This Week in sBTC

Week of April 28, 2023

Author

Andre Serrano
May 01, 2023

Dear Bitcoiners,

Last week, the Stacks community showed up in force to Consensus 2023. I had the honor of speaking about sBTC at the Keep Bitcoin Weird event along with Alex Miller, Chris Castig, and Kyle Ellicott.

Kyle Ellicott (Bitcoin Frontier Fund), Alex Miller (Hiro), Chris Castig (Console), Andre Serrano (sBTC)

Discussion highlights:

  • Kickstarting Bitcoin DeFi

  • Moving Bitcoin from L1 to L2 in a decentralized way

  • Bitcoin’s economic security

  • The power of identity in Web3

We met with several partners for sBTC throughout the week, and there was positive sentiment from builders on developing new use cases. Check out the latest progress updates on sBTC below 👇

💻 Engineering Updates

  • Testing Infra - Sergey Shandar

    • ✅ Code coverage in CI for our Rust code. Preparing PR Rust code coverage in CI #307

    • Working on a document on how we can achieve 100% coverage.

    • Asks from other workstreams:

      • ⚠️ Our code coverage is very low. ~33%. We need to increase.

  • Bitcoin / DLC - Tycho Onnasch

    • Made a draft technical design

    • Fernando will be working on a technical draft of the DLC implementation discussed in sBTC Eng Bitcoin: DLCs, sBTC

  • Bridge / Frontend - Mike Cohen

    • Switching the commit tx from P2WSH to P2TR. Mostly learning Taproot/Tapscript. Adjusted the UI and API to handle the Tapscript data

    • Writing a blog post on this experience - working title “sBTC Commit Transactions”

  • Blockchain - Mårten Blankfors

    • ✅ stacks-coordinator transaction broadcasting now tested

    • ✅ Draft implementation for commit-reveal support in Stacks

      • ⚠️ Initial SegWit support limited to P2WSH/P2TR nested in P2SH

    • Asks from other workstreams:

      • ⚠️ We need feedback to know if it’s enough to support the P2SH nested SegWit transactions or if we should follow-up with full SegWit/taproot support for commit-reveal.

  • Clarity - José Orlicki

    • ✅ Organized key tasks.

    • ❤️ More tests added:

      • Marvin: Adding Clarity native testing.

      • Fernando: adding SegWit testing.

      • Jesus: adding sBTC Asset Contracts tests.

    • Asks from other workstreams:

      • ⚠️ At least one vector testing case for Peg-In. Already discussed with Marten.

      • ⚠️ Get more input from Stacking Pools

  • Crypto - Joey Yandle

    • Core-eng repo back using wtfrost and p256k1 from crates

    • frost-signer/coordinator now using wtfrost Signer trait instead of accessing parties directly

  • Signer - Jacinta Ferrant

    • ✅ Met with Rena, Andre, and crew to go over initial requirements gathering

      • ❤️ Kudos to Igor for taking the lead on the meeting last minute

    • ⚠️ Priorities are in Coordinator Alpha release so not enough time to devote to Signer this week

    • Asks from other workstreams:

      • ⚠️ Please consider what sort of functionality you would want/expect as a signer and document

  • Bitcoin Builder Updates

    • @mårten#2709

      • Open PRs:

        • ✅ Draft: commit-reveal support in Stacks: stacks PR#3683

          • ⚠️ Initial SegWit support limited to P2WSH/P2TR nested in P2SH

          • ⚒️ Needs thorough testing

        • ✅ Contribution guidelines + DCO check: core-eng PR#292

          • ⚠️ Open question whether we should go with a CLA instead of the DCO check

        • ✅ Peg handoff wire format: stacks PR#3673 updated to stacks PR#3687 based on TM fork.

          • ⚠️ High latency for reviews. Most likely due to the Stacks hard fork work taking precedence.

    • @stjepan#1659

    • @Ӿoloki#3105

      • Merged core-eng PR#273; Use wtfrost and p256k1 from crates; use Signer trait without accessing parties

⚒️ Go-To-Market Updates

  • ✅ Several working group participants attended Consensus, met with partners, and spoke on panels regarding sBTC

  • ✅ Shared pre-mortem takeaways with working group

  • ✅ Conducted UX research interview with LNswap, Gamma

  • ✅ Progress on legal work stream

  • ✅ Competitive research draft completed

🌍 Around the Ecosystem

Signing Off,

Andre