Transcript 0:00 [funky music] I am back from Bitcoin Amsterdam. 0:36 I've got my Ordinal Maxi Biz BitAx. My runes bags are up, my ordinals bags are up. So are yours. 0:44 We've had multiple giant raises in the Bitcoin liquid staking game, and of course, we have had some drama around mempool.space. But before we get into that, a word from our sponsor. 1:00 Bitcoin Season 2 is brought to you by Botanix. 1:03 Botanix Labs is pioneering a new direction for DeFi, with the first EVM L2 running on Bitcoin that's built to be forward secure, decentralized, and share gas fees generated by the network with users. 1:16 See the future of DeFi at Botanix. botanixlabs.xyz. Uh, yeah, so welcome back to Bitcoin Season 2. This is the Monday live stream where I hit the metrics, the updates. 1:29 It's a little visual-heavy, so if you are listening to it, I recommend going over to the live stream video on demand on X or the YouTube channel. Otherwise, I'll try to describe what happens here. 1:40 Um, yeah, so I've got my OMB BitAx, this custom badass, uh, little, like, desk Bitcoin miner. You've been-- You may have been seeing some of these online. You can check these out. 1:51 This is a really cool initiative under the OMB brand to decentralize mining and kinda show people and the community how this works. 2:02 Um, go check out the Mining Pod, another podcast from, uh, Blockspace Media, where we talk about the BitAx, and we did a writers' room episode a few weeks ago, me and Colin kind of chatting through the topic of, like, mining and hash rate and home mining. 2:15 But before we get there, let's just jump right into it. Um, it's been kind of a doozy of a week. 2:23 Uh, if you've been trying to use the Bitcoin blockchain, you've seen that fees went from, like, two to three sats per vbyte. The mempool almost cleared, but, uh, activity on-chain is back up. 2:35 And I know if I zoom out here and I look at, like, a month of, like, this is kinda, like, what the average mempool might look like from as far as transactions waiting in it, it might not look like much, but this represents a significant influx in tr- in, in, uh, block space demand. 2:51 And what are these people doing? They are minting runes. So look at this. Runes market cap is back above a m- a billion dollars. In fact, I think it might be higher than that now. 3:06 Um, we are seeing significant volume, uh, at least comparatively, millions of dollars in signi- in volume. Um, we have volume up, I think, three or four times on the week. 3:18 And, uh, Magic Eden again leaves the pack with sixty percent of all volume. OKX still, uh, doing quite a bit. Like, depending on the day, OKX might flip Magic Eden in terms of volume. 3:31 Um, and it's kind of-- We've got some new rune tickers. Uh, Casey himself actually tweeted that he thinks the runes tickers are getting better. So, uh, you know, watch, uh, watch out. 3:43 Be, uh-- Keep your finger on the dial if you wanna do degen for whatever Casey might like. [clears throat] Um, and of course, uh, look at this. This is the seven-day view of runes. Dog is up thirty percent. 3:57 Billion Dollar Cat, PUPS, up significantly on the week. Decentralized, LOBO, other random stuff, Water Bottle Pengu under Cold Blooded Chiller. You've got WANKO. Um, everything is up, so you do love to see that. 4:12 Lastly, let's take a look and see that your collections are up. Puppets and NodeMonkes are kind of in this, like, neck-and-neck race right now for, uh... 4:21 So they're both ten thousand, uh, piece collections, and they're kind of in a race for who takes the lead on the, like, largest collection by market cap. 4:29 So right now, Puppets are slightly ahead with point one eight two for the floor. NodeMonkes, point one seven seven for the floor. But, you know, you see OMB Puppet Maxi Biz caught a bid this week. 4:39 Um, Quantum Cats have rels-- have stayed flat, and Taproot Witches are up. There's way more. I won't go into the exact collections because I think let's just get into this. 4:49 Despite the mempool, that is mempools around the Bitcoin network filling up with transactions and fee rates, we saw mempool.space, which is the m- you know, most famous, uh, transaction and blockchain explorer that I use, I think most other people in the Bitcoin space use, um, they put out this, uh, tweet 5:10 to, uh, just, I think, uh, two and a half, one and a half days ago that says, "To clarify some FUD going around, the Mempool open source project does not support, quote, Ordamen integration. 5:22 Mempool.space only displays data contained in Bitcoin's mempool and b- and blockchain from the Lightning network. This means that if you look up a transaction that contains ordinals, 5:31 inscriptions or runestones, this data will be visible on mempool.space exactly as it exists on Bitcoin's blockchain. We are Bitcoin only and do not support shitcoins. But if it's in the mempool 5:40 or on the blockchain, it will be visible on mempool.space since displaying the blockchain is literally what a Bitcoin explorer does." Where did this come from? Well, recently, mempool.space started showing, 5:56 uh, if a transaction contained a rune in it. You can click on these goggles, uh, and you can see if a transaction, uh, containsA, an inscription or a rune. Look, this block is clean. 6:11 It has no evil, uh, JPEGs or runes in it currently. 6:16 This block, oh, oh no, it has, uh, looks like it has both an inscription and a, uh, a, a ru- looks like it does have a runestone and an inscription, so it's the worst of both worlds. 6:29 Um, regardless, Mempool.Space started showing this, and it made some people mad. If we go back here, we see Luke-Dash-Jr, the infamous Luke, 6:42 with, uh, reiterating a position he's had a very long time, which is, "Ordinals, inscriptions, and runestones are not Bitcoin and do not exist on Bitcoin's blockchain." 6:53 Well, what happened is, um, the Ordinals community overall wanted to, uh, say, "Hey, uh, folks who think like this," you might call them laser eyes, um, "we like this feature on Mempool.Space. 7:08 We are power users of this platform, and so we want to support this financially because this is, uh, really, really helpful for, um, open source projects to display the contents of what is happening on-chain." 7:22 So this turned into kind of a race, um, to see who could, um, as an, as, uh, do individual sponsorships, uh, at various comparatively high price tiers. 7:34 The whale sponsorship, which is now comprised of m- almost entirely, like, uh, JPEG and an, and explicitly endorsing inscription, uh, people, uh, this tier is.03. That's several thousand dollars. 7:48 The Chad sponsors, disclosure I'm one, same thing, a few hundred dollars. 7:53 Um, so we see now that the community has, in response to a handful of, like, no- uh, I would say some notable, um, hardcore Bitcoiner criticism, uh, has responded and say, "We want to support this platform. 8:08 It's a really, um, good platform." And I would like to just compare. 8:12 Here, I took a screenshot from the WayBack Machine, so I went back to, I believe, December of 2023, and just looked at who, you know, the, the sponsors on Mempool.Space. And you can see here that there was not that many. 8:28 There is basically a little over a dozen different individuals here who are fin- who are sp- financially sponsoring Mempool.Space as of nine months ago. Well, now, 8:40 this number has ex- has grown significantly, and I think by the end of the week it's gonna, it's going to grow even more. 8:47 You can see here new companies, uh, explicitly Ordinal-endorsing companies, Leather and Taper Wizards, on this list. Um, so these are enterprise sponsors, and then I won't even get into the OG sponsors. 9:02 But, like, this has been a, the subject of a bit of, uh, drama, and, um, 9:10 I'm going to pull up this account, which is a Bitcoin wallet called Manna Wallet or Manna Bitcoin, which is an, uh, yet-to-be-launched Ordinals... 9:21 Not, sorry, yet-to-be-launched Lightning wallet, um, that will let you do normal Lightning and Bitcoin wallet things, and they claimed, uh, [chuckles] "We have decided to terminate our support of Mempool.Space. 9:35 We do not believe our values are aligned, and want to do our best to support developers that are more in line with our goals. Wish them best with their runes and stuff or whatever." 9:45 [chuckles] And nobody says, "Just curious, how much capital did you support Mempool with before you terminated your support?" 9:52 And, uh, this wallet, which has not released a product nor has financially supported Mempool.Space, uh, says they were just, uh, going to, they were just using Mempool.Space as API and/or linking to them. 10:07 So I don't really know if that constitutes, like, supporting Mempool. [chuckles] It's just more like integrating their free API and front-end website while the rest of us are supporting. And I know this is me. 10:17 I'm, I'm obviously very biased here. 10:19 I have opinions, but, like, you know, I've, I have been, uh, a power user of Mempool.Space, as many of you viewers are here, and this is a great example about, like, um, kind of the changing current and feel of who is, uh, who are Bitcoin users and who is, like, prominent in driving Bitcoin discourse and activity. 10:40 So, that's the Mempool. What about meme coins? Yes, I know maybe you don't wanna hear about meme coins. Maybe you're tired of this. 10:51 Maybe you are tired of hearing about this guy named Murad, but I do think it's important because he is kind of like the, the driver of, like, discourse of meme coins and shitcoins, if you wanna call it that. 11:03 And he's, um, been, and he's, and so everything that he says goes viral right now, and he's even, uh, commented on some meme coins, uh, uh, which are on Bitcoin, which I think is very interesting because it means that the streams are crossing, and now that the sec- you know, the broader, like, non-Bitcoin discourse is now coming back to Bitcoin, I think this is pretty important. 11:24 This is my core argument, and this is probably one of the most important slides in my presentation, right? Ready? Meme coins are not a vampire attack against crypto tech. 11:35 Meme coins are a vampire attack against crypto tech tokens. That's a big difference here. You understand? So, uh, I love technology and I'm all for decentralization. I've been supporting 11:48 thousands of different things in crypto since 2014. 11:51 So anyway, his point is that, uh, meme coins are basically the rejection of the VC coin retail, uh, exit liquidity thesis, and that [chuckles] this is a funny picture- But-... and that, um, uh, 12:07 thatMeme coins are much more aligned with Bitcoin, uh, in his view because they are very m-much, like, uh, honest about what they are. And so, uh, I would love to talk to Murad here on Bitcoin Season 2.2. 12:24 Uh, I anticipate being able to at least get some insight from him about what he thinks about, uh, this discourse as applies to Bitcoin. 12:32 But I think this is really, really important because, um, we have now the confluence of, uh, meme coins and viral, like, culture, 12:42 culture-driven transactions on Bitcoin, uh, from the perspective of ordinals and runes and inscriptions. These are now, like, the dominant users by transaction fees and by block space use, um, for Bitcoin. 12:56 I mean, I'll amend that. Maybe not by transaction fees, but by, like, marginal buyer of r- of block space, certainly over the past year. So, um, this is something I'll be, uh, monitoring pretty closely and, uh, I... 13:09 You know, if you don't enjoy this, I hate to break it to you, I'm probably gonna be talking about this a lot over the next year. So let's get into other topics. 13:18 One thing I found really interesting is Signal21, uh, put out a new dashboard today. If you're not familiar with Signal21, you can go to signal21.io. 13:27 They're kind of like a, another emerging kind of like blockchain analytics platform. They focus mainly on layer twos. But they put out a, uh, piece or a new dashboard on developer activity by Bitcoin layer twos. 13:41 Now, I wanna make a big caveat that I don't think their methodology is very representative of our reality here, but it at least gets really close. 13:50 Or not close, it at least is directionally correct and interesting because you can look at, you got different layer twos, such as blockchain, Blockstream's Liquid, Stacks, Rootstock, Corda, Babylon Chain. 14:01 And the reason that I'm using the term layer two here, pretty hand wavy. Um, but you... They are tracking commits on, on the, uh, uh, across the various repos. 14:11 They're tracking the number of developers who are subscribed or, I believe, maybe have pushed commits to each, uh, to each repo. I think that can be very misleading. 14:22 That might, might not be, like, the active developers in the ecosystem, but might just be developers who are, who are, like, watching those repos. And it tells you, like, month-on-month changes. 14:33 So this is very interesting and, I think, really important to watch because one of the main narratives, uh, each cycle is like, where, what are the devs doing? Where are they going? 14:41 Where is the developer activity happening? And this is gonna be an important, uh, metric to try to track insofar as we can. Let's see. Other news. Uh, I hinted at this, but, 14:56 uh, we saw a significant amount of money raised this past week in the Bitcoin liquid staking game. 15:04 I think this is the other major narrative happening right now across the Bitcoin Season 2 world, which is you've got idle capital in the form of the proof of work Bit- generated Bitcoin token. 15:16 Well, let's put that to work. We can lock Bitcoin up in various, uh, types of Bitcoin script or Bitcoin locking mechanisms, and we can slash it according to, uh, oracles and, uh, off-chain rules. 15:33 We can use that proof of work-generated token to solve some of the issues and structural problems with the proof of stake system. 15:41 I did an interview with David Say of Babylon Chain about this, but you're seeing kind of on top of the Babylon Chain ecosystem, you are seeing various types of additional staking layers. I saw... 15:51 I did an interview with Luke Hie of Satlayer, but now you've got Solve Protocol, um, launching, raising $25 million for a staking abstraction layer. 16:05 Um, they say that, uh, they have 20,000 or about 1.3 billion... 20,000 Bitcoin or about 13-- 1.3 billion US dollars TVL, 400,000 users. Um, 16:20 they're-- They s- they, you know, use things like there's no native yield on Bitcoin despite its large trillion-dollar market cap, and they want to introduce a staking abstraction layer. 16:32 Um, I haven't done any due diligence on this, but this is like a huge raise and I think starts... We're, we're starting to see, like, this, the da- the amount of money coming in start to dwarf, like, activity, um, 16:45 uh, previous, like, fundraising for, like, Bitcoin act- software-type activity. This is pretty significant. What else? We see Yalla, Yalla org, um, announced that their... 16:58 They had a seed rou- a seed round for 8 million led by Polychain and Ethereal Venture Capital to build a, quote, "liquidity layer for Bitcoin." It's a three-times oversubscribed round. Galaxy was in this. 17:11 HashKey, Amber Group, ABCDE, um, UTXO Management. Like, kind of the names of, like, people who write checks into the broader crypto ecosystem now looking at Bitcoin staking. 17:25 Uh, they have, uh, 2,000 BTC committed from, uh, investors and, uh, yeah, they, uh, will be launching a testnet soon. 17:36 I think these are major narratives in the Bitcoin, uh, just in the overall Bitcoin ecosystem because, [clears throat] you know, re-regardless of what you think about Bitcoin staking, this is clearly, uh, 17:49 hugely attractive to venture and capital at large, as if you were to compare, like, the overall ecosystem grants for Bitcoin or, like, raises in Bitcoin prior to this, 25 million, um, from Solve is, like, massive. 18:05 And we saw, like, I think three, I'm ballparking here, three or four out of the top five largest raises in the Bitcoin, like, software ecosystem going to Bitcoin staking.Babylon, I think, raised seventy-five million this past year. 18:19 So huge, huge narrative going on in the venture landscape in Bitcoin, and it's all around this idea of Bitcoin is the pristine asset and pristine collateral asset. Well, enough about that. 18:34 Uh, I think it's time to talk about OP Next. If you are not going to OP Next, you should have us on your radar. This is Blockspace's conference 18:46 about, uh, it's a scaling conference for Bitcoin builders, developers, and founders in Boston, Massachusetts this November ninth. It's a Saturday. It's one day only. 18:56 We have many, many speakers at this conference, which I-- they are now, um, more than we can list on the website pretty quickly. We've got Peter Todd. You may know him as the person HBO named as Satoshi. 19:08 He's not, but he's coming. Armen and Ethan, the co-authors of the OP_Cat BIP. John Atack, another very important contributor to Bitcoin Core. Reardon, Brandon from Sw- uh, from Swan, and a, and a author of L Enhance. 19:23 Ryan Dell of the Taproot Wizards. Pete Rizzo, Bitcoin historian. We have Rusty Russell, um, uh, of Blockstream, and, uh, uh, behind the Great Script Restoration. We have Jeremy Rubin, author of CTV. [clears throat] Um, 19:40 and we will have many more people coming out. I would make sure you are paying attention to our social media, @blockspacepod. Um, you can check out the, uh, tickets we have for sale. We have a VIP ticket, uh, available. 19:57 Uh, it is almost sold out at seven fifty. We have a GA ticket. Again, those are readily available. And for students with a valid student ID at the door, twenty-five dollars. Um, [clears throat] 20:09 if you're listening to this, I will give you a discount code, so get out your notepad. This is just for if you made it this far in the stream. Uh, use discount code OCTOBER, all caps, one word, OCTOBER, O-C-T-O-B-E-R, 20:26 for twenty-five percent off your GA ticket purchase to OP Next. You don't want to miss this conference. 20:34 If you are a company or an individual interested in the technical side of Bitcoin and the discourse around potential Bitcoin scaling paths, proposals, and activation discussion, this is the conference you want to be at. 20:47 I think this is one that you cannot miss. We're going to have, um, we will be live streaming it, but it's not going to really be able to replace being there in person. 20:57 Uh, yeah, so thank you very much for listening to Bitcoin Season Two. I'm Charlie Spears. Uh, uh, make sure to like and subscribe. Check us out on social media, @btcszn2 on Twitter. 21:11 And make sure, make sure to, uh, review us, give a, a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. And make sure to subscribe to us on YouTube. Otherwise, see you all. 21:21 [upbeat music]
