2024's record year for Bitcoin startups, Bitcoin dev list Google ban, Circle's IPO

It was a busy week. Trump did the tariff stuff and Bitcoin seesawed around $85K. Before we jump in to the news items you missed this week…

Join us at OPNEXT, the Bitcoin scaling conference!

📍 Hosted by Blockspace at the Strategy (formerly Microstrategy) HQ.

📆 Friday-Saturday, April 11-12.

🫂 Coinbase, Bitwise, Brink and tons of other Bitcoin engineering firms.

Tickets go up again April 8! Use code "BITDEVS” for 10% off a ticket by visiting here.

Boost your ASIC mining with NiceHash Firmware, powered by MARA!

Get the highest efficiency and lowest fees - just 1.4% when mining on NiceHash. Unlock elite mining technology for your Bitcoin (S19, S21 series) and Kaspa (KS5, KS3) Antminers. Supports air, hydro, and immersion cooling. Upgrade now and maximize your profits! 🚀

More Bitcoin ventures, less funding in 2024: Trammell Venture Partners

Bitcoin-focused Trammell Venture Partners released its third annual report yesterday, “The emerging Bitcoin-native venture capital landscape,” which provides a recap of 2024’s Bitcoin-native venture capital activity and compares fundraising stats with 2021, 2022, and 2023. The TLDR: 2024 was the hottest year for Bitcoin startups when accounting for total companies founded, but the total value raised was less than any of the prior three years. – link

OUR TAKE: It’s never been better to be in the business of Bitcoin, with more venture funds and investors eager to allocate to Bitcoin-focused businesses than ever before. Notice, we say “Bitcoin,” not “crypto.” The sprawling offspring of Bitcoin and its many manifestations (DeFi, Web3, etc, etc) have historically overexcited capital allocation and taken the largest slice of the fundraising pie. But investors are exhausted after multiple altcoin cycles, projects groping blindly for product market fit, and unfulfilled promises. (Not to mention memecoins, which have obviated the idea that your cryptocoin actually needs to do, well, anything).

But the most interesting nugget from the report is seemingly counterintuitive: deal flow is up, but total value invested is down. A smaller pool of capital is pouring into a bigger bucket of startups, so startups are pulling in less fundraising on average than the previous three years. Overall, TVP observed the following year-over-year changes:

• Total transaction count: +31.8%

• Total companies funded: +27.5%

• Total capital raised by startups: -22.1%

• 2024 pre-seed transactions: +50%

TVP Managing Director Christopher Calicott told Blockspace that "the primary reason is the broader pullback across venture capital as a whole,” and that “2024 also saw fewer Series Bs in the Bitcoin-native sector, which are a big driver of the total dollars number. 

On a positive note, Calicott mentioned that “new business models” are emerging in Bitcoin “that have historically lived elsewhere in crypto.” As we’ve covered extensively on Blockspace and Bitcoin Season 2 with Bitcoin’s blooming ecosystem of layer 2s and metaprotocols, DeFi applications are being increasingly subsumed by Bitcoin, so VCs are chasing the opportunities.

“What's happening here is that elements in the Bitcoin protocol stack are becoming more composable, more vertically and laterally interoperable. All this building, in turn, uncovers investable opportunities,” Calicott concluded.

Bitcoin Dev mailing list suffers momentary Google ban

The Bitcoin Development Mailing List (currently hosted on Google Groups) was taken down by Google without warning on Wednesday, sending developers scrambling and even prompting Jack Dorsey to tag Sundar Pichai on X. By Thursday Google had restored the group saying the “issue is resolved.”

The Bitcoin development mailing list is the primary formal communication channel for Bitcoin developers and dates back to the original Cypherpunk mailing list that Satoshi used to release the Bitcoin whitepaper. – link

OUR TAKE: The mailing list has consistently wandered through the desert trying to find a home. It’s been hosted on Sourceforge, with the Linux Foundation, and OSUOSL, before moving to Google Groups in February 2024. Isn’t it ironic that the leading Bitcoin discussion forum is hosted on Google? Developers ultimately opted for Google Groups because the forum is very easy to manage and broadly accessible. Google Groups mirrors and logs chats in numerous locations for redundancy, but going back through historical discussion is still a slog.

Some have proposed using Nostr to coordinate the mailing list, and there’s even been Bitcoin native ideas like inscribing the data as an Ordinal. After all, why not use Bitcoin itself to host discussion on Bitcoin development?

Ultimately, its important for developers to manage discussion in a productive way. Bitcoin’s meritocratic developer culture means that there have to be ways to conduct basic janitorial work on the core forums. We’re not too worried about the coordination of the mailing list for the time being. If anything, the fact that Google brought it back–and billionaires like Dorsey are advocating on its behalf–is encouraging.

Turn Your Hashrate Into Seamless Financing

Unlock capital with Luxor Pool’s Forward Market!

Turn your hashrate into instant financing to expand your ASIC fleet. Scale your mining operation effortlessly—join Luxor and grow your future today!

Circle of USDC fame files for IPO

​Circle Internet Group, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the NYSE under ticker CRCL. The company reported $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income for 2024, with net income from continuing operations of $157 million. Circle had previously attempted to go public via a $9 billion SPAC but terminated that deal in 2022 – link

Fidelity creates direct Bitcoin investment plan

Financial giant Fidelity launched a new product for investing in Bitcoin and a few other cryptocurrencies directly, with no ETF wrapper. The assets are held by Fidelity in cold storage. - link

Foundry mines emptiest “non-empty” block

Bitcoin transaction activity is at its lowest level in over 2 years, resulting in the largest mining pool, Foundry, mining a notably sparse block. The block only contained 7 transactions, which likely was all the transactions that were waiting in its mempool (it’s also worth noting that Foundry’s block was timestamped only 1 second after the previous block from F2Pool). This is not to be confused with an “empty block,” which is a block that contains no transactions except for the coinbase, often by design when latency prohibits a pool from publishing a full block template once it finds a new block. – link

Satflow introduces inter-mempool ordinals trading

Ordinals marketplace Satflow rolled out a new feature that allows users to trade assets without having to wait for a Bitcoin block to confirm. Conventional ordinals trading is settled when a block confirms (roughly every 10 minutes) but the mechanism introduced by Satflow allows “0-conf” equivalent trades with Satflow acting as a cosigner to chained “children” transactions. – link

What content would you like to see Blockspace cover? Reply to let us know!