked at DLCs, you've done some work with Lightning, if people have used Ellen Swap, that's actually by Trust Machines Engineer.
We are looking at liquidity angle. How do you pour in liquidity both from Bitcoin and I want, but also from lightning into our applications. Our applications, because they require smart contracts, they will be running on most of the time.
and Bitcoin L1 and then we deeply care about the liquid resources. So the liquidity we think is going to either come from Bitcoin L1 in VDC or it's going to come from light-in channels. And those are the two areas that we are contributing to the infrastructure because that just backfits us.
Thanks, Vinnie. Zubi, over to you for your question. Okay, good evening everybody. Can you hear me? Yep. Okay, um...
I didn't join the space at time, so here's my question. I want to know how exactly those, the Bitcoin blockchain secure the stocks blockchain.
Yes, you might have missed that a little bit, but the The TLDR of that is that if you do a transaction on stacks It reaches Bitcoin finality what that what we mean by that is if for someone to reorder that transaction to reach
If you are a geodogger, you will have to go and attack by coin. You will have to reorg by coin to be able to reorg stack transactions. But this, by the way, to be very precise, this will be the case after the Nakamoto release. Not in the system that is live today, but this sort of security is part of, offer the
not come out of release or call it like reorg security or your base level of security. And I think there's a different definition which people ask about when they try to think of stacks as a L2. I usually just say it's a Bitcoin layer. I don't try to get into those classifications, but a lot of people naturally
you just call it a l2. I think in a in a terium, the clear definition of an l2 is if you can withdraw your assets. This is not about re-organ, but if you can withdraw your assets from the l2 just by using the l1 security, l1 security material. So our
Arbitrum, like fraud proves, they give you that benefit. You can always present a fraud proof to the L1 and you can take your assets up, same with same-bit roll ups, different mechanism but same-double-o security with ZKRL ups. So that is not possible on Bitcoin today. Like you need some off-coats on Bitcoin. I want to be able to do it.
So the level of security over there is different from this L2 definition from Ethereum. And over there, the security is that there are signers. There's a decentralized group of signers who lock capital, they lock SDX and InfantSys, and you're reliant on those signers to sign off on the peg up request.
So that's a, for people who understand proof of stake, I would hate to call it proof of stake, but it's kind of like that, that it depends on how much capital is locked. So today it's like, I don't know, $405 million dollars is locked in the future, it might be more, might be less, but you're deriving your security from economic incentives.
And I think if the network is successful, there's a lot of usage, you can actually get a lot more economic security behind the pegout, which is, I think, a healthy thing. And down the road, if Bitcoin ever lets an upgrade in, and we can have a few obstacles.
was that we need. And at the BICWANAL1 level, then you can actually have a Ethereum-like security where you can just ask the BICWANAL1 to withdraw your BTC out of staffs. Thanks for the questions, Tobi. Cosmo over to you. Sorry, I have one more question.
Let's go to Cosmo first just so we can make sure that we can get everyone's questions. Thank you. Hey, my name is Gina. Thank you so much for the time for organizing this. My name is Cosmo from Nova River. I guess my question is really around Nakamoto.
and sort of one of the key milestones in timeline getting it rolled out. With the context being clearly there's a lot of excitement and energy in the ecosystem today, but the UX, as you've admitted, they're not admitted, but as you realize, as we all realize, it's pretty poor because of the
the long timeline so Nakamoto seems like extremely important and so it's like you know what are the milestones or timeline as we think about how we can get it rolled out or is there other ways to sort of a midpoint or other ways to capture the excitement in the meanwhile before that's rolled out. Yeah it's a great question I think
I think it's a, I would say, let me break that down a little bit. I think I sort of like reviewed, you know, how the open source project was doing over the last year. And one of the things that really stood out to me was just the total number of, you know,
core developers who are actually pushing things forward. And given the decentralized ecosystem, the way we sort of tackle that problem, it's like the tragedy of the comments, right? It's a very decentralized ecosystem. Here are some common things that everyone benefits from, but no single entity has
the incentive to dedicate too much resources to the common good because they're sort of benefiting everybody else as well. You're not just benefiting yourself. That's a tragedy of the common thing that was clearly happening here that happens less, I think, in ecosystems where there's one big company, like for example, Solana Labs, everybody sort of expects Solana Labs to do the work of
of actually building the blockchain. But in this ecosystem, it was pretty unclear and there's a tragedy of the common happening. But I think it became painful enough for so many people that a bunch of different entities started contributing or internally allocating more resources to hiring these engineers, some open
So that's one thing that that is much better today than it was like six six months ago for example still not ideal I think we can always always use more open source contributors at that level So that's one thing that directly impacts like how quickly you could actually ship the second thing and this is again a user
unique problem is these people actually literally are employed by different entities or open source contributors who work whenever they want to or not. Not the case, again, I don't want to pick on Solana, but just to give people like a visual that at Solana Labs, they are engineering managers who could fire you if you're not performing.
Very hard to do that in a decentralized ecosystem. There are also teams like how they work together. I think our ecosystem actually went through some learning where they realized that, look, because of decentralization, there's so much communication overhead challenges working together with each other. I think things are, again, finally,
coming a little bit better with these working group models where people participate in those working groups. And those two directly impact how quickly you could actually ship something in those sorts of projects. And I would say those are getting better, but I completely hear you that, you know,
If magically the faster everyone could go live like within months, that would be way better than waiting. But hard forks especially when done in a decentralized way. Again, this is not an ecosystem where if the blockchain goes down, you could reboot it. This is actually decentralized.
So there is a process that runs that actually takes a while. I think we have calculated like historically a hard fork picks the ecosystem like I would say the best gets in our year two months if not three months right like given the voting the testing the Everything else that sort of like happened for the miners like it's
It's so funny that we literally don't know who the miners are or who most of the miners are. I think we know a few people who have sort of been public about like running a miner. We literally don't know who the miners are in the network are and sometimes you have to like chase them. People have even tried like sending miners like on their addresses.
messages to their addresses. You should upgrade. You're leaving money on the table. You should really upgrade. Again, very different from a blockchain that can overnight turn itself off and tell everybody that you have to upgrade over here. It's a process like the ecosystem is getting better at that. Given that timeline,
of how hard it is to actually do a major upgrade and get everybody, get a reminder to upgrade, get off enough like voting power behind it. You don't want multiple such upgrades. That's why SPTC is sort of like combined in the proposal with the FASHA blocks.
because I think the overhead of doing that upgrade is going to be pretty large this year. So I can tell you that it's pretty certain, almost 100% certain, it's not going to happen in the first six months, not like age one of this year. And I'm pretty confident as well that it can happen in age two.
Thank you so much. And, um, Subi, I know you had had another question, um, but also, prior to getting that money, um, just on the sort of discussion of milestones, is there anything that you would highlight around sort of micro
blocks and faster times ahead of Uncle Moto. Yeah, so the thing that might actually make the most so there is some work that you could do on these micro blocks. I wouldn't get too much into them. They can give you some benefits, but
I think the more visible change that can happen is this idea of subnet, which is like a scalability there around stacks. And I think subnets are in a good enough position on testnet that with some effort, they could be pushed live.
And I think they can give people at least like a feel for what fast transactions are going to look like, even if they're experiencing them on a subnet versus kind of like a main stack layer. Right. And I think I think that could be very helpful to people, especially to a bunch of, let's say like NFT communities were doing a mend.
and they can see fast transactions, high bandwidth, they can go great, I can't wait for these features to come to the main layer as well. So I think from a UX perspective, probably subnet is the thing and just to point out,
like my company Trust Machine is doing zero work on something. Like they're not in our path. So as an ecosystem, I think we need to figure out how to sort of like push them forward, but I personally, like, I don't spend my days thinking about something at all.
Thanks, Vinnie. We also have stacks nation here. Would you be able to unmute and ask your question?
"Staxation, do you want to unmute?" All right, well, I think that we had another question from
Soobie and I think he was asking for sort of a recap of the unique features and products that many of you think might pull in more builders and more excitement into the Bitcoin layer ecosystem.
Yeah, so I think if the question is about what the unique future of Stax are, the things that are live today that people are using is one is this just ability Stax as a layer can read every Bitcoin transaction. So even though Bitcoin doesn't have a full smart contract, these
transactions, the normal big coin transactions can actually hit more expressive smart contracts on the understacks there. So, and people are doing interesting things with it. That's how the Arnold's trustless swap happened because you don't have, you can't program a smart contract on L1,
But you can program it on the stack layer and again notice how careful I am being not saying L2 even though that's the easier visual for people like the L1 and then L2 on top. But I usually try to just call it a layer. And that is live today.
atomic swaps, which are interesting. The other sorts of interesting things there are the way even the consensus works, like there is BTC yield, BTC rewards that are coming out on Bitcoin out of one.
And it's, I would say it's fairly significant, like something like 2,200 BTC have gone out as rewards. And I think this is sort of like the early steps towards it thriving Bitcoin DeFi. Because like once people, people who have actually experienced it, if you look at the
It's actually because it's a notice that's relatively small ecosystem right now even though things are changing it's gaining more traction. I think it's across like maybe project number 50 now on coin market cap or something like that. I think with that it brings more users attention. But if you look at
the core community and the people who have been around for the last two years. They love it. And most of them have actually experienced getting BTC awards in their Bitcoin wallet. They see what type of opportunities are possible, but the community, because it's much more organic, much more sort of like
growing at its own pace, it isn't very large. Same thing, but Alex, the company, not the person, and they have built an amazing product. It's a full product-wise, maybe better than
than Uniswap. And they shift fast, they're sort of like getting ready for SPTC to be deployed. Right? Like they have the swapping functionality, they have like an orderbook thing that they're working on. But the total liquidity
Again, it's getting more traction, especially recently, but is limited by the Bitcoin capital. As soon as SPDC gets deployed, people can easily deploy BTC directly into something like Alex. I think that's where the magic happens.
Thanks, my name. All right. I think we have time for one more question, and then we'll be at the top of the hour.
Hi, Farouk. Feel free to ask your question just the heads up that we do have to wrap in just about a minute. Yeah, quick question. Hello, my. I have seen some tweets recently where people were concerned about the selection of stacks minus by colluding with the big
So that can negatively impact the selection of start-minus. My understanding is given the liveliness of Bitcoin that might not be feasible, but I wanted to hear from you about what you think about that type of issue. Yeah, so I think it was pretty interesting.
I've been meaning to write or respond to some of these things like there there's a blog post that basically came out and It was like a very sensational type of an issue that you know Bitcoin miners can can censor everything happening on stacks which sort of not true and and they can become the miners
themselves that would draw down the BTC rewards to zero, again not true, right? And I think it's maybe what you're referring to is towards that. The simple answer to the very lengthy blog post is that stacks that protocol can have a minimum
So right now there's no minimum bid people can bid whatever they want for mining and that's where the BTC rewards come from. But if let's say in this hypothetical scenario where suddenly every single Bitcoin miner on the map of decides that I am going to be a miner and I'm going to try and
outcompete or censor out other miners, other people on the coin. First, that level of collusion in Bitcoin has basically never happened. All these Bitcoin miners are able to agree, because even if some of them are not agreeing, the rest of the miners can't actually participate.
of Bangalore, but even if let's say you know we're in hypotheticals now that 100% of Bitcoin miners around the planet have decided to collude right. The stacks protocol can have a minimum bid amount that your bid cannot be less than x which would mean that these miners still have
to spend money on stacks mining and you will still have the BTC rewards. Going in, they would be constant sort of like at the minimum bid level and you can pick what the minimum bid is. Like could be a reasonable number. And so that's situation. However, theoretically, there's like it basically can't happen because of the minimum bid.
Got it and any plans about having a minimum bid in the stacks roadmap plan? We might make it a part of the upcoming SIP, like describe this theoretical attack and just pick a number, what that minimum bid
could be, I mean, I would argue for picking a lower number than the current historical data, right? So you don't want to force people. It's just like a hypothetical attack, sort of like mitigation mechanism.
I honestly I wouldn't be worried about it even if that bit is not there. This is not a practical thing at all. Do you have it? All right. Well, thank you so much for the questions and I feel like, you know, we can expect some more information.
to be shared on some of these soon, because really great questions from everyone. And thanks to everyone in the community who contributed questions. And thank you so much, Manny, for being here. - Thank you, everyone. - Okay. - Talk to you soon. Bye.
I just want to ask you about the ways that support projects that support the corresponding offices as well as the great annulment in the corresponding offices.