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Stacks Townhall
Recorded: Aug. 14, 2025 Duration: 1:25:39Space Recording
Short Summary
The latest Stacks Town Hall revealed exciting developments in the Bitcoin ecosystem, including new partnerships, grant initiatives, and innovative projects aimed at enhancing user engagement and growth. With a focus on expanding the developer community and improving yield opportunities, the Stacks ecosystem is poised for significant advancements in the coming months.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. hello hello everybody good morning good day good evening wherever you may be tuning in
from around the world we are incredibly excited to be here with each and every one of you, a part of the Stacks and the greater Bitcoin ecosystem,
to talk about what's happening across Stacks, but also what's just happening in general across Bitcoin.
We've seen a number of headlines, but also a number of exciting movements across Bitcoin in the last
30 days since our last town hall. And we wanted to continue discussing not just those topics,
but also continue these town halls as we got a lot of good feedback that the community is
really supportive and wanted to see more of these, hear more from the different entities to the different team members to the
different projects and to really hear more voices across the Stacks ecosystem. So today, that's what
we're going to be doing. So we're back here with another edition of our Stacks Town Hall. I'm your
host, Kyle Ellicott. It's a pleasure to be with you today. We've got a roster of speakers. I mean, I'm looking at my show notes
right now. We've got at least almost going on two dozen different speakers that are coming up and
down the stage to share a little bit of what's happening across the greater ecosystem and what's
happening post SIP 31. I know that there's some questions. There's also a lot of excitement around this.
So we're going to have people coming up, sharing about where things are, along with some builder
updates from a variety of the team members as well. And just like normal, if you have any
questions, just raise your hand. We'll try to get them towards the second half of today's show.
Otherwise, everything here discussed is educational purposes only,
not financial advice. Please do your own research and let's have a little bit of fun.
All right. With that said, I want to kick things off today. I think I'm missing my co-host
at the moment and I will give him maybe one, maybe 30 more seconds
to see if he'll be able to join us as well.
Mitchell from the Stacks Foundation
will be coming up on stage to kick things off.
But everybody, this has been a wild summer.
We have not just had a wild summer with Stacks,
including, again, SIP31, the Satoshi upgrades,
talks of the future of SBTC, but also across all of Bitcoin.
We've got a massive unlock in terms of institutional capital with Bitcoin treasuries starting to be announced and also starting to come to market in waves.
We've got the rise of Bitcoin stable coins across the industry.
Shout out Hermetica. I see you down there. We also have more activity on chain across Bitcoin
applications in all ecosystems, whether that be wallets, shout out to experts, leather, or that is in some of the other applications. We also have seen a mass rise
around creatives coming back to Bitcoin in a way that we haven't seen, I believe, since
that kind of late 2023, early 2024 era as well. I see Peace Love Music, a shout out to you and all
the work that you and the community are doing as well around creatives and helping them enter into not just Stacks, but into the greater Bitcoin ecosystem as well.
That said, I think we're going to go ahead and kick off.
I think Mitchell is going to join us here in just a little bit as well.
But again, welcome everybody to this edition of Stacks Town Hall.
We're going to be talking
again about everything that's happening across the greater Stacks ecosystem. And oh, here he is.
And what's happening now post SIP 31 and the Satoshi upgrades and get a little bit more in
depth detail for you all as well. As he's now entered up on stage i'd like to welcome up my co-host
mitchell of the stacks foundation to say hi for a minute no pressure morning good morning man how
you doing good i've been here the whole time listening and i'm like let me up let me up
i was not late for the record but it's good to see you again i can't believe it's time for
another time hall already but uh got a lot to share today.
So let me know when you want me to dive into it.
Yeah, I think I'm going to bring Shannon up first, if I can.
Shannon and I are going to jam for just a half a second.
Everybody, we have a ton of events and upcoming activities.
If you don't know in terms of the event circuit,
this time right now here in the summer kicks off every major event across Asia. And with that,
the Stacks Asia Foundation and myself are going to be at a number of events in the coming two and a
half, three months, including some we just got back from as well.
So Shannon, welcome to the stage.
Let's jam on it.
Yeah, of course.
So you know this very well
because we have you on the front lines here,
but we're definitely going to be out and about
these next few months from now until December.
It's going to be a busy fall and early winter.
So like usual, we're at a lot of the major events through Asia, US, Europe, and we have
some virtual stuff coming up too.
So I'll expand on that as well.
So Kyle will be at WebEx Asia and BTC Asia.
WebEx is in Tokyo, BTC Asia is in Hong Kong, followed by Super Return to Asia and Singapore
and then EdCon in Osaka. So quite a busy
August and September. Just like past years, we are going to be at Korea Blockchain Week. We have a
ton of hosted side events and dinners and meetups that are during that very important conference
week for us. And then a really big one for us this fall is always Token 2049 Singapore. So
if you didn't already know, this
one definitely has a huge global crowd that taps into it. Not only is it a great event for
partners and investors, but one that we do see a lot of devs at. So we always try to be there
and we try to show up full force. We will be at the token 2049 conference. We will have an
activation space there, but we will also have side event
activations at multi-chain day, at network state conference, and many others. We have a lot of
partner events that we tee up with that week too. So just check out the Stacks events calendar.
That's always updated. And if you're going to be there, we would love to see you and meet up.
We have quite a few team members that are going to be there as well. So check out the calendar. You can email events at stacks.org or ping me on
Twitter. Happy to fill you in on all the details there. I'll try to be quick. We also have Dev
Connect in Buenos Aires. That's towards mid-November. This one is definitely tapping into
those deep builder vibes. It's a great
opportunity for our Stacks dev advocates and community leads to get face time with developers
that are just wanting to hear more about Bitcoin L2s or wanting to see what the opportunities are
to build. So we are definitely going to be there. I'm mentioning this one, even though it's in
November, is because we will have a pop-up Bitcoin Builders Stacks conference during DevConnect. We're exploring a hacker house opportunity there. There's more to
come on that. And we also are activating at Multi-Chain Day and at Staking Summit. And we
will be hosting a little casual barbecue that week too, Buenos Aires style. So we're excited about
that. I'm going to try to feed in a little bit more here. Sorry, I'll keep it quick. But on the virtual side, we have a three-part Bitcoin DeFi
webinar series that's going to be kicking off early September. There's been a little bit of
promotion on it so far, but we'll be going all out on it next week. This is going to be really
interesting for people that are just looking to sharpen their skills in DeFi and hear about the latest
opportunities within Stacks. It's really designed to help you take control of wanting to know more
about DeFi and how it relates to Stacks. So we have virtual events on September 2nd, the 9th,
and the 13th. And many of you that are here will be featured in that too. So we're excited about
that. And then Kyle with Stacks Asia Foundation and
with Stacks, we are going to be hosting a Bitcoin Dominance virtual on September 3rd. So
if you're looking to register for these events or to hear more, just check out the Stacks events
calendar. We have all the information there. Much more to come, Kyle. I'm holding back because
there's definitely more in Abu Dhabi.
Go for it.
We got an extra 60 seconds.
Go for it.
We do.
Okay, great.
Who's next can hold for just 60 seconds?
So you're good.
Okay, so I'll just mention too that I know a lot of people have heard about the BTC Media
Crew.
They're doing another Bitcoin Amsterdam.
Stacks will be hosting an event during Bitcoin Amsterdam.
So just check out the calendar, like I said before, for those details on that event, if you're located in that area or planning on going.
And then we also are going to be sponsoring BTC MENA in December.
And that's in Abu Dhabi.
We will have plenty of events and meetups and different activations that y'all can be part of that week.
So there's plenty more to say here, but that's it on the
event horizon. So you can definitely be part of it, whether you're in one of these regions,
or if you just want to tune in virtually to what we have going on, there's definitely
chances to be involved. Absolutely. And we've also got, Shannon, I'm not sure if you mentioned it in
the in-depth recap that you just gave, but we also got a blockchain leaders summit that we're doing
in partnership with hash in Japan, and then also potentially their events similar in Korea,
BTC con as well. We also have some Bitcoin events that are being happening in BTC Asia,
in Hong Kong. I've just gotten back from conviction in Vietnam and gotten to see the beginnings of the Vietnam Web3
ecosystem and their excitement around Bitcoin, building on Bitcoin, and also kind of the
institutional focus of Bitcoin as well. So a lot more to come, as Shannon said, but reach out if
you're going to be at any of these events and we'd happily like to see you or have you join us in any capacity as well.
That said, thank you very much, Shannon.
Next up, I want to bring Mitchell back up on stage and also welcome Alex Miller as well.
Gentlemen, the floor is yours.
Hey, hey.
Good morning.
Hello.
How are you doing today, Mitchell?
Pretty good.
It's been, as we'll get into, it's been a lot of really good and interesting work happening after the hard fork, which I don't know about you.
Mentally, it feels like it was a long time ago, but then I looked at the calendars only two weeks ago.
then I looked at the calendars only two weeks ago. Pretty incredible. But yeah, so what I want
Pretty incredible.
to get into today, and thanks for being here is basically three things. So number one, I want to
talk a little bit about what work has been happening since the SIP happened, since the SIP
was passed and the hard fork happened a couple weeks ago. What we're working on kind of right now,
specifically with the organizations that were called for in the SIP, so the endowment and
the operational entity, we'll talk a little bit about what's going into that. Even we've got a
name for it, which we'll be revealing today and having an announcement around. And then the third thing is a look ahead. And we've got sort of a
roadmap for, you know, CIP 31 resources, as I'd call it, or really focused on sort of the,
how do we bring labs and endowment to life? And then I guess a bonus sort of fourth thing is,
how are we thinking about deploying some of these resources in the very, very short term to help out builders, help out others in our community,
and make sure we leave ourselves both time to do the setup properly, but also not make people wait.
Because we want the idea with the CIP 31, obviously, is to get these resources into people's hands as quickly as possible.
So we'll talk a little bit about how all of those things are coming together, what people can expect. After this call, we'll be dropping a ton of links,
forms that you can fill in to let us know you're interested in these things,
really important forum discussions that we all we have teed up that we need your help on and all
good stuff like that. But we'll get to all of it. I think, Alex, I'd like to start with the news that
is probably going to be pretty exciting to everyone. So if you guys remember, in CIP 31,
there was this thing called the operational entity. And that's going to be where a lot of
the center of gravity for people contributing can be, especially core development and things like that. Well, operational entity, not the most sexy name. Was that you came
up with that, Alex? I think I can blame you. You're an author, right? Yeah. I mean, I'm pretty sure
that was actually you, but I'll take the blame. Oh, was it? Okay. All right. I'll take that one.
I'll take that one.
But I wanted to start out here with a special shout out.
So Ineola Sam, aka Sam.BTC, is a longtime community builder in our ecosystem.
He's been doing a ton of phenomenal work onboarding developers in Africa.
And he's got this really cool program called Stacks Labs.
And through that program, he's been educating people cool program called Stacks Labs. And through that program,
he's been educating people on using Clarity.
He's worked with Adam on our team to hold events
and things like that.
And we've been discussing with him using the brand Stacks Labs
for this new operational entity for a while now.
And the reason that was desirable is the labs moniker really aligns well to the structures of other ecosystems.
And as the SIP mentions, one of the things that we've struggled with as an ecosystem is just Stacks itself already has a ton of sort of non-standard naming conventions and things baked into it.
And so there's already sort of an overhead with people learning stacks.
It's not a problem.
It's just something that we try to be cognizant
of adding too much to.
And so if you look around an ecosystem like Solana, right?
They have the Solana Foundation and the Solana Labs.
And they both have clearly defined roles.
And a lot of other protocols have sort of similarly
named and separated roles.
So I think for an organization that is going to work with a lot of partners,
touch a lot of things externally, hold marketing campaigns,
the fact that we have an organization whose name actually aligns with its function is really valuable.
Sam understood this, and so we worked out a deal with him
where we're able to
use the Stacks brand for this new organization. So we have him to thank for that. The foundation,
myself and Sam will be releasing a blog post in more detail about how his programs will carry on,
be renamed, et cetera. And for the time being, we're not touching the properties. We'll get into some of that later. But yeah, big shout out to him.
And so we have a name, guys.
So the new operational entity will be called Stax Labs.
I think it's pretty cool.
And we also have a new interim CEO.
And so Alex, I want to bring you on to talk a little bit about that.
Before I do, let me give you a little love.
So one of the things that's been happening over the last two weeks is a ton of work to get the legal and operational structures of these companies set up and set up and done in a way that are going to be bulletproof for decades to come.
And so there's some complexity when doing this with an existing ecosystem. And so we just want
to make sure this is done exactly right. And Alex has naturally stepped up with his knowledge of
the SIPP and helped us identify all kinds of different experts who are helping us do this
in the right way. He's got his team at Hero supporting things. We've got folks from Trust Machines, from the
foundation, all over the ecosystem who are doing everything to bring these orgs to life in the best
way possible and in the fastest way possible. And so sort of in that effort, Alex has emerged as
kind of really circling the wagons on that and driving a
lot of the process forward. So I want to say a big congratulations to you, Alex. I've really
appreciated seeing you step up to make sure all these things are moving forward, giving us all
kind of clear roles and responsibilities. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit about
why you're excited about this role, what you think it means for both Labs and for Hero.
And I'll leave it there.
I'll have some more questions for you in a minute.
Sure.
Well, thank you for the kind words.
So just to make sure it was totally clear what Mitchell was saying there is that I'll be starting off as the interim CEO of Stacks Labs.
And what that means is that the whole goal is over the next roughly six months,
getting the organization stood up, making sure that we have an actual legal entity,
getting the initial employees there, picking off, most importantly, kicking off the searches
that are really important for Stacks Labs. So chief marketing officer for Stacks, chief security
officer, obviously, we need to run a full permanent
CEO search for Stacks Labs, making sure that we hit the ground running really fast. And as Mitchell
said, we'll chat a little bit after this too as to like how we're going to start deploying
some of the things as soon as possible. Working with the treasury committee as the appointments
committee gets them all
appointed to make sure that that's all set. But again, it all just really comes back down to
how quickly can we hit the ground running while still creating all of the necessary structures
that make this last? Because as we said, right, this is like something that we're trying to do.
We're trying to set up something for 20 years here, right? That's going to last.
And as Mitchell said, there's a lot of complexity with us being in an existing ecosystem.
So we actually did get some exciting news yesterday that there is officially now a Cayman
foundation for the Stacks endowment that has been filed and created.
has been filed and created.
There's going to be some travel down there soon
to do kind of the finalizing elements of that,
as well as actually create the Stacks Labs entity as well
so that it can start hiring people
and taking in funds to actually start deploying
and working on them.
We've actually managed to move, I think, very quickly on this, given the overall
complexity of it. But again, kind of as Mitchell was saying, there's actually two things that
I think really lead to us needing to do this right. And they both relate to us being an
existing ecosystem. Number one is that, of course, the tokens that are going into this, right, all of
these assets actually have a real value already.
And so it's much more subject to like scrutiny from tax authorities and things and making sure you do it right.
Whereas a lot of times when ecosystems are setting up a foundation and like a lab structure like this, they might not even have a token at all, let alone a token that has substantial value to it.
But the other thing they don't have is they don't have a community existing. And if you go through
and you look at like the structure of the foundation and the community involvement around it
that we talked about in SIP 31 that we obviously worked with so many other people on this call
about, most ecosystems don't actually have that because
they're getting set up again when there's like not much built already. And so it's pretty much
just like secretly the founders controlling everything, right? Or like a couple people
controlling everything. And that's very much not the structure that we wanted to exist,
you know, again, as an entire community. And so figuring out how to actually, again,
set up these organizations and put everything in place right, but in a way that was like
legally compatible, but still involved the community has been a couple months now worth
of really intensive work. And fortunately, we have some, a couple really amazing like regulatory
and legal folks involved on our side who are long-term members of the community who
have been driving this forward and really making it happen. So the exciting news about that all is
that by basically the beginning of September, the endowment should be, itself should be fully going.
Stax Labs will be a legal entity that can start getting people like working and moved over. And so by October, with sort of like the whole first chunk of people actually moved over
from like Bitcoin L2 Labs and the foundation and a few folks from some folks from Hero,
all kind of working full down by the end of September.
We'll have some, Mitchell, do you want to talk about some of the initial things
that you were thinking about? Or did I cover all the kind of core things there?
No, definitely. I think you did. I think probably people are most interested in sort of hearing
how we solve for sort of moving quickly in the short term. So I think we should dive into
what we've been talking about with the appointments committee, which had its kickoff yesterday and things like that.
So I could I can dive into that. The only other thing I think covering on the lab side is just clarifying, too, that we're going to have we want everyone's input on these roles.
Right. So we're trying to balance moving really fast for everyone with also, we want to find the best possible talent in the world.
We want to involve the community in the whole process of things.
And so one of the things that will be shared out today with the announcement that sort of outlines everything Alex and I are talking about will be forum posts where you guys can engage with.
I think the CMO is gonna be the first roll up
that you can give feedback on.
We'd love to hear from folks on,
we hear this notion of like a stack CMO for a while now,
but what exactly does that mean?
What do all of you as builders
or community members want in a CMO?
So I think engaging in those discussions is really helpful
because as these entities get finalized and they can begin to
hire and have things like bank accounts and so forth and can actually bring people on it'll
accelerate the pace at which they can do things if we're already clear on what the community wants
from these positions and the job descriptions are written and so it's like Alex can come in day one
and say boom here's my CMO job description so I I'll give a quick plug. Those are going to be up on the forum.
Daniel from Hire Vibes and Claire are going to be helping drive the discussion there.
But there's the other thing I want to talk about, which is sort of short-term
needs in the ecosystem. And this is an area where Alex and I have come together to partner on things.
And the idea being that no matter how fast we move on some of the entity formation and
placement of the Treasury Committee and all these things, it's unlikely that it would be ready to
dole out initial grants to people in high need areas
in the next three to four weeks, let's call it a month.
And I think we're all committed to saying, hey, that's not fast enough.
And so we've been figuring out what solutions can look like there.
And the solution we've come up with is for Alex and I to kind of partner all the kind of funny to say partner because the endowment doesn't, I guess it does exist now.
In any case, the Stacks Foundation is well set up to do grants.
We've done grants for many years.
We also have the appointments committee and a number of awesome groups of community leaders that I think can help weigh in on prioritizing grants in the shorter term until we have a staff at the endowment and until we have the treasury committee.
And so what we've come up with is just an interim, a very simple interim grants program,
which we're going to be opening a form for today. If you're interested in a kind of early
provisional, I need, you know, grant. You'll be able to indicate your interest.
And then in the next couple of weeks,
we'll be announcing how we will open and assess applications
and the types of things that I think, you know,
we as a community can agree on our high need.
And then the foundation, my foundation, the Stacks Foundation,
we'll go ahead and execute on those grants.
And then we'll worry about getting reimbursed
from the Stacks Endowment
when it's set up to do those kinds of things later on.
And so the fundamental idea here is that
we don't wanna rush hiring the best talent.
We don't wanna rush getting the treasury committee.
All these things can happen fast,
but I still think it's important to get those people right.
These are majorly
important positions. And so if we can take some of the pressure off using the tools that we already
have to give ourselves more time and space to do that well and not block any ecosystem growth
or block our builders or make anyone suffer, that's what we're doing here. So I think we've
come up with a good solution. We've been talking about it with the appointments committee back and forth all day yesterday and today. And I think
there's a lot of folks who are willing to kind of chime in and help us do all these out. And yeah,
I'm excited. Our role here at the Stacks Foundation throughout this process has been to,
as much as we possibly can, provide stability. This is an exciting new chapter, but also means transition.
And so making sure things don't break
and making sure that there's time and space created
for really smart people to do good work
is sort of our whole MO.
And so I think this short-term grants program
fits really neatly into solving a nice
kind of short-term opportunity for the ecosystem.
So Alex, I appreciate all the time
and thought that you and I have put into that. I appreciate the appointments committee's thoughts
on this. And, you know, again, more details to come, but over the next two weeks, everyone can
expect a way to engage with and request short-term grants. I will caveat that by saying like, this isn't a sort of wide open free for all
grant program. I think we want to be thoughtful and specific on what are the areas that are the
highest need and then defer to, of course, the Treasury Committee on anything bigger and, you
know, more of an official grant program and a scalable, transparent one that we can all rely on in the
future. But this should do more than enough to get us there. So I'll pause there. I hope that
makes sense. I've been thinking about this a lot, Alex. So call out if I missed anything in my speed
run here. Nope. I think that covered it pretty well. As you said, like we're still moving very
fast to get all this stuff set up. And over the next six weeks, I think both labs and endowment should be at pretty much full, I'll call it full initial operating capacity.
But that's still not as fast as we want to see starting to have impact from it. And so I think the structure you talked about where we get some initial deployment
out of the foundation's existing programs
lets us start delivering that impact in like two weeks.
And I think that's going to be a big win for us.
And then, you know, like I said,
by the end of September,
we'll be fully up and running
with labs and the endowment
and ready to be scaling out
full long-term programs. Awesome. So we've hit two of my three things and I'll end the bonus.
So the remaining bit is really to take a look at what's ahead and as well as how people can
engage with what's ahead. So I'm going to tee you up here alex um i'm looking at this announcement
which will go out shortly we've got a long list of things that were already done in july
i think we can skip that and let people review that later if you are curious or you've never
been through a process like this we're trying to share as much as possible on it so you can learn
along with us um we have a lot of experience with people helping us.
And also just to see that even though, you know, if a week goes by, you know, hey, what's going on?
We built a tracker that you can check out.
So that'll all be published in the blog post today, too.
And I've sort of stepped up to keep that as up to date as humanly possible.
But I think what's even more interesting than what's been done is what's ahead.
So, Alex, you want to talk a little bit more in detail about what's happening the rest of the month of August and then into September?
Yeah. So the rest of this month is finalizing all of those legal formations.
As we said, we'll be coming up.
There will be the initial Treasury Committee meeting with the kind of the initial three members, including
Meneb and, sorry, me, Mitchell, and Meneb, meeting with like the Cayman directors of
the foundation that have been hired to, again, handle all the formalities and the legalities.
That'll also be what approves kind of these initial grants that you were talking about.
The inaugural Stocks Endowment Board meeting
will happen with these guys.
The first wave of open positions are going to get posted,
again, as Mitchell was saying, for community feedback.
So specifically, the CMO, CIO,
and then in the coming weeks,
also the CEO of Stacks Labs role.
Publish out that initial grant program
where, again, Mitchell said, if you've got grants,
we'll have a form up today for folks to ask that. Into September, it's, again, just continuing a lot
of the logistics and stuff that have to happen. We'll keep getting even just bank accounts and
other critical vendor setup things. Stax Labs by the end of September is going to be fully
operational. We'll have a nice little website and everything for it too and do a whole big public launch.
And then moving into October is when kind of all of the longer term programs will get up and running.
Makes sense. Just a few things to do even.
Talk to me a little bit about, I know this is a question I was getting pretty frequently,
you know, in terms of existing core contributors that are at Hero, that are maybe at Trust
Machines or even here with me at the Stacks Foundation. Are those folks, are there some
folks moving over? How are you guys handling that? I know there's hiring as well. So talk to us just
a little bit about how your team is coming together.
And in addition to obviously like the full-time CEO role in the future, like how are you
approaching that? Who do you expect? Like what are the kind of priority departments and things
like that? Yeah. So obviously the first, you know, the key things that Labs needs to do are core
protocol development, marketing for Stacks, both the kind of ecosystem marketing
we've always done, plus expanding more into things like token marketing.
It's going to have all of the strategic partnerships for the ecosystem and then just all of the
growth work and stuff.
So core devs are the easy one, right?
Pretty much all the core core devs from like Bitcoin L2 Labs, several folks from Hero,
like, you know, anyone who's kind of worked with the core dev teams probably obviously met Aaron,
who is a legend in the ecosystem. Bryce, Jeff, all will be kind of joining the core dev team
at Stax Labs, which will do it. On the Hero side, hero is going to stay focused entirely on kind of developer infrastructure and things.
So a couple of different things,
couple of the open source type things that we work on right now,
like Stacks.js, Clarinet,
and the Explorer are actually all going to move over and be
taken over by Stacks Labs as well just because those are
hard to separate from the base core work that happens.
Whereas here we'll focus very deeply on the API Chainhook, really, by the way, if you haven't
seen it, new version of Chainhook coming out soon, and scaling all of that up to continue to try and
improve the resources that we have available for devs in the ecosystem there.
Marketing folks coming in, obviously again, CMOs can be one of the first hires that we have available for devs in the ecosystem there. Marketing folks coming in, obviously, again,
CMOs can be one of the first hires that we make.
So we're not going to wait and not do a bunch of new marketing programs
and experiments in the short term before that.
But once they come in, they'll obviously have the entire marketing team there
to grow it.
And then, of course, kind of investor relations, strategic partnerships, BD.
There are huge, huge partnerships in the works right now that have been worked on, I think, for a while.
And this fall is going to be kind of loaded with announcements on that front.
And so having the team there to kind of own all of that.
One thing I'm really excited about right now is that right now, there's those kinds of deals and things.
And, you know, trying to bring in partners are spread across several different organizations.
Having all of that under one roof, along with the integrations team that's part of the core
dev team is going to make those deals so much easier to make happen while also having the
resources to actually do them. Yeah, well said. I also know, and I will tease a little alpha here
that I know there's listings,
listing announcements ahead in that big bundle
of big name partnerships you mentioned.
So looking forward to a lot of good news
over the next 30 to 45 days for the ecosystem.
And cool.
I think we're probably running out of time here, Alex,
unfortunately. I have sort of to running out of time here, Alex, unfortunately.
I have sort of to wrap this portion of the town hall up and leave room for others to give update.
I want to stress that if you missed anything today that we covered or anything was unclear
of a blog post that will drop right after the town hall's over, it'll include a ton of links
to these things. And sort of the four key ways, if i if i were in the community that i'd consider
engaging were um we'd love to hear your thoughts about grant programs so there's going to be uh
claire is posting an open forum thread sort of framing the discussion around what you'd like to
see that is intended to give the endowment when it's online all the information they need to
build a program that you guys are going to be really excited about. That's number one. Number two, indicate your interest in,
you know, these kind of short-term grants and future grants. There's a form that is a form,
sorry, provided that you can fill out there. Very simple, take you 60 seconds, maybe less.
The third is we'd love for your input on these job descriptions that Alex mentioned.
Whatever sort of level of feedback you want to offer is really helpful.
Make sure that it's all considered as we open these roles and start doing recruitment.
And of course, Alex, I'm going to volunteer you for this.
If you have a person out there that you just think would be really fantastic in any roles
you assume will be open at labs, send them our way.
We'll take a look.
And then last but not least, I will invite you to look at the tracker that I have built,
and it is on the Stacks Foundation website.
The tracker includes a month-by-month look at what's being worked on related to all this
stuff that Alex and I have
been talking about. And I'll keep that updated approximately every week. So you guys can track
the progress there as we move forward and keep good visibility there. And otherwise, I think
we did it. Anything else in closing before we pass it back to Kyle? Yeah, no. Only other thing I'm going to plug is
that, you know, I've been doing these office hour spaces on Monday mornings. I'm going to keep those
going. So the next one will be, you know, next Monday, 1030 a.m. Eastern. I'm actually throwing
up on my profile right now. So, you know, I'm'm gonna keep those up on a weekly basis.
If you've got questions about labs,
how we're gonna get going,
what initial focus thing's gonna be,
why we're doing things the way we're doing,
please come check them out
and let me know what you're thinking about.
Awesome.
Thanks, Alex.
Kyle, I think we can kick it back to you.
Thanks so much, Mitchell and Alex. Alex, congratulations.
Excited to have you in this new role in pushing for the ecosystem further post-SIP 31.
It's going to be an exciting time as you laid out the initial timeline and excited to see where it goes as well.
And everyone, make sure you join Alex's office hours if you haven't already. It's a great time.
That said, Larry, welcome up. Talk to us a little
bit about the upcoming SIP around Bitcoin names. Hey, Kyle. Thanks so much. Yeah, so for those of
you who aren't familiar, I made a proposal earlier this year that we use Bitcoin addresses in place
of Stacks addresses. And the thinking is from a high level view
to make SBTC really feel as much as like Bitcoin as possible.
And so there are really a couple of parts to that.
One part is the addresses,
another part is payment of fees.
So the SIPP that we're talking about today
is for a BTC addresses for Stacks transactions
and it's focused only on addresses.
And we've sort of divided it up
so that there's a separation of concerns
that we don't need to have like entire ecosystem buy-in
to make forward progress.
And so this SIP is really just focused
on the application and library level,
doesn't deal with consensus at all,
doesn't deal with Stacks core.
So it talks about how the libraries should behave
when they're working with addresses
and how applications should display addresses.
And one of the challenges that we're thinking about
is how to prevent accidental sending of SBTC
to wallets that don't understand SBTC
or other Stacks assets.
And so as part of this, we've reached out to the major wallets in the ecosystem
and a couple other parties as well, such as the core devs.
And we've got some people going through the current SIP and provided some feedback on that.
And one of the things that I realized during the process is that it's really hard to design a standard when
you don't have actual real world experience with how
it works in real life.
So as part of that, I'm working on a reference
implementation of the SIP.
And I hope to have that out for people
to start testing in the next couple of weeks.
So if you want to be on that beta list,
you can at me on Twitter, and I'll
make sure to reach out to you when it's ready for you to test.
And I'm hoping that from that experience,
we can put better suggestions into the SIP of how wallets
should handle the UX challenges and the UI challenges
that they'll encounter with this SIP.
Yeah, and then once we get that reference limitation out,
we'll also be opening the SIP up for public comment.
Awesome.
Thank you very much, Larry.
Larry, where can everyone go to provide any input or support
you and the team around the SIP?
At the moment, just follow me on Twitter and make sure to at me if you want to be notified,
and I'll make a list of people who have reached out.
And then we'll have more information posts on the forum when things are out in a more official capacity.
Okay. Sounds great. Thank you so much, Larry.
And next up, I want to welcome Blue Ocean to the stage.
Hello, hello.
Hello, hello.
Can you hear us okay?
Yeah, I can hear you.
Awesome.
I wanted to bring you up on stage to talk to us a little bit more on the SIP around stacking.
Yes. So, yeah, I just decided to add a SIP number to this. So we're talking about SIP 32, and it's about improved stacking.
And it's about improved stacking. And well, as the operator of Fastpool, we just distributed 10 million stacks since we started in cycle three.
And over the last month, I thought how we can improve the experience of stacking.
the experience of stacking.
And we are proposing to simplify the flow.
We streamline for solo stackers
and delegating stackers into one flow.
And we also want to improve the responsibility of signers,
because since Nakamoto upgrade,
signers play a much more important role
than pool operators do.
So signers can define where the stacking rewards go
and then they can also negate it,
how the operation costs are shared
between different entities and so on.
So the SIP is really about making a better experience
and also reflecting the new flow since Nakamoto.
Awesome.
Thank you very much.
And you guys, we're going to keep this running.
I know everyone's got...
That was Friedger in disguise.
Yes, yes.
Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you.
All good.
Sorry, Rieger.
Wasn't sure which identity we were taking on,
but again, pleasure to have you up here today.
Next up, just in the essence of time,
do we have Adriano?
Looks like he's not yet up on stage,
but we'll just keep running.
Andre, talk to us a little bit about product
and growth from L2 Labs.
Yeah, thanks, Kyle. And good morning, everyone. Good to see you all here for another Stacks town hall.
So as you guys know, the mission of Stacks is really to activate the Bitcoin economy.
And this really encompasses a wide range of use cases and applications.
But in the near term, the focus is really to make Stacks the best place to earn Bitcoin
yield.
This is where Bitcoin holders, institutions, and public treasury companies can go to put
their Bitcoin to work.
It's where we're seeing a lot of the current demand in the Bitcoin ecosystem.
And we believe this will help us to build liquidity and grow Stacks to more users in
the near term.
So I'll talk a little bit about some of the recent work
with SBTC as well as what we can expect on some new upgrades and products that I know folks are
excited about. So on SBTC we had a really strong first half of the year still sitting at right
around 5000 Bitcoin TVL. This has earned approximately three percent on average over
the past six months through proof of transfer
rewards offering Bitcoin in, Bitcoin out, yield opportunities.
So definitely looking to continue to scale that into the rest of this year.
We've had some recent new feature ship for SBTC recently.
One that I'm excited about is the ability to automate the distribution of POX rewards
to automatically peg into SVTC,
recalling this feature, SPOX.
And so I think this could be interesting
for pool operators out there
that are looking to just streamline their operations
and just keep those rewards directly in SVTC.
We also included a feature to make it easier
to do signer rotation to rotate the signer set
and expand it in the future.
And as we look to the remainder of the year,
a lot of the focus is on continuing to scale SBDC,
preparing for the eventual cap removal,
which is a top priority. I think this has been heavily
requested by DeFi teams to enable more user acquisition. So there should be some more
news coming about that soon. And then making progress on R&D for SBDC. The goal for SBDC
really is to be the most trust minimized Bitcoin asset.
So you can have full assurances when you're using your Bitcoin and DeFi, you know, ultimately
working towards full unilateral exit to make sure that SBDC is the most secure way to put
your Bitcoin to work.
For this, you know, we've been researching technologies like BitVM and different implementations and a wide range of other
technologies that are available in the Bitcoin ecosystem right now. So that's been progressing
well. And then as mentioned, Alex alluded to earlier, really working on some new integrations
and partnerships. This includes bridges and custodians, on-ramps and new DeFi protocols.
And I don't want to steal anyone's thunder here,
but I think that there should be some exciting announcements
coming out over the next 45 days.
One of the integrations that I'm most excited about
is on SBDC yield vaults.
So we've talked about this before,
but yield vaults are a way to really provide
more scalable yield strategies for
SVTC. And this is the way to essentially simplify the user experience for investors so they can just
have like a one-click deploy option while also bootstrapping the Stacks DeFi ecosystem. And so
we're planning to launch a flagship vault later this year. Over the past couple of months, we
fielded proposals from a number of different teams
and selected the best team to build this.
Really excited about it.
And there should be some more information
coming about this soon.
And lastly, because I know folks are excited
about dual stacking.
In case you haven't heard about it,
dual stacking was an upgrade that was proposed earlier this year, allowing Bitcoin holders to earn Bitcoin-denominated yield while also boosting STX utility. or both. And if you stake both, you receive a multiplier on your BTC yield. This will allow
us to bring more Bitcoin capital into the Stacks ecosystem while also strengthening the Stacks
token economy. And so, you know, with this, I'd say the economic model is just about finalized
and the technical designs are in progress. We're planning to run a small pilot to validate some user behavior
before the launch and test some of our assumptions. But things are progressing well there and excited
to share more details over the coming weeks and months. But yeah, back to you, Kyle. Thank you.
All right. Very, very excited, Andre. Thank you very much. Next up, I want to welcome Adriano to the stage.
Adriano, floor is yours.
Thank you, Kamil.
I'm going to be super brief because some of the technical stuff
has already been covered and something else will be covered.
But I just wanted to give everybody
a sense of what core developers are doing.
As usual, we are listening to feedback from the community
and delivering something which I hope will ease their pain.
Our main focus right now is on bandwidth and scalability.
We're going to be doing things in different directions.
One is that we're going to be rolling out a more accurate fee estimator,
which is going to make sure that fee and costs, basically,
which is going to make sure that the fees paid make sense
and they allow for a nice competition
so that if you want to get your transactions included faster,
you should be able to pay more and get them in faster.
And at the same time, the chain itself is going to be able to pay more and get them in faster. And at the same time, the chain itself
is going to be able to estimate more accurately
the cost in terms of resources, budget, rates, rights,
and so on and so forth.
Meanwhile, we're working closely with partners, builders,
bridges, and so on and so forth, so that we can provide them
with a better quality of service. So for instance, one of the things that we can provide them with a better quality of service.
So for instance, one of the things that we have been doing
and that was long requested was the ability to use a Stacks
Core directly in order to fetch previous blocks,
previous tenures, previous transactions.
You had to go through the API before.
And that was great.
And it worked fine.
But it introduced some additional complexity
and some more moving parts, which can be critical, especially if somebody's running a breach
or something like that. And so we have a bunch of PRs right now that make that process a
lot more smoother and basically reduce the security perimeter. We have Cloud AD4 in the oven almost,
and I know that Bryce,
one of the core devs is going to speak more in
details about it later today.
As always, we are looking forward to
things that we can do to streamline operations for node operators,
but also work on the performance of the chain itself.
Right now, we are producing 99.9% of the blocks
within five seconds.
And we're always on the lookout for other optimizations
we can do here and there to squeeze out more performance.
And with this, I'm going to give it back to you, Kyle.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you, Adriano and Andre as well
for providing those technical and product updates.
Next up, Jacob, tell us a little bit more
about what's going on at Hermetica.
GM Jam, folks, glad to be here.
Yeah, so as Andre alluded to,
the focus of the ecosystem is to create a place or be the best place to earn Bitcoin yield in general.
And we at Hermetica, obviously our mission is to bring real yield to the DeFi ecosystem.
And so as we are expanding, we're seeing a lot of the protocols, a lot of the key primitives coming online in size right now.
We have lending markets that's just past $100 million in TVL yesterday. The DEXs are maturing. We have real yield sources. And so there
is the perfect ingredients are coming into place to create an on-chain yield product.
The challenge, though, is that a lot of these operations are quite complex for the general user. A lot of folks don't
want to necessarily manage the risk, manage the operational overhead of doing so. And so what we're
working on is a one-click vault solution that allows folks to generate Bitcoin on Bitcoin yield
all via SPTC, via the DeFi ecosystem that we have today on Stacks.
And that will be announced soon.
And then also will be available soon for everybody to enjoy.
And that is really my update, my tease.
More to come.
Back to you, Kyle.
Oh, man, that is a heck of an update and a tease right there.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Jacob. Everyone keep up an update in the T's right there. I appreciate it.
Thank you so much, Jacob.
Everyone keep up to date with Hermetica on Twitter.
Make sure to follow Jacob and his team as well.
Next up, Bryce, I want to welcome you up on stage.
Talk to us a little bit about what's going on with Clarity.
Hey, thanks Kyle.
Yeah, so I'm going to give kind of the update of what I'm pushing for for the Clarity updates.
We kind of have, or I kind of have three phases in mind.
I'll focus in on this first one and then give a quick summary of the follow-ups.
So the first batch that I'm proposing, and I've posted a forum post and opened a PR in the SIP repo for this today. So these are basically three new functionalities in Clarity
that have been in strong demand to help support the bridges and the marketplaces that are really
vital to the ecosystem. So we kind of wanted to get these separated on their own so they can get
done quickly. And essentially that is one, verifying the hash of a smart contract. So as you are
interacting with untrusted traits, you can grab a hash of what the body of that contract is and verify that it matches some template that you're expecting it to match. So you can feel more secure calling into these untrusted, untrusted traits. The second one is also helps with calling untrusted traits. It allows Clarity Contract to add its own post conditions, similar to the post conditions
that users can place on the transaction level.
But this allows the contract to protect its own assets or the assets of other principles
if they want to.
And again, this will make it more secure and easier to make sure that when I call an external
function that I may or may not trust,
I can ensure that it's not moving assets
that I don't expect it to move.
And then the third one is pretty simple.
This is just a new to ASCII function,
which will allow you to quickly convert
various simple clarity values into a string.
And this one's important for interacting
with cross-chain message passing.
Because right
now, if you want to, for example, get a string version of a principle, it's a very complicated,
unnecessarily complicated function to write it in Clarity. And it's much easier to just do that
in the built-in. So that's kind of phase one. We aim to, like I said, I posted a SIP PR for this
today, and we aim to get this voted on quickly, so in this quarter.
And then we'll be starting implementation right away.
The two follow-ups would be, what I'd like to do after this one is just some general cleanup.
So if you've written clarity for a while, you definitely will have seen some things that are surprising.
Why did I get this error here? Why didn't I get an error for this? So there's a few different items that we have on the list of just general cleanup and consistency.
That would be the next phase.
And then the follow up after that would be going again into some new expressions, kind of in two categories.
The first of those being built ins to interact with Bitcoin transactions.
So we have the Clarity Bitcoin smart contract, which is used by lots of different applications.
But that is kind of expensive and a bit complicated to understand.
So since interacting with Bitcoin is one of the core reasons we exist, it makes sense to bring those into built-ins in the language.
And that would allow you to do things like verify Bitcoin transaction was mined, decode transactions, stuff like that. And then after that, just a whole wide variety of things that,
there's a lot of things that feel like they're missing from the language right now.
So we have a Clarity Lang repo for all the developers that are interested.
You can check out the repo, add your own issues, comment on the issues there.
But these are all the things that we'll prioritize into that next version.
All right.
Yeah, that's it for me. version. All right, Arne.
Yeah, that's it for me.
Nice, all right.
Thanks so much.
Next up, we wanna get Eric on stage.
Talk to us a little bit about Hiro.
Looks like we don't have Alex, or excuse me, Eric,
so we're gonna go to Rubis next.
Rubis, come up on
stage and give us a little community update please yeah hey guys GM thanks
for having me on I thought I'd come on and give a quick community update I
think listening to what's been said before about the kind of future the
roadmap the setting up of the entity and all of the exciting things that are
coming for SBTC and stacks I think I speak for everyone when you know it's a very exciting time um and i wanted to throw out
some flowers for communities that have been building on stacks for the past you know one
two three years um we're going to hear from a lot of the bigger protocols obviously you know zest
bitflow hermetica and that kind of thing i want to throw out some flowers to some of the you know
more uh grassroots communities that have been building.
A lot of the meme coin communities that have helped onboard an awful lot of people, you know, Leo, Welsh, Pepe, Rue,
all those kind of grassroots communities that have been formed just through relationships, etc. there.
I also wanted to share that Stack Tools have got a, which I'm the co-founder of, I've got a big upgrade coming in the next three to four weeks.
It's going to be the biggest one.
We've been working on it for almost a year now, best part of the year.
So it's going to have a ton more features, which hopefully the community will enjoy.
I know you will.
Over the past week, I've also put out a post, a couple of posts actually,
asking for input from community people that have been building,
which might not get the light or the spotlight usually. So I thought I'd just quickly brief through some of the ones that have been shared to me.
I wanted to highlight the Stax AI Guild with Hero Gamer and 3Hunner.
They've been putting out an awful lot of content and shout out to the people that have been, a lot of the creators there.
BoostX V2, which has got referrals and sponsorships boostex has been
a very popular app on onboarding people through spaces i'm sure you're all aware of it
and the spaghetti punk nft community has got a staking and referral system we have the screen
fiends nfts uh they're putting out a lairs which is like a link tree replacement a customizable
one with nfts we have the stacks wars Wars gaming community where they've got their first word game is live at the moment. AI BTC have got their faces now coming soon along with other AI
compatibility there. We have Stoneburst from the Stone community that have got a play-to-earn
game coming out. We have Kenny.BTC building a truth chain social verification and Codetator.BTC
is building BlockSheet which is like a tax kind of compliance thing they've all been shared to me over the past week
I think that's kind of a community update for what's been shared to me I'm going to hand it
back to Kyle but before I do I think coming on next is Xero and Peace Love also want to give a
big shout out to those guys two of my favorite community apps with Deorganize and Zero Authority DAO.
I think that kind of covers everything.
Thank you so much, Rubes.
I really appreciate it.
Next up, we got Stephen, Stephan, pardon me, from the Stacks Creative side.
Welcome to the stage.
GMGM.
Yeah, you can call me Steve, peace love music whatever um but thank you guys for giving
me the opportunity to come up and chat about our amazing community there is so much happening in the
ecosystem there's going to be a little probably overlap between what zero is covering and what
rubes had to say because there are a lot of things that overlap in our ecosystem but
there are a lot of things that overlap in our ecosystem, but so many things happening.
So really quick, I think Rube mentioned BoostX. They have a new referral program, guys. If you're
not familiar with BoostX, actually, we've received some space drops in this space. Some Stax tokens
have been dropped onto everybody in this space that has a BNS name in their X username or display name is actually what they call it.
And it's this integration and it is a huge engagement factor.
We utilize BoostX with the find to earn games that we're doing on the organized in conjunction with
skull coin and zenitron and we get tons of engagement out of that we actually proliferate getting new bns names to people getting them adopted into x so they're being displayed on x
and then it also gives us great ways to incentivize participation and engagement in these spaces. It's also
functional now on Discord. And now if you actually download the browser extension, you can set it up
so that when you send boosts, there's a small fee. It's like 0.1 STX. You can actually set up a
referrer on there. So whoever referred you to BoostX, you put their BNS in there.
They get a small split out of the fee.
And then you can actually set sponsors as well.
So you can actually split up to 40% of that fee and direct it to specific people in the ecosystem that you want to support.
Really cool stuff going on there.
It also engages with BNS1.
BNS1 has auctions coming, launching mid-September. BNS names can be auctioned using STX and SBTC. Broker feature targeted for early November. Connects sellers with buyers via a broker,
with buyers via a broker taking a 10 to 20% fee marketplace volume, 60,000 STX traded since launch
user activity, 750 to 800 monthly active users on BNS one right now. Really great stuff happening
there. Want to shout out fact fun and what Rafa has been building out over there. Some really
great stuff. It's not just a bonding curve launch tool.
He's got AI DAO integration with the AIBTC devs.
He's working, again, we mentioned the Faces mainnet launch.
That is imminent.
That's also in conjunction with FactFun
and some stuff Rafa is working on.
Community memes for the Bitcoin blocks and community-driven meme content coming.
And guys, I don't know if you know that Odin Fund was hacked, but there are no backdoors
at Factot Fund.
It's trading cannot be paused like Odin Fund.
It's not as vulnerable to such things.
It is a truly decentralized exchange and platform.
You can deposit BTC, buy memes and purchase AI DAO tokens directly from Bitcoin on FactFun.
Great stuff coming.
More development coming on that end.
I also want to shout out CryptoDude from BoostX has actually also innovated connecting the Stax wallet to Unreal Engine.
He's developing a third-person shooter game that is going to have levels that interact with certain Stax tokens and NFTs and really amazing stuff there and also um skull coin find to earn impact they've played over 800 games so far with
over 10 000 stx given away to date in about a little over a year now uh they advocate for
on-chain games they drive real liquidity and value to stacks and the upcoming uh launch for their
seed phrase treasure hunt is going to be on chain. It's coming. I think it's
launching next week or very soon thereafter. Crypto game on stacks, native on stacks,
encrypted NFTs, innovated on stacks and 24 word BIP 39 seed phrases incorporated into the game.
And my last one, I know I'm talking a little bit more. Yeah, we got to wrap it up here. I got to
get a few more people on, but go ahead and get the last one out boom wallet and stacks pay and what he's working
on the digital product marketplace great stuff from dan and rash over at thank you very much
peace love music uh next up i want to welcome ken from xverse ken welcome on stage i know it's late
for you right now so i want to make sure you get a few minutes in here. Tell us what's going on. Thanks, Kyle. Hey, everyone. I'll just give
some really quick updates from Xverse. So we've been continuing to focus on the Bitcoin DeFi side
of things. And namely, we are working on getting BTC2S BTC, the native bridge to work directly in the wallet so that it provides the easiest path for users to get their BTC from layer one to the stacks layer two.
creating some of the most popular DeFi apps on Stacks directly into the wallet
so that we have a curated section of all the different ways that users can put their BTC to work
through the many protocols that we have right now and earn a yield.
And, you know, we're also continuing to work on just widening the funnel
in the Bitcoin space to get more people that use Bitcoin,
have Bitcoin, to know that there is an ecosystem of Bitcoin DeFi,
get them onto Xverse Wallet, onto our platform,
so that they can discover all the
different apps that Saks has for offer. Awesome. Thank you so much, Ken. For those
who haven't already followed Xverse, Ken and his team on Twitter to keep up to date.
Next up, Rosar and Kenny come up on stage, talk to us about developers, developers,
developers, and hackathons. Hey, thanks, Kyle. Yeah, I'll quickly get started with just giving
a real quick overview of some of the programs we have going on right now. Code for Stacks is still
ongoing, continues to grow every single month. So if you're a developer that just wants to work on
a Stacks project here and there, this is a great chance to help kind of work on your project consistently, earn some Stacks for doing so.
So we had 5,700 developers participate in that last month, which is amazing. Another program that
we have that kind of takes you to the next level is Stacks Ascent. And this is really designed for
newer builders. You're kind of past the learning stage, but you want to start kickstarting your
career on Stacks. So I'll help guide you through learning how to not only code and work on your
project, but also how to communicate on social, how to communicate via writing. It's really designed
to sort of build you up from the ground up as a developer so that you can become a more higher
quality builder. So that's Stacks Ascent. And I'll put links to all these in a thread down below on
this, attached to this tweet.
And then we've been working with an organization called Ryzen since the beginning of the year,
and they're really working to help us recruit and train developers in countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, Turkey, India.
And so they've been running events and meetups for the past several months now.
They've got an average of like 50, 60 people for each workshop and meetup.
They do developer boot camps. They're doing some hacker houses. So they're doing a bunch of really cool
stuff. They're bringing in several hundred new developers into the ecosystem. You can go and
check out the Stacks event page, stacks.co slash events to see everything that they're doing.
And then really exciting for me personally, today marks the launch of the course three of the Learn
Web 3 Stacks developer degree. So we're doing four courses with LearnWeb3 total.
Course three launches today and it's focused on DeFi.
And so you get to build like a legitimate borrowing and lending protocol.
There's some integration with Bitflow in there, which is really, really cool.
So super excited about that.
So people can start learning how to build some stuff on DeFi.
And all that kind of culminates in one of the main metrics we track is electric capital.
A lot of people are probably familiar with that, but currently sitting at about 370 active developers. And that's a 64% increase over the past year and 100% increase over the past two years. So Stacks developer community continues to steadily grow, which is awesome, super exciting to see.
And then the final thing that I'll have Rosar join me and talk about in just a second is we're I don't know if anybody hasn't noticed, but AI is kind of a big deal and popular right now.
And so everybody's probably heard the term vibe coding and vibe coding can be a double edged sword.
It opens up access for coding for a lot of people, but you got to do it right.
You got to approach it the right way.
And so we're actually going to be doing is we're going to be running a vibe coding hackathon to kind of give people the opportunity
to do that. And so I'm going to go ahead and hand it over to Rosar to give a little bit more
information on exactly what that's going to look like. Thanks. Thanks Kenny. All right. So I'm
going to do a little spiel. So start with the anecdote here. So a long time ago, I read a book
called seven habits of highly effective people. I don't know if anyone's read it. It's a great book.
It deals with the core principles.
And one core principle that stuck with me was seek first to understand, then be understood.
So I'm going to start off by saying I'm going to try and understand everyone here.
And I just want everyone to stop and actually think about this question.
How many of you ever thought like I'd like to build something, but I'm just I'm not experienced
enough or I'm not technical enough.
I just can't do that. It's like that's not
what I do. Actually think about it. If you got a little button, put your hand up or something.
But I think the same thing. I used to think the same thing. I think it from now and again,
I think the same thing. It's natural to feel a bit like an apostle sometimes and you're
always learning new stuff. That's part of the growth mindset and um you know you don't always have a deep track record in them um but actually
i discovered something recently um that personally my non-technical strengths weren't just useful
they're actually the main catalyst that directly contributed to most of my big like breakthrough
moments so definitely keep that in mind, all right?
All right, to the hackathon now.
Our hackathon has three rounds, validate, build, and pitch.
So what most people miss is that each round
requires a completely different set of intelligence.
So like validation's all about understanding
real human problems, finding needs to real problems.
You know, not abstract problems
that no one actually has, like real problems that exist maybe in your neighborhood
or in where you work or in your community online.
And second is building.
Building requires a creative problem solving,
knowing how to connect solutions to needs.
And then third is pitching.
Pitching requires communication skills,
communication intelligence,
translating complexity into clarity.
So you notice there's something
missing from that. None of it is technical. And with AI, a lot of this stuff's a lot easier.
So, and here's the truth, like software is only as good as the non-software domain that is
connected to the business logic. So software without business value is really not very valuable
at all. I think actually Peter Thiel once said a quote, it's every successful startup knows a
secret that others don't. So if you're a super nerd in any particular domain that's not software
related, that could be your secret. That could be your competitive advantage. So keep that in mind.
So my, yeah, yeah. Okay. Challenge one challenge and then I'll get wrap this up.
Bear with me. So here's my challenge to you. I want everyone to think about one domain expertise you have that no one else in this room does. So that could be your entry ticket into the hackathon.
So seriously, take a few seconds and think about something you actually are,
something you can do that you're really good at and it's really weird and no one else does. So
I'm going to take a breath, actually. I'm like running out of breath. But yeah,
take a second and think about that.
Okay.
All right, last thing.
Okay, remember that Seven Habits book from the beginning of this?
Well, that book has nothing to do with software at all,
and I fed a bunch of ideas I learned from it into AI,
and I generated this entire transcript
that I'm reading word for word.
So if you think AI is only for software,
you should think again.
All right, Kenny, now we wrap that up.
Do we want to tell them when we're kicking this off?
Yep, let's do it.
All right, cool.
We're kicking off next month.
So mark your calendars because I will definitely be showing you how I made this and a lot of
other stuff you can do with AI.
So it's a lot easier to think.
So that's all I got.
Thank you guys very much. Appreciate it's a lot easier than a thing. So that's all I got.
Thank you guys very much.
Appreciate it.
Next up, Zero.
Zero, give us a little bit of what's going on with Zero Authority.
Hey, hey, hey.
Hey, hey, hey.
What's up, what's up, what's up, what's up?
Hey, guys.
GM, GM to everybody in the builders.
Love Stacks.
Love you guys. And I'm bullish on what we're all building here.
Zero authority Dow started as just a community media outlet. And we just wanted to highlight all the builders shout out to all of our
amazing, great partners who stuck with us since we launched V0.1 and then 1.0 and now 2.0.
Zest, Bitflow, StackingDAO, Roo, Leo, Welsh, Xverse, Arcadeco.
You guys have been there along with our journey.
And then we know lots of people and builders from the Stacks Foundation,
Hero, also Hero Systems.
You guys have been our early testers, our early adopters
in a world where trust is bought and sold and creativity is often trapped behind gatekeepers.
We noticed that there was an opportunity for creators and builders and people who make things
to come together, collaborate freely, earn fairly, and grow together.
And so that was the idea behind Zero Authority DAO.
And people coming together, rewarding each other, supporting each other,
that's what we've been about from the start.
And it's been really, really warming my heart to see all the community growth.
And I'm just going to read some stats.
And this is really about you guys and the builders and the community growth. And I'm just going to read some stats. And this is really about you
guys and the builders and the creators here. This creator on chain economy and stacks and what we're
building together, it's really coming together. People from outside our chain see this. And so
just a couple of stats to just read off that's just mind blowing is since we've launched the
V2 platform, we've seen 12,000 participants, over 100,000 views,
over 3,000 event completions, and event completions can be multiple things on the
platform like bounty submissions, gig requests, gig acceptance. We've seen over 48,000 RU
distributed, over 10,000 DECO, over 300,000 Flat, over 9 million Leo, over 25 million Meme, over 1 billion Nott, over 2,000 Stacks, 2,000 USDH, over 1 million Welsh. And we've seen 0.001 SBTC. And then we've seen a good amount of stacking DAO STSTX.
And we just continue to see people wanting to come together, reward the people they care the most about to build out their communities.
Huge shout out to AI BTC and Satoshi agents.
Please go try these new protocols.
AI on Stacks and Bitcoin L2 is becoming an absolute theme.
The Stacks Ascent program, Code for Stacks is rewarding builders and program leaders.
Join these programs.
They're here for us.
They're here for if you want to build something and get some support.
A couple of things we've been working on is on-chain legends.
So we have this really cool experience that we're going to be launching.
We launch FastPool and Stack for Impact.
So huge shout out to FastPool and what they're doing with the Rider devices.
This is amazing with these new capabilities that it's giving a lot of creators and builders
This is amazing with these new capabilities that it's giving a lot of creators and builders here.
here.
Shout out to BoostX, STX Tools, STX Watch, Find to Earn Gaming.
If you guys are here and you believe in the power of Web3 and the journey of Web3
and you want to get more involved, try these protocols.
Go build some apps.
Go build some decentralized infrastructure.
Get involved with these communities.
What we want to do with Zero Authority over time is the whole D-grants, the new version is going to
be built into the platform in some capacity. I don't know exactly what that looks like today,
but we do know all of the creators are already there in Zero Authority, and we want to give them new ways
to engage with the community and people who need the direct support and help. One of the
partnerships we recently launched is with Clarity Alliance. Now on Zero Authority, if you need help
from a security audit, security consulting, go to ZeroAuthorityDao.com and get in touch with those great gigamines.
And something ahead here as far as like the vision and where I see all this going,
SocialFi, InfoFi, all of these tools that are emerging in the Stacks ecosystem,
DeFi is going to continue to play a huge role to onboard people with the deep liquidity.
What we're going to be able to build
on these building blocks with a zero authority, with the STX tools, with the community tokens
now playing a huge part to onboard all of these builders across the globe. So there's a lot of
momentum. We're going to capitalize on this. And I'm just so thankful and bullish for all you guys
who come to zero authority, who want to incentivize, who want to encourage each other.
And so we have our team there is to support you where we want to hear from you if you have any feedback and just keep building, guys.
Thanks for the time today.
Thanks so much, Zero.
Appreciate it.
Diego, welcome up.
Talk to us a little bit about Bitflow.
Good morning. Pleasure to be here with so many legends. It's summer, but we're all heads down building. We all believe Bitcoin needs better markets.
And we're on a mission, Bitflow, which is simple, to deliver the most widely adopted engine for Bitcoin liquidity and making Bitcoin flow where it's needed the most.
Recently, we announced the upcoming launch of HODLMM, which is our concentrated liquidity engine.
HODLMM stands for High Throughput Order Book Style Decentralized Liquidity Market Maker, but at the end, it's just a really cool name.
but at the end, it's just a really cool name.
And we're doing this by expanding Bitcoin markets,
enabling zero slippage trades,
unlocking higher yields with precision AMM tools.
This isn't just about liquidity, though.
It's a full spectrum of Bitcoin-denominated markets,
making Biflo and Stax the go-to protocol
for earning and trading with Bitcoin,
built with institutional-grade precision
for assets
they actually want to hold.
And this is coming from demand from institutions.
And we've seen this successfully being deployed in other chains.
And Bitcoin DeFi needs this.
We're starting with SBTC, of course, but we want to expand to other Bitcoin assets, L1
tokens, Bitcoin native tokens, and even tokenized equities.
You know, imagine trading NVIDIA to SBTC, Apple to SBTC.
The future is orange.
It's hungry for yield.
And if you're trading and earning a Bitcoin, you do it here on Stacks.
We're super excited for what's to come.
There's a lot of unlocking and catalysts coming up with bridges and integrations that's just going to take us to the next level.
And we're super happy to be here.
Thank you so much, Diego.
Brandon, come up, tell us a little bit more about Leather.
Looks like we might not have Brandon on here to talk to us about Leather.
Looks like we might not have Brandon on here to talk to us about Leather.
For those who have not checked it out, definitely go look at Leather Wallet and follow Leather
on Twitter for their latest updates next.
Hayden, talk to us a little bit about what's going on with Alex.
Hi everyone.
Hadan here with the Alex Lab Foundation.
To keep it quick, you know, we're proud that we were able to make users a whole from our June security
incident.
Since then, we continue building back.
We've had success with our new pool creation forums.
Some of our community meme pools are in double-digit yields from fee rebates of loan.
We've passed through governance votes, our year four emissions, providing multiple farming
pools with double-digit yields.
We've been working closely with some meme communities.
We have a bounty on Zero Authority now for Welsh. And our latest major step forward
is that we've been working with Stacks core devs,
and we have key new functions that are included
in the SIP for Clarity 4, including contract hash,
that eliminates the possibilities of attackers
using failed deployment as proof of contract deployment
and with post conditions functions, which prevents the kind of unauthorized withdrawals
like those we saw in both incidents.
We have a post with a GitHub link of those new functionalities.
So a huge thanks to the Stacks core devs for their time and generosity in assisting us
with these.
We look forward to having these implemented and these mark the next steps towards the Alex Dam,
which will be our concentrated liquidity engine that we are building towards. And we have a
roadmap laying that out. And as mentioned earlier, if Stacked Labs is something that's being built with a 20-year horizon, that's a similar horizon that I'd say that Alex Labs have.
And if you look back to the early history of DeFi and the vulnerabilities that were experienced there, we are early in Bitcoin DeFi as a pioneering team and project that has been pushing the boundaries of what's been possible on Bitcoin DeFi.
And we believe that over the long time horizon that the cream will rise to the top and that, you know, these successful experiments on other chains will return on to Bitcoin.
And we will continue with our heads down and building towards that.
So thank you very much for the
opportunity to join you guys today. Thank you.
Thank you so much, Hayden.
And a big thank you to everyone in the community for
taking the time today to join us for
this month's
Stacks Town Hall. As you know,
as you heard, we had a lot of
updates. Everything from
recapping SIP31 to what is happening now
post SIP 31, the new entities, the endowment, and how things are moving forward on a technical side,
as well as some of the upcoming products, whether it be SBTC or what was teased around
vaults and so much more, along with updates from projects across the ecosystem.
And a shout out as well on the technical side for clarity
and a shout out to the community side as well
and all that is happening.
And we thank each and every one of you
for being a part of this community
and continuing to support the growth
of all those that are building, contributing,
and a part of the Stacks and greater
Bitcoin ecosystem. That's it for today. If you'd like to tune in live or join the conversation in
the future, be sure to follow Stacks on X along with all of the projects mentioned today to keep
up to date on everything that they have going on as well. As Shannon mentioned in the beginning of today's episode,
we've got a ton of events happening around the world,
both physical and also digital.
So make sure to tune in and join into those events
as they come up in the future.
With that said, everyone have a wonderful day,
evening or morning,
wherever you may be tuning in from around the world.
I'm your host, Kyle Ellicott.
Until next time, we'll see you soon. Take care, everybody. Thank you.
