18 October  2024 · Block Height 866184 · Bitcoin Price $67K

Welcome back to the Blockspace Newsletter!

Mempool.space’s latest update caught our eye this week. For news, we cover Trump’s token flop, Craig Wright being on his bullshit again, some advancements to Bitcoin Script, and why fees went nuts this week (yes, it’s exactly why you think…)

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What caught our eye this week

Bitcoin explorer Mempool.space is really useful, and that makes some people angry.

Over the weekend the most popular Bitcoin blockchain explorer, mempool.space, added a feature that allows users to easily identify if a transaction contained a Runestone or a Runes token protocol create/mint/transfer operation. Initially, mempool.space power users celebrated the feature as they increasingly rely on the explorer to track transactions related to ordinals & runes activity.

But not long after the launch, some criticisms emerged decrying this output flag as explicit endorsement of shitcoinery (after all, why would you dare explain what is in a transaction?!) In response, the Ordinals community started flooding the open source project with donations, doubling the number of individual sponsors and approximately tripling the project’s yearly revenue from individual contributors. Notable new faces to mempool.space’s corporate sponsorship circle include Taproot Wizards and soon to be MagicEden.

By our estimates, the popular explorer has raised well over 1 btc ($67,000) in the past week from the support in response.

News

Trump launches underwhelming “WorldLibertyFinancial” DeFi scheme

Despite a dedicated video and a retweet from the official Trump account, the WorldLibertyFinancial DeFi… thing … from Trump has only raised ~$10m out of a targeted $300m from the token launch in its first week.

Craig Wright sues everyone for $1 trillion

Craig “Faketoshi” Wright is suing Bitcoin Core and Square for $1 trillion for “misrepresenting” Bitcoin. Implicit in this filing is that Craig claims he is Satoshi (again) which is explicitly against the court order from COPA v. Wright, which demands he denounce the false claim.

Weikeng implements new verifier in Bitcoin script

Once again, researcher Weikeng Chen surprises with Bitcoin technical innovation. This week, he implemented “Circle Plonk” on Bitcoin signet. Basically, it makes Bitcoin Script better (and more dynamic!).

Runes are back and feerates are going wild

Runes minting explodes as degens race to beat each other into Bitcoin blocks. Feerates spiked as high as 300 sats/vbyte on Wednesday and mempool sniping went wild. Are we, dare I say, so back?

Raises this week

• Hermetica, Bitcoin-backed stablecoin raises $1.7m

• Solv raises $25m to expand Bitcoin staking, “Staking Abstraction Layer”

• Yala gets $8m to build liquidity layer for Bitcoin

Chart of the week

The mempool is starting to get frothy again thanks to Runes degens. 

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