Hello, hello everybody. Welcome, welcome, welcome. If this is your first time joining us today is a very special stacks Twitter spaces. We've got an exciting guest in some new to cover some news recently
here within the stacks ecosystem and also to talk a little bit more about our continued theme around Bitcoin layers and also just what's happening in general around Bitcoin and also more importantly the Web 3 industry as a whole. And we do welcome all of you. We're going to give everyone just one more
minute here to join us on stage as we've got a few of our speakers joining in. Other than that, I'm going to be your host today. My name is Kyle Ellicott. I am a partner at Stacks Ventures. And again, if you are joining us for the first time, the way it will work, we'll go ahead and kick things off here in just a moment. Go through some great discussion and Q&A.
And then at the second half of the show, I'll see if we have any questions. We'll try to bring one or two people up on stage to ask questions in real time. So do bear with us and hold your questions to the second half of today's spaces. And again, I'll make sure that that's known of when we're going to ask and we'll try to bring everyone on stage.
That said, welcome everyone to this special edition of stacks Twitter spaces where we talk about everything happening within the stacks ecosystem. The broader ecosystems, including building on Bitcoin and Bitcoin layer
What is happening today? We do have a special guest joining us from Kraken to talk not only about the big announcement that we just had with the Stax token STX being listed on Kraken but also what more is to come around the ecosystem and
and their thoughts around Bitcoin and its future growth as well from the development side. That said, everyone probably knows Maniv and also Patrick, but we will do some quick introductions and Brian will save you for last. Maniv, Patrick, quick introductions for those who may not know you, and joining for the first time today.
Everyone, I'm Manib, co-founder of the Stacks project, which is a Bitcoin layer for smart contracts. And I'm the CEO of Trust Machines, which is a company that aims to build the largest ecosystem of Bitcoin applications.
I am working in the Staxiq system at Freehold. We're working on various projects at the moment. One of the focuses that we're helping Staxiq's with as well as
as minting Bitcoin NFTs. That's our sort of one of the current things. Let's kind of update for me. Welcome, I'm an even Patrick. Bitcoin NFTs, by the way, we had a great conversation last week on our regular weekly
show. So if you didn't have a chance to check that out, do check that out wherever you listen to your podcasts, whatever platform it may be on, definitely tune into that. And to welcome our guest Brian, welcome from the Crackin team, a little introduction on yourself, please.
Great. Hi. Yeah, Brian Hoffman. I've been at Kraken for just over two years. I am a group product manager on the crypto product team responsible for a bunch of different things including new token listings, staking, our DeFi work and our Bitcoin Lightning
projects. So that's to be it a nutshell and I just want to I know that everybody loves these but I just want to make a quick disclaimer on behalf of by by talking for for cracking but I just want to make sure that everybody knows that like this this collaboration that we're doing today is just for informational and it
education purposes. So like we have a we have a venture arm crackin ventures that is directly invest in tokens, but you know that doesn't really impact the stuff that I'm working on or I'm going to talk about today. And this is not like financial advice or whatever I'm not financial platter on it. A-d-e level.
And this doesn't really reflect like Kraken's endorsement of stacks or any other token that we talk about. And I also won't be commenting on the price, although I don't have anybody likes to talk about that. But anyway, you know, do your own research. So thanks for--
for years and years now at this point. So we know those rules of engagement. That was going to be my next thing actually. Brian and I at Patrick we go way back and back in the so Brian actually worked on open bizarre
which I still think is one of the most fascinating projects that came out. I think Brian had a way like NFTs before NFTs, right? It was real world objects that people could buy with crypto. Brian is actually one of the OG users of
And you would, Brian, you would appreciate that BNS is like really getting interesting and sort of like taking off like now. Who would have thought that it would take us like so many years before people start getting into it? Yeah, definitely. Yep. I know. I remember
Remember talking about this like many, many years ago. So the BNS, I don't know if you're on this, but the BNS has a new almost like TLB or namespace called dot BTC. And that's the one that people are really interested in. Like there's a marketplace gamut.
It's one of the most heavily created items there. So people are almost like created as an NFT, which is very interesting to see. We're seeing a bunch of integration into applications. So you can log into things with your doc PDT name. You can always like
have gated access to communities using that and NFTs and so on. So it's like, I know we were like super early, but if you stick around long enough, you kind of start seeing the traction and the points of inflection as well.
Yeah, definitely, definitely. And I think in terms of like crackings, work on integrating any kind of naming services and things like that, we're still early on, we haven't released anything yet officially, but internally we have a lot of people looking at this and thinking about it and trying to figure out what the best way to
because there are like tons of different solutions obviously around naming and identity and we've invested and brought people in from other companies to come and help us craft like a strategy around that but I'm hoping in the near future we'll be able to announce or like come out and explore
explain stuff we want to do there. So stay tuned for that for sure. That'd be amazing. Alright, finally, you might have some questions. No worries, no worries. Patrick, do you have anything to add on to that first? Oh, yeah. Yeah, just just add, yeah, I've known Brian.
a great guy. He's also working with a bunch of other OGs at Kraken or has had some overlap working with him. Jeremy Welsh, I consider OG and Dan Held, previously. Kraken is like a blue
I believe changing leadership too. I think there's announcement about Jesse. So I think like there's a lot of exciting sort of new changes happening at Kraken. Kraken's been around for a while. So just good to see you guys. See you guys like kind of like all in the same company. I'm curious to know. So you're crypto platform Kraken.
What exactly does that entail? What's your kind of day-to-day sort of job and what are you, what are the types of things you look at and how do you sort of come across stacks? Yeah, sure. So when I joined two years ago, almost to the day, actually, I think it's been like
two years and a week. I was brought on to look at new token listings and help prioritize crackings onboarding of new assets to the trading platform. But as soon as I got there, there's just so many crypto OGs that crack in with great ideas. We're only about 800 people
the time and now we're in the three thousands. There weren't a lot of people available on the product side to work and build new capabilities. As I started talking to more and more people, I realized, "Okay, we need a crypto platform team, somebody that build out new capabilities in just expanding
and what we're doing and not just list a new coin every month. So, I ended up recruiting people like Pierre Rashard over from our business team to come over at VAPM and work on Bitcoin Lightning. And my co-founder from OpenBazaar came over to help out with some staking stuff and there's like
different things going on within the team, kind of just formed it organically. And so now what we do is we work on a bunch of different areas that powers like a lot of the product verticals. So like we have a bunch of apps, you know, we have our consumer mobile app, we have our pro mobile app, we have the website, crypto watch, we have a lot of products, and they all
rely on different kinds of services so they may have staking capabilities or they may have. They're doing trading of our assets which we are the ones that build those nodes and gateway infrastructure and all that stuff to power that. So we do quite a bit of things and we're growing really really fast for sure.
wonderful Brian speaking of that I kind of want to shift gears into Bitcoin and talking how or maybe where Bitcoin's place will be in a multi-chain world as we do start to move into this more interconnected sense of networks from the
application side all the way down to the infrastructure side. Where does Bitcoin's place within that from your view and how does stacks actually play a further role into that and the broader world of Web 3 and development? We'd love to hear your thoughts. Again, Bitcoin's place in the multi-chain world and where stacks may fit into that and the
but I'd like to hear your comments as well. Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, I know there are a lot of folks who will probably argue about this to their blue and the face, but I personally think Bitcoin's arguably the most secure blockchain currently out there. And I think we also can acknowledge that somehow we've ended up in this like multi-chain world, right? So, you know, like I said,
I've known each other for a long time. We've seen this evolve over time in the ecosystem in crypto space. I do think that as time has gone on, developers and Bitcoin users and holders have come to want more functionality, more capability.
than what I think Bitcoin originally kind of supported with its scripting capability. So, you know, we've seen so many different projects, product teams like build extensions on top of like the blockchain concept, like with new chains and like layer 2s on top of existing chains. And I think I think stacks is kind of
like another part of this exploration into those new areas. And it has the unique proposition of building off of Bitcoins security structure rather than just trying to go out and create a whole new momentum off of something else. It's coupling the best of Bitcoin with some of these
expanded new capabilities and don't get me wrong. I mean I'm not a stacks expert by any means. I look at a lot of different blockchains in my work but I think what what stacks is trying to accomplish is like really really fascinating. It's like a really unique way of approaching the things that our clients and customers are asking for.
Yep, thanks for Brian. I would agree. I think what Brian is talking about Bitcoin is really good in terms of security, simplicity, having this crypto capital. Imagine when you keep your Bitcoin
Bitcoin on the main Bitcoin chain, you don't even think about hacks anymore because Bitcoin has never had any problems, right? You're not concerned that my BTC from my multicech wallet are just going to disappear for some reason, right? Or the chain is going to crash. It is built like that level of durability and trust in the system.
But I think the biggest realization for me was probably in 2017 and I think this is something that I still think is underappreciated in the Bitcoin community that smart contracts when they were introduced they just felt so dangerous. I remember that.
My gut reaction to smart contracts, especially full EVM, you know, pure and complete smart contracts were like, this is dangerous, right? Like you're running untrusted code on your computer. And I think the flip side of that is that it was also very programmable and powerful for the developers, right? So it's a dangerous thing, but it's
It's also very powerful and developers can do so many things. Over time, you've seen that the benefits actually are a lot more. Like the downside, the hacks and the other issues, I think people have figured out ways to contain them through audits and other types of things and what not. I think there can be improvements as well.
But the power of smart contracts and the power of having a global ledger that has like full full execution environment. Like that is something that I do think is still underappreciated in the big one community. And what what the saturated really trying to do is it's trying to really do
two things and the current version of stacks kind of goes to a certain level and I think the next version that is being worked on goes like much further along in those goals and those are really can be unlocked BTC capital can you easily take BTC from your main chain, transfer
to a Bitcoin layer, deposit it in a small contract, and use it that way. In a very secure trust, that's a matter. And bring it back. And the second thing is, can you benefit from Bitcoin security in the sense of like in a hundred percent way? Like, can it be that a transaction?
that you did on a Bitcoin layer is as immutable as a transaction on the on the main chain. And I think I think if you if you get really close or you you knock out these two properties, then you have a very, very powerful system because now instead of bootstrapping a separate chain and you know
the entire ecosystem around it, you're just unlocking the giant in the middle, like all the capital that is already sitting as Bitcoin, all the security that Bitcoin have for quality has. I think that's really the goal of Stax and we're kind of chipping away at it, right? And we're making the progress month to month.
I see agreement all around the table and we need kind of want to drill down on that and we've talked a lot on our spaces around the different use cases and types of application areas that can be built around Bitcoin layers and what in particular
Bitcoin DeFi. How does Bitcoin DeFi interact or add to Bitcoin's security in some capacity? It is a very notable topic and I think we'd love to hear more.
Yeah, I would say that this goes back to even the earlier days of Bitcoin, where you would see a lot of talk of building a circular Bitcoin economy, like making Bitcoin really useful, that Bitcoin is used everywhere, not just as payments, but also as collateral, also as Bitcoin should be
the asset against which everything is creating and creating in a decentralized way. So right now I can give you a personal example. I was noticing that I have a bunch of wallets where I actually hold the e-code. Nothing in case it's right. I actually held it at various points.
Evolution I was actually I don't know if people know this I was part of their original I see oh actually held it from the ICO to I think so 10 Then I held sold it then I entered it at like 22 like 200 or something like that then I entered like 400 to 3000 at some point like I've done like various things with each I'm not a not a man
And I was noticing that on a day to day basis, the reason why I hold it is actually to pay gas fees for stablecoins. That's really why I hold it, or sometimes to play around with NFTs. And it's such an obvious thing that there is no
like a native Bitcoin wallet or a Web Bitcoin wallet that would just let you pay gas fees in BDC and move around stablecoins. Or go play around with NFTs by paying BDC as gas fees or trading in BDC. I think those are the real use cases.
And the access is basically trying to enable that. I know right now it feels like you need first need like STX to be able to do these things, but in the next step upgrade that might change. You're just using the non-custodial Bitcoin asset directly to do these things. But that to me is the use case, which is taking
off in the industry and it's just not possible or that big in the Bitcoin ecosystem right now. And if you bring that use case, that actually helps Bitcoin a lot. It grows the Bitcoin economy. Right. Instead of right now you're actually losing use
users. They might discover the crypto industry through Bitcoin, but then they end up going to some other blockchain because they, let's say you want to use stablecoin. You would end up on Ethereum or Chrome or something else, right? Because that functionality is kind of like missing from the Bitcoin ecosystem right now.
And with us at Brian, I mean hearing some of these use cases and knowing the potential of the Bitcoin ecosystem, how do you see Kraken supporting the broader ecosystem that's being built out around Bitcoin and Bitcoin layers that the need had explained as well?
Yeah, I think we're still admittedly early on in Kraken's journey around these types of use cases. We are one of the oldest crypto exchanges in the world, right? And it all started with Bitcoin. And we've done a tremendous job of expanding the
the types of capabilities we have around trading and that platform. But I think one of the reasons why we founded this crypto platform team is to explore these additional use cases and figure out ways to incorporate that into our new products. And so we have, I think that
some of the investments internally and through like M&A and other ways, we are starting to build the foundation of the teams that will start to roll out new features and take advantage of that. One of the things that's really probably visible at the
moment is our yield generating opportunities around staking. And I think that there's like a huge parallel there with what's going on with stacks and stacking. And I think that that's obviously something along with all the other opportunities that we're looking at that would be helpful for our customers because ultimately they want to
be able to earn more than just the normal growth from holding the asset. I think it's really, really, really fascinating all the different things being built right now on DeFi, even just in the last two years or so, that
the complexity and the innovation that's happening is just ridiculous and the money that's been pouring into it from like the VCs and everything else into these teams is going to be fruitful and it's you know in over the next few years and even though we're in a pretty pretty vicious bearer
phase right now, I still think this is the time where people are building and getting ready to roll out what ends up being like that next crest of technological advance. So I think we're really looking forward to that and we're keeping our heads down and building and I think that's what a lot of people are doing.
Brian, crack me if I'm wrong, but my image from the outside just seeing you guys execute is that you're not going to kind of like ape into every ridiculous thing out there, right? But you're also not going to just ignore the industry and just kind of like be like, you know, we are we are just going to
pretty wild at cracking in terms of our headcount growth and the amount of talent that we've brought in. Obviously with Jesse shifting his role into more of a product focus rather than CEO driven and having Dave Ripley come and take over in the CEO
these probably going to have some effect on how we tackle this kind of product innovation. But there's a lot of really, really smart people that come from some wild projects. If you knew some of the people that we're working at the company, you'd be like, "Oh man, that's crazy. I never knew that."
We're pretty like opaque in terms of who comes in and out the doors at Kraken for security reasons, but I think the talent is there and we do a lot of really deep diligence on what we build. That being said, we're not immune to any
challenges that that any company that's growing has, you know, we'd love to go faster and faster in in a bunch of different areas, but you're right. Like we want to do what's ultimately what's ultimately going to pay off in the future and not necessarily just like a cash grab. I mean, you know, if you look at something like we rolled out Bitcoin lightning earlier this year and you know, that
That's a business area that we knew wasn't going to be like, oh, we're going to be reporting billions of dollars of profit on our books this year because we rolled out lightning funding. That's just not what we were trying to do. We're looking at this long term as like, okay, these are potentially ecosystems that are going to grow and expand.
And I'm sure that the people looking at stacks are thinking the same thing right. They're not necessarily trying to spend all of your time supporting an ecosystem that you think is just going to die next week. You're looking long-term at where is this going and do I have a belief in what the mission is trying to
to accomplish. I'm really bullish for where Kraken's going. It's been over a decade now of us being around and we're still one of the leading exchanges. If we can continue that, having that mentality around product ideation, then I think we'll stay around.
I get whenever I think about working at an exchange or what it's like working an exchange, I just imagine it is so many moving parts supporting so many different projects and not only customers but also working with core developers and just maintaining everything all at once.
sounds very overwhelming, honestly. I'm curious to know just briefly what projects are, what has got your interest as someone who's sort of like looking at many projects and kind of like seeing certain trends
and making sort of valued decisions on what to integrate and what not to integrate. Just like, yeah, kind of like interested in just your take there. Yeah, I mean, from an individual perspective, I mean, it's almost impossible to be aware of everything that's going on in this space. But I try really hard to surround myself with
a team that has that kind of knowledge. I mean, we recently brought someone on who's helping out with our QANFT work and he just knows so much about that space and, you know, we rely on people like that to help us build out our roadmaps and our plans and think about what
What is our thesis at Kraken in terms of expanding crypto adoption around the world? We have a global team. The folks on the crypto platform team are in Australia and in Europe and Asia. I mean, they're everywhere and they're seeing different
Angles of like what the market looks like. I mean we do business in Japan for instance, which is like a pretty unique market and you know we have Discussions all the time around things like well what's going on in Japan like what's what's what's popular there? What what are they like prioritizing as investors there and
versus elsewhere. We're like a heavy market leader in Europe as well, which has a completely different financial challenge. In terms of just like straight capabilities, I mentioned we have a venture arm, so crack inventures. While I don't work at crack inventures, obviously, we
We do communicate with them. We get to see what they're looking at, what they're thinking about, investing in, and what they're sharing their thoughts on from a VC perspective, what they're seeing and what sounds interesting. We have really large clients, like
that we communicate with regularly just to, you know, relationship manage and they have input and they have observations that are pretty unique coming from like institutional trading side of the house. So there's just so many different inputs that you have to kind of parse through and figure out like where is
this going? Where is the most promise? Where is the opportunity? And what's got the best kind of return on investment? Like we can't build everything. We can't do everything. And as many have said, you know, you have to really pick the things that are most impactful for the business and for our customers.
I agree and that actually leads me to my next question around the current status of of stacks and some of the updates that are coming down the line is there is so much development as you mentioned Brian you can't build everything you can't do it all but
We do have some very exciting upgrades and developments happening in the ecosystem. The need and maybe even Brittany as well, could you chime in on what the current status of stacks is and some of those updates that are in store for the 2.1 upgrade and beyond?
I can quickly chime in and then like Brittany continue. So I would say that with a minute launch for the stacks layer in early 2021, at that time like the biggest thing was like they look like the clarity language is live and the smart contract functionality is
live and the new consensus is live. Nobody has done this before, running a consensus mechanism that's partly on Bitcoin, partly on the layer. And the biggest thing with this BTC yield, the native Bitcoin yield, which I think has found a pretty strong product market, even in the bear market, I think
maybe this cycle, we are at like all time high in terms of STX locked and earning BTC rewards. It has found like a pretty, pretty kind of like, clear product market fit. The lessons learned were, you know, because we were limited by the coin block times and other smart contract chains.
were much much faster. Same with the capacity of how many transactions we could do, we optimize a lot for decentralization and people are used to much faster change of much higher network capacity. And the biggest missing piece remained the
non-custodial Bitcoin asset. So people can easily transfer that in, have the more native Bitcoin experience and then do a Bitcoin writeback, because smart contracts can then send SPTC out to a Bitcoin address as BTC. So I would say those were the wins and
Obviously, the community and everybody else was very, very excited. And now, with the bear market starting, a lot of the focus is on the key upgrades in terms of speed and the long-cushury Bitcoin asset and a few other things that I think this could really, in my view, kind of like unlock Bitcoin Capital, which is the mission.
Yeah, I think I'm pretty here. Yeah, I think many really great points about what's sort of coming. I mean, I've seen this growing interest in this Bitcoin as a sentiment layer and then layers built on top. You know, we've seen more adoption of things like lightning, which
is really great for small payments, but if you want to do more compute or if you want to do more advanced actions on Bitcoin, stacks is the leading place to do that. So just seeing sort of the innovation come through, at the foundation, we see that in grant proposals, we see teams who are entering like
the stocks accelerator or the pre-accelerator and they're kind of rethinking the value that can be unlocked by tapping into Bitcoin. So I think that paired with some of these technical upgrades, making the chain faster, making bridges easier, a bunch of things that are coming
in stacks 2.1 later this quarter, those are kind of going to really unlock like a huge amount of opportunity for people who want to build, people who want to put Bitcoin to work in new and interesting ways. So I was just feeling like really excited about what
We're here to support all of those experiments and ideas. We get the front row of seed of what people are building and how they're imagining bringing that to market. But I think every Bitcoin holder wants that asset to be to survive.
to be around for a long time and I think the only way to do that is to add more utility on top. It can't just sort of like, "Oh, okay, I buy it," and then it sits somewhere idly and doesn't really contribute to the wider Web3 innovation. So I'm just excited to see that.
Absolutely agreed and the needy with with that said by both you and Brittany kind of want to talk about maybe some of the large projects on stacks but more importantly are there more
tokens potentially coming to the network. We have the STX token within our network, but you also mentioned something called SBTC. Is this a new token that could be built around the network and used in some way, shape or form?
I think this is going to require like a deep dive. This is a down custodial Bitcoin asset, but I would say it would be very hard to summarize it. And this is something that everyone learned more about. That's perfect. I would put a pin on it for like an actual deep dive.
Many were just like one minute left. Can you tell us the meaning of life? You see the exact next topic that we're going to be covering. So many of you put the right pin in it. Everyone, thank you very much. Manee Patrick, Brittany Brian.
appreciate your time today. And as many have said, we're going to put a pin in that question because we've got a lot more to talk about around the future of some of the innovations coming to stacks like SBTC and others. And potentially even the meaning of life, number 42 or beyond as well for all of you.
Again, Brian, thank you very much and thank you to the Kraken team for joining today. Many Patrick, Brittany, thank you as well. Many of you have a shout out. Yeah, no, just great to see you, Brian. It's always great to have him. Likewise. Thanks. Thanks for having me guys. Thank you, thank you, everyone. Thank you. Thank you all for joining us.
tuning in to this week's special spaces. If you would like to tune in live, ask questions or join the conversation in the future. Be sure to follow stacks on Twitter and tune in every week at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays for a regular show. Until next week, I'm your host, Kyle Elcott, partner at Stacks Ventures. Take care, have a good day. Talk soon, everybody.