This Week in sBTC

Gm Bitcoiners,

Bitcoin Summer is coming to an end and sBTC builders are in the arena. This summer, the sBTC working group has made considerable progress streamlining the roadmap and core milestones. As always, Bitcoin Writes is the go-to place for the latest updates on sBTC development.

sBTC - bringing Bitcoin onchain

👉 What’s New? The current priority for the working group is deploying sBTC on the Stacks testnet to test deposits and withdrawals. This upcoming release milestone is built for Bitcoin Builders - to focus on capturing early feedback and improving the developer experience.

👉 Why does it matter? It’s 2023 and the majority of Bitcoin activity still happens on centralized services. The opportunity is wide open to deliver a superior platform for trading, lending and borrowing Bitcoin in a decentralized way. This release is a big step toward that.

Nakamoto - new and improved

👉 What’s New? A proposal called Nakamoto v1 has been published, which describes changes to the Stacks blockchain that include:

1. Fast Blocks: Transactions mined and confirmed within seconds instead of minutes, achieved by increasing block production speed.

2. Bitcoin Finality: Once a transaction is confirmed, reversing it becomes as difficult as reversing a Bitcoin transaction, eliminating forks in the Stacks blockchain.

3. Bitcoin Fork Resistance: Stacks transactions valid after a Bitcoin fork will be re-mined in the same order, while invalid transactions will be dropped. (This feature is not consensus-critical and could be added in future releases.)

4. No Bitcoin Miner MEV: Bitcoin miners will not have an advantage over Stacks miners, requiring competitive BTC spending to earn STX.

👉 Why does it matter? This proposal, if implemented in its current form, would significantly reduce the estimated time to implement Nakamoto, potentially allowing us to ship sBTC faster 🚀

We’ll be sharing more details on the upcoming milestones and roadmap over the next few weeks — stay tuned.

Nakamoto:

• Completed Mockamoto Node & RPC endpoints

  • Scoped Mockamoto

• Enhanced StackerDB (load from smart contract, full ECDSA signing, event observer, RPC interface)

• Progress on Stacks Signer (libsigner)

• Worked on Epoch 3.0

sBTC:

• Advanced sBTC v0.1 testnet architecture

• Finished end-to-end deposit flow

• Updated documentation to reflect roadmap revisions

• Worked on the Bridge, addressing PSBT issues

Clarity:

• Worked on sBTC Standalone Persistence Checklist

• Addressed Nakamoto Clarity Checklist 

Clarity Wasm:

• Summit ported to stacks-blockchain

• Built all functions necessary to support boot contracts

• Tested execution of complex Clarity contracts in Clarinet and stacks-node

Quality of Life:

• Progress on stacks-e2e-testing

• Developed Clarity contract property testing plan

• Created Rust orchestrator design document

• Focused on DevnetJS and bitcoind debugging

• Implemented mutation testing

Signing Off,

Andre