This week in sBTC

This week we released Growing the Bitcoin Economy: The Road to sBTC. The sBTC roadmap consists of three major phases, each concluding with a major release.

Read the full post here for a breakdown of the initiatives we plan to pursue on our path toward creating a thriving Bitcoin economy.

👉 Takeaways:

• sBTC will improve the functionality and accessibility of Bitcoin DeFi.

• It will significantly upgrade the experience for users and developers and has the potential to unlock $450B+ in capital.

• Bitcoin is the perfect settlement layer for the digital economy.

👉 The Bottom Line: Bitcoin is No Longer “Just a Rock”

💻 Engineering Updates

• igor

  • The sBTC Alpha Deployment issue PR is owned by igor, fjs, mijoco. Watch this issue to know when sBTC Alpha is deployed. Estimated to be next week.

  • The team overcame a major blocker integrating FROST with Bitcoin transactions.

  • We kicked off sBTC mini development.

• fjs

  • Done: Serialization of Clarity Value is done using binary serialization (actually hex).PR-130

  • WiP: p256k1 & secp256k1 linker conflict problem

• Jacinta

  • Merged: PR-135 fix for flakey CI tests in stacks-signer

  • Merged: PR-36 to add ability to properly serialize/deserialize ECDSA signatures

  • Merged: PR-34 to wrap ECDSA Signature generation

  • Merged: PR-142 to finish frost/stacks integration

• donpdonp

  • Merged: PR-131 Frost-test Bitcoind test helpers, includes rpc-call

  • Merged: PR-127 Added frost-coordinator setup instructions

  • WIP: PR-87 Add peg-out transaction builder to stacks-coordinator

• Ӿoloki

  • Merged: PR-37 p256k1: add field::Element and BIP-340 functions

  • Merged: PR-38 p256k1: use SHA2-256 not SHA3-256 for all hashing

  • Merged: PR-90 frost: implement BIP-340 style Schnorr proof

⚒️ Go-To-Market Updates

• Published sBTC roadmap blog and video update

• Round 2 of sBTC brand designs came in. Next week we'll organize a structured feedback session to finalize.

• Reviewed budget with Stacks foundation and allocated funding.

• Established clarity on bridge solutions. Follow up needed regarding Magic Bridge for developer use.

• Made progress across a number of strategic partnership integrations.

• Analyzed network incentives and potential options to bootstrap growth.

🌍 Around the Ecosystem

• Delphi Digital tweet thread on sBTC and Stacks (Link)

• Muneeb explains how sBTC can work with Bitcoin Rollups (Link)

Lastly, a few folks from the ecosystem got together this week for a panel on Building in a Bear. The takeaway: the most important innovations always occur during bear markets. There’s more signal, less noise, and the builders can focus on solving the critical issues to fuel the next phase of user growth.

Signing off,

Andre