Hello, how are you? I am good. I don't know so much for being here for rescheduling. I'm sorry, but yesterday. No worries at all. Yeah, yeah, it's funny. I also do a podcast that I'm gonna do it for like two years now and we don't like a
100 episodes, like over that entire time, there was one episode where we had like a guest and a time scheduled and like there was a, sorry, that wasn't there and there was a guest he was like wait and I was like oh my god, I'm so sorry, never have it again. So I got my one, never again. Well, no worries at all.
Does it matter to me? I'm happy to chat anytime. That's great. Yeah, so yeah, we'll just do a little chit chat just while people start coming up here. Where are you coming from? Well, right now I'm in Los Angeles, California.
I was in New York City for a long time. Yeah, just bouncing around and the city brought me back for blocks back, which transitioned into hero, you know, stacked equal system several years ago. And then, you know, pandemic work from home, I decided I want some sunlight. So off to L.A.
I went for now and we'll see how long it lasts.
Alright, good deal. Cool. Are there any before we get rolled? Are there any like
specific things that I have a bunch of questions I can ask about. Things you want to make sure that we head on. >> Just to benefit to developers here. To me, this is the biggest win. Obviously, developers now have easier access to the API
data and the blockchain data directly. But I'll have until rely on someone else running the node for that. Which kind of is what Quick Node does, but it's like a different company. So like today, I'll just go into briefly how developers are doing today.
A developer working on some decentralized application kind of relies on one or two stacks companies providing this data for them. Every developer can and I recommend that they should run their own blockchain and API instance, but they're not always in the best
cases do it themselves. When there's problems, they don't always know what to look for and how to fix it. So it can be challenging. So they rely on external partners right now. And that comes with its own, you know, own problems. You have rate limits.
It's the problems happening there. They really have no insight into it. So, you know, it's always been a challenge of finding a way for developers to have really unfettered access to this data. And that's really where we were really interested in working on flip-notes on this. You know, you guys have a great track record of, you know,
providing this type of data to developers. And yeah, I'm really excited about it. I know some people are already using it and they're already really happy with what they're seeing. Awesome. That is super, super great to hear. Love hearing that. Cool. We got some people filtering in now. Why don't you,
yourself, let us know a little bit of who we are, how you got into this whole crypto world. Sure. So I'm Jesse with the staff foundation. It was kind of a random thing. I was working at Amazon and I got a call from someone at a company called Blocksack.
who I used to know and she wanted me back in the New York City to help them with this crypto thing. So came back to New York City from Seattle and that was my start. And you know, it was several years ago, I've been in the ecosystem ever since. You know, was that block stack at first?
then we transitioned to a company called Hero and then I finally made my way to the foundation which is where my strengths are today. So people will see me out in the community. I have kind of free reign to work with allowed developers and try to address some of the pain points they have with our platform.
And yeah, that's basically me. So anytime someone has a problem or a question, I'm usually a good person to come to. Cool. And so was block stack and stacks are those like the same thing that was happening?
or a new project that's got off-shoe? What's the relationship? No, it started off as BlockStack. Originally it was built, I think the original name was like, "Oh boy, it's a long time." No, it wasn't name coin. It was something like that. One name, that's it. It was called One Name. It was built
on decentralized identities. And then they transitioned the name to blocks that. And that's what we were named for several years. We were the first SEC qualified token at the time, a few years ago. And then once we started working on a more decentralized model, which is our current blockchains stacks version two.
That's where some of the more decentralized companies, to be honest. So BlockSack turned into the company called Hero, HIRO, and it run some public APIs and work on developer tools. The blockchain itself went over to the foundation where I'm at. And then a couple of the products that we were building
of the time kind of went off to different entities in the community and they're off their normal thing. We have experts, gaming technologies, trust machines came up recently. So we're very much trying to decentralize what we were at Blockstack. But we're still very much the same, you know, the same
It's the same ish blockchain. We change from version 1 to version 2, but it's still the same core team and core technologies. >> Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Looking at one of the articles here says block stack is becoming hero, celebrating its cyberpunk route.
Yeah, what's that? What's the sniper punk for the audience? Oh, don't ask me that. Cyberpunk is an old group of people who are very into cryptography and laid a lot of the foundation for the not always what we think of now is like crypto not always legal.
Nice. So stacks is really interesting because it's a way that you can get basically smart contracts onto Bitcoin. That's kind of like my like high level understanding of it. Is that kind of a
a good way to describe it? Absolutely. There's a couple of things that, in that sense, that we have to unpack. So the first is we are very pro Bitcoin. We've been using Bitcoin since really we switched to using Bitcoin several years ago. So originally, we were actually Bernie Bitcoin.
by using it. We have right-trans actions to it, but we will burn the big one. With version 2 of our chain, it's a little different. I'll get back to your question around contracts. But now what we do is we have a consensus model called POX, proof of transfer. Rather than us burning the big coin as part of our mining
algorithm, we actually reward Bitcoin to stakeholders in our system. So people that hold stacks, we call them stackers. Secondly, with contracts, yes, Bitcoin is awesome, but there are some things that people would love to see that Bitcoin can, or I'm sorry,
Bitcoin shouldn't or possibly couldn't do for many reasons. One of them is smart contracts. That's where we come in. We provide a way to perform things you would normally see in a smart contract system and have it settle back into Bitcoin. So there is a, you can trace
every block in stacks in the Bitcoin chain itself. Very cool. And what are some of the types of things that you would build with stacks? I mean, the typical things you see today, decentralized applications, DeFi applications, and of course,
NFTs, which is everyone is really into these days. Those are the main ones we see today. We're looking at different things like bridges, we're integrating with oracles. We're very open to anything, but we see a lot of impact with NFTs today, honestly.
And is there like an NFT marketplace for NFTs on stacks? There is. One of them is called Gamma.io. And it's a really interesting place. You can a lot of different NFTs projects launch there. You can buy and trade, do whatever you want with them.
I'm sure there's some other ones, but I know that's the big one and Jimmy always a good friend of mine. So I'm happy to let people know about it. Cool. Yeah, I'll be curious like what the stacks community is like and where they hang out. Is there a discord or
you know, telegram, something like that. Both. You'll see me more in telegram just because I'm kind of old school like that. But yeah, we have a discord where a lot of the developers hang out. So the last question is on, hey, I want to do this.
I want to do this in a smart contract and it helps. Other developers will pop in, help out. There's also dedicated channels for blockchain developers. And then there's different groups will create their own little area in Discord. It's Xverse as a wallet that wants to create a group.
You know, they can do that and give a little bit of a sense of experts in there. But yeah, it's a very vibrant community. I don't know the exact numbers, but there's a lot of numbers. 38,000 is right now. So quite a few people, I don't know how many are bots, but
Big member, so it's gonna be at least a ham. Yeah, and if someone was interested in getting into stacks and they don't know anything about it, what do you think would be like a good entry point for someone who wants to start learning it or start playing with it? Um, that's a great
I know we've got a great person, Kenny, who's working on creating tutorials and working with different online school type applications. I don't know the links offhand, but other than that, the docs are great.
trying to get better at is our documentation and you know trying to point people in the right direction so they can get better versed in how to do things with stacks. Very cool. Yeah and at the beginning we were talking a little bit about the benefits of staff
So we have more people here now. So when we revisit that and our title here, you know, accessibility and Bitcoin apps. So how does sex make data more accessible to developers and what can they do with that accessible data?
Yeah, it really depends on what you mean by accessible. So I guess the main selling point is that our entire chain is actually written into Bitcoin. Now, using Bitcoin for decentralized apps is, you know, it's not a really good experience today.
because of the bottlenecks and the slowness of Bitcoin, which is by design and it's great. What's that for us is we're still writing to every block in Bitcoin, but we also have something called micro blocks, which makes the transaction speed quite a bit faster.
So you have a much more transactions per second. What this means for developers is you have access to read and write the data much faster than you would if you were just to use Bitcoin as your your your back end.
The accessibility aspect of it is really where I think we're shining. So we use an API model for the blockchain data. So the API model makes it so that when you're reading blockchain data, you can get that data as fast as the database can respond.
This is for read access. Write access, you're still writing directly to the blockchain, doing it similar to how Bitcoin does it, you know, RPC requests, posts, things like that. But reading data is still very quick, and we can respond to many requests per second that way.
And I'm looking here and there's an STX a stacks coin so that if it's built on Bitcoin, why does there need to be another coin? Well, that's because we are a layer one by ourselves. So everything that happens in the stacks blockchain is native to stacks. It is our layer one. Everything
happen there. When a new block is mined, what happens is we create a hash of that block and then we write that back into Bitcoin as an opportunity. So I mentioned previously where you can track our entire chain in Bitcoin. That's how it's done. So if you were to look at a few of the blocks in Bitcoin, you will
We'll see some of our transactions that there is offer turns and can trace that back into our chain to see exactly what happened. So we live on Bitcoin. Gotcha. Very interesting. Yeah, it's a very different model from, I think, what a lot of
Elpers would be used to because there's usually the layer one has both the coin and the smart contract in it if you're using one of the more recent ones. Yeah, a little bit more. You mentioned proof of transfer. Could you take a little more? It's like what exactly is that and how that work has it relate to maybe like proof of stake?
Yes, so proof of transfer is something that we came up with a few years ago. The white paper is out there. I'll probably share some links with you guys after this call. But essentially what it does is, so the miners instead of spending things
like electricity or setting up these complicated validator systems for proof of stake, a minor will essentially say, I'm willing to spend X amount of Bitcoin to mine this block. And then through some random functions, verifiable random
functions essentially a minor is chosen for each block based on how much they state and probability models. During that process all the people that are holding stacks, you know basically they lock up their stack. They get a reward when that block is mined. So the block minor will spend bit
coin, but instead of burning it, they're sending it back into the network. So if I am stacking my coins, my FDX tokens, every time a block is bind, I get a small reward, like maybe $5 of Bitcoin, reach block. And that's the proof of transfer. And that is our consensus model.
Cool. Yeah. So what else I'd like to get into is I was trying out just some little examples. And I noticed that there's a different programming language you have. It's called a clarity. What is the clarity programming language and what it makes it kind of unique
Yeah, so clarity is something that we develop in scratch as well. So when we're thinking about version 2 of our blockchain and what we wanted in it, smart contracts were something we wanted. We looked at the different smart contract languages out there and we tried to evaluate what they did well, what they didn't do well.
where we could improve on them. And that's where clarity was born. And eventually we settled on a list-based model, which is very human readable. And it's also, you know, it's not compiled, so it's human readable. So if you look at the blockchain itself, you can see everyone's
contract. And I know that a hero put out a blog post basically saying that with clarity you can't hide. So if someone wants you to use a smart contract, you can go and you can actually read the code of the smart contract in the blockchain before you decide to send tokens to it or participate in it.
Yeah, it's very interesting. I've done not like list proper, but other kind of like list inspired languages. There's this database called fauna that has their own query language that's written as like just functions and functions inside of functions. So you can look a little weird the first time you look at it, but what you kind of get
like the paradigm like your says that is actually very readable and if you look at like the examples on stacks.co you have like you know define get contract owner you know get contract owner and it's like that's all you do then you get it so yeah we had some fans of lists that were working on it
And absolutely they are e-mats users, so it all makes sense. Very cool. What's the state of DeFi with stacks? Is that a common thing? Yeah, smart contracts. Enter the picture. We do have a couple of larger DeFi providers. One's called Arcadeco with their own token.
called Alex. You know, that's about all I can say about it. I'm not a deep-by person, so anything I say will probably be wrong, but I know they exist. Okay, and then for like wallets, is there a canonical wallet or a handful?
wallets, what would someone look who wants to get one of those up? Yeah, there's a couple. One is was created by hero. I believe it is being decentralized currently as the hero wallet. The other one which I use personally is the X-verse wallet. And that was someone that used to work with me
a block fact if they wanted to build their own wallet and broke off and created their own little company that does it. It's a great thing. It's on iOS or Android, whatever your choice is. The team behind it is really solid. What I'll do is I will share
a bunch of links with you guys after this because a lot of it is you know impossible to write down here. Yeah for sure and feel free to like reply to this Twitter and the tweet for the space and that will be a good way for people to find
I know it's always I'm curious for like I love I'm like a domain name buying addicts. So I see there's an STX that name is a blockchain stacks naming system right? Yes, um, yeah, so that is a runnant of our version one of the blockchain which is
One of the main reasons that BlockSack existed in the first place was decentralized IDs. BlockSack or blockchain naming system today basically means that you can create a namespace which is built around DNS zone files.
So I can have a name of jyli.btsy.id. And I can use that as my decentralized id across applications. So let's say in the future there is some discord clone or something like that. I may be able to log in with my decentralized identity.
And you can see me there. And then if I join a different one, I'd say there's a reddit clone or something like that. I can log in with the same ID there. And it's all the same. And it's all tied back into my wallet with my decentralized identity. Yeah, decentralized identity is a really, really interesting topic.
And it's one that I think is going to become really, really consequential for the whole blockchain world. And as far as I understand, it's actually like a web standard. Like there's like one of the IETF I think. There is. Yeah, so like what is the benefit of having something like that instead of just like
something written into the blockchain. The benefit is just when you have more people agreeing on the standards, you have more cross-pollination with different groups. So, you know, if I'm using this discord clone and someone else makes something else, I know that my decentralized
and then you will work across them. If you also work closely at the IETF and the Working Group, you'll see that we were a part of it for years. So a lot of what we have done is really based around the standards of that group. >> Yeah, I remember when
Jack talks about his like web 5 thing that was that was I think also based around DID. Yeah, so if anyone in the crowd has any questions feel free to raise your hand and come on up or if you want to reply to the tweet with the from
the space, then you could do that. We'll make sure we get those questions asked. While people are doing that, I would be curious if there's any events or meetups or things where people can go to kind of connect with the stacks community. Yes. I can help there.
Yeah, so the two most immediate ones are next week. So if you're based in New York City, there is a Stacks New York City chapter dev workshop. It's held at Empire Dow, which is also a blockchain co-working space for other projects such as Solana and a few others. That's on 9-2-1.
next Thursday, week from today, from 12 to 2. If you email me, I usually don't give a shout on Twitter, but share it in that stacks.org. I can help get you in because we're currently at Max capacity, but we'll have lunch and beverages and all sorts of other presentations from Kenny and Joe at Stacks and Hero on Clarity and Clarity.
And then that evening we're doing an event at this space called the Van 541 and it's going to be pretty great, great DJ, food and bebs again, lots of swag. We've got arcade games, all sorts of stuff. You can find that just by going to our stacks Twitter or go to stacks.co. If you go to events, you'll see the event list.
there as well. Or if you just search building on BTC party, it will come up there too. We're getting a little tight on attendance, but if you, again, if you want to go to that one, I'm happy to get you signed up as well at that same email. Or events@stacks.org is another one. Thanks. >> And I'll also be there too, so we can talk a little bit more about
all stacks, quick node, core boxing, whichever. Awesome. Thank you so much. Yeah, Loubles, did you have a question? Yeah, so the question I have is a relation to clarity and the language for
for stacks created and some questions relating to building applications on the stacks ecosystem. So the first question, I think, is going to a ready.bcc. I hear you saying something about clarity. The thing is,
At my community, there are so many people interested in learning and roast and clarity, but there are so little materials to actually learn this program in languages. I don't know if we are the one who do not actually know where to actually go, but where can someone go if they want to learn these languages?
Yes, so there's a couple of places. Again, I will share a link after this, but we basically have a book that's published online on clarity with a bunch of good descriptions and examples of how different functions work when to use certain things.
So the clarity class basically that happens periodically and there's also in our discord there are some clarity specific channels where people can go in and talk about clarity and get help. As far as rust goes, you know, that's a little more generic.
We're not doing anything special with Rust. Yes, perfect. Anthony just mentioned it. With Rust, it's just very generic. You can go to Rust Lang and look at the documents there to learn it.
Okay, thank you. Well, the second question I have is in relation to the projects that we are going to work on my community. The thing is, on my community, we have a lot of projects that we want to, or we are trying to go live with on the status
ecosystem. Some of them are currently in the production or the building phase, some are actually still in the documentation phase. Our main issue is relations to funding of the projects and we don't really know how the stock ecosystem is giving grants for
small communities that are willing or they want to participate actively on the start-circu system, more probably lacking funding and the education power to actually further the projects. So how do we go about this? Is there any kind of system for this? There is.
This is our Grants program essentially. The URL is very simple. It's grants.stacks.org. I will absolutely reply to this in a tweet afterwards. It's a simple process. You click some buttons and then you outline what you want to work on. It's evaluated based on the merit
and what the needs of the community are at the time. But it's a conversation with the people that run the grants program. Of you telling them what you want to build, why you want to do it, how much money you're asking for, and it's a very simple process to be honest.
Okay, okay, thank you very much. And that's all. Thank you.
And if anyone else has any other questions, feel free to hop up. What's coming up with stacks, what people know about, what some exciting things you're working on? Well, the biggest one is we have a very major upgrade coming soon.
In the next couple of months, it's going to be our 2.1 upgrade, which is going to really ramp things up for our ecosystem. The main one is it's going to provide much more decentralization.
So for example, today, if you want to mine on stacks, you have to do it yourself. There's not a way to do something like a mining pool with stacks. Well, let me clarify that. There's not a way to do a mining pool without trusting a centralized
person or entity to do it for you. You have to trust them to deliver the rewards and things of that. Not a good model. With 2.1, you can do things like a decentralized mining pool where you don't have to trust anyone.
It's fully trustless. The second one is the POX consensus model, the reward system, will be upgraded quite a bit. So today you have to re-stake your tokens.
after every cycle. With 2.1, you can click a button essentially in the contract to say, keep recycling this staking, or you can add more or reduce the amount that you're staking. So there's a lot of great updates coming.
Awesome and Looks like I don't think we have any more questions here So I think we start closing it out working people find you to get in touch with
Well, the best place is Twitter here. You know, just like DMs and you know, I respond to anyone. You know, other than that,
I can share my email just jessie.com/stack.org. If you join our discord, you'll see me popping in here and there at event.
see me there. Yeah, we try to be very accessible. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. I hope that our listeners here will go check out stacks. I've been really excited to play with that. I think it's a really unique thing in the web
3 space right now and it's a cool for bringing kind of the older crowd the Bitcoin crowd into this whole smart contract world and it's really exciting because you then you get things like like the namespace and the DeFi and NFTs and just like all these things out now people really think of
We love Bitcoin. We are very close to Bitcoin Maxi ourselves. What Bitcoin does, it does very well. We don't necessarily
want to see a change. We don't think that Bitcoin should necessarily do spot contracts. But there is a need for that on Bitcoin, and that's what we're coming at. So we're trying to provide extra functionality without having to change Bitcoin. Cool. And, Lubles, if you have another question, you wanted to ask.
Sorry, not really a question. And so Jay Welley said and we could probably these DMs are open for more questions and I thought maybe I could DM
>> Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, just send me your response on Twitter or an email to jce.ks.org. And I'm happy to help you. >> Okay, okay, thank you.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being here. Everyone is our weekly space. These usually happen on Wednesdays. So if you want to catch us next time, this time on Wednesday, be happy to see you there.
And yeah, this all ends to us and it for us and the y'all. Thank you. What one last thing any developers on the call go to quick node launch a node for your application. It's really
really awesome and the guys that are working on it, a quick builder, Tartar Kropnosh. They're doing a great job. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. All right. Thank you, everyone. We'll catch you next time. Thanks.