This week in sBTC ✨

Hi All,

This week, we’ve seen a resurgence in Bitcoin activity thanks to Ordinals, a protocol that allows individual satoshi’s to be inscribed with arbitrary content, thereby converting it into a digital artifact (aka NFT). This process of inscription was made possible by Taproot, which made it easier to store witness data in a Bitcoin transaction.

Since ordinals are native to Bitcoin, they benefit from the security and longevity of the largest public blockchain. For artists or collectors that want to ensure that their NFT survives decades into the future, there is simply no better chain for it than Bitcoin.

While it’s still early, there have already been approximately 50,000 inscriptions since it went live on January 21st. Many companies in the Stacks ecosystem have been quick to launch tooling and infrastructure to build on this momentum. In fact, OrdinalsBot and Gamma are the easiest way to inscribe Ordinals NFTs today.

We’ll be closely following Ordinals to see how this landscape evolves. I think it’s likely most future Ordinals trading activity happens on Bitcoin layers like Stacks, which can offer more expressive tooling and scalability than the base layer. That means once live, sBTC could become the dominant trading pair for rare Ordinals NFTs.

Speaking of sBTC, here are the latest updates from this week:

💻 Developer Updates

• New GitHub Project Live showing all real-time updated work completed and pending for sBTC Alpha (Link)

• Igor proposed several Stacks Foundation Requests for Proposal Bounties for sBTC.

• PR for peg-in bitcoin wire operation ready for review (Link)

• PR for peg-out bitcoin wire operation updated to include a UTXO to allow for correlating request to fulfillment (Link)

• Distributed key generation completed; started work on signing phase

• Design for sBTC alpha complete (Link)

• Distributed key generation completed: (Link)

• Frost-signer signing in progress: (Link)

• Stackerdb PR broken up into smaller PRs and ready for review (Link)

• Published documentation for wtfrost library

• Completed performance improvements to wtfrost library dependency p256k1

• Fixed fee calculations and completed first version of transaction viewer for sBTC bridge.

• CI/CD developer productivity improvements.

⚒️ Go-To-Market Updates

• Presented strategic roadmap and launch plan to internal stakeholders

• Scoped budget estimates and dependencies

• Assigned Directly Responsible Individuals for partner outreach

• Initiated legal and economic workstreams

• Distributed developer survey and identified several potential Request for Proposal bounties

• Created content and events calendar

• Created sBTC channels in discord for ecosystem collaboration

🌍 Around the Ecosystem

• Stacks Foundation Executive Director Brittany Laughlin talks about the potential of sBTC (Link)

Signing off,

Andre