[funky music] Welcome back to Bitcoin Season Two by Blockspace Media.
I'm your host, Charlie Spears. This is the live stream. I do this every Monday around noon Central, one PM Eastern, and whatever that is in UTC. Uh, thanks for joining.
Make sure to check out other Blockspace Media content. Hit our website, blockspace.media, sign up for the newsletter. Some interesting stuff coming out. We've, uh, got some additional mining content.
And check out the Gwork Show, check out the Mining Pod, and check out our new show, The Bitcoin Stock Show. So if you're into the equities side of things, it's, um, it's socially acceptable shitcoining, but for equities.
So you Bitcoin hardcore folks can finally start trading something that isn't Bitcoin itself while not being excommunicated. So, um, today we are talking about, uh, meta protocols on Bitcoin.
We'll be hitting Stub Prost, Opnet, Fractal Bitcoin, which is a side chain, but meta protocols on that. Um, so stick around to the end of the show. I'm gonna kick it off with some metrics.
If you're listening to this, this is mostly visual, and this is a live stream, so I'm kinda running off the cuff here. But let's just kick it off with some metrics. This is the dashboard from data, from Data Always.
And frankly, I'm not even gonna dive into it very much, because ordinals activity, inscription activity is very, very down.
Just to give you a sense for like how down it is, um, these Dune dashboards have to be manually triggered to be updated, and I was the first person to rerun the metrics on these dashboards in seven days.
So I was the only person to have touched this dashboard, which I think the num- the best ordinals metrics dashboard in a week. That's just how bad down we are. Now, yes, I mean, activity is creeping up.
I'm gonna just skip onto the next thing. Domo's dashboard, an idea of like marketplace health. Over half a million users. We creeped over three million trades, um, four point four million in volume.
And I'll also make this. I was the first person to have to run these, these dashboard, um, uh, calculations again in three days. So this is, this is, again, outdated information.
Volume across all marketplaces for ordinals specifically is still anemic and declining. What will it take to bring back this marketplace and this ecosystem? I don't know.
It may be newfound created wealth in the, uh, world of, uh, meta protocols on Bitcoin, which we'll get to. Um, going to, uh, Magic Eden. This is the seven-day view.
It's kind of the same, uh, it's a lot of the same, uh, collections as normal, e- as, as it has been, except for we've got a few new entrants here. FTW, which is, uh, I wanna be nice here.
It's kinda like a Puppets-style knockoff, um, that got a lot of, uh, attention. It has a Magic Eden's, Magic Eden, uh, diamonds or points, um, incentive to it.
And then Domo Ducks, which is over the past twenty-four hours been your hot, um, new NFT or inscription project. Um, there is an associated BRC-20, which is getting hot on Unisat's Fractal test net.
There's a lot going on here. Otherwise, a lot of the same folks, Node Monks, Puppets, Cats, um, OMB.
Those have stayed roughly the same, with Arsic getting a bit of a bump, uh, again over the past week as the Twitter account became active again. So that's all it takes.
As far as Runes, not gonna dive into the, the details on Runes very much, but you can get the idea. Looks like we had a n- a pico low in overall Runes market cap of six hundred million on August fourth, and now we're at
seven hundred and eighty-three million dollars for total Runes. Casey is not happy as we see this beautiful indicator on Genie Data, which means that Runes is currently under a billion dollars total market cap.
We've seen a couple like Runes mints pop off, but it really hasn't, uh, filtered across the whole market.
Um, as far as news this past week, I think maybe the notable news was Satflow going public and announcing its round led by Variant.
And most notably, I believe this is Coinbase Ventures' first investment into the ordinals ecosystem. I actually think this might be Coinbase Ventures' first, uh, check into a like Bitcoin-only company in a long time.
So shout out Robert Clark and the gang for that. Um, Satflow is an ordinals sniping, uh, tooling, um, and, uh, I just-- my subjective experience having tried them all, it's the best performant. Um,
but, uh, regardless, these-- the ordinals sniping landscape is heating up.
If you want to hear about just general MEV on Bitcoin, I would recommend you listen to the most recent Bitcoin Season two episode, which is on the YouTube channel from Rebar Labs.
Um, speaking of just kinda like financialization of interesting things happening in Bitcoin block space beyond MEV, um, uh, Alchemia, uh, is, uh, announced their trading, their fee rate trading competition, Alchemia seven-seven-seven trading competition.
This is basically a competition to see who can have the best-P&L for fee rate trading on Bitcoin over this particular, uh, mini, I think, two-week cycle.
Um, if you wanna know more about Alchemia, uh, go listen to my interview with Leo Zhang, who is the founder of Alchemia, and, uh, that was from a few weeks ago. That's from, I think, uh, I believe early August.
So again, that's a Bitcoin Season two episode.
But it's kind of interesting because if you go here, you know, there's a bunch of different people this might apply to, but right now you can basically speculate on fee rates on Bitcoin.
Yes, this is a product that trades on Coinbase's base, but it uses a Bitcoin node as oracle for fee rates. So I feel like I pretty much trust this.
You can't currently execute these stype-- these, these style transactions on Bitcoin L-one, but you can, if you're not a US resident or perhaps, I say, US IP, um, you can go and trade fee rates. Who might this apply to?
Let's say you've made it this far and you're an Ordinals enjoyer, and you want to inscribe a bunch of stuff on Bitcoin, but you worry about fee rates going up, um, while you prepare.
You can actually hedge your fee rates, um, on this platform. It's really, really interesting. I'm a huge fan. Um, if I were not a US resident, I would be much more publicly using it.
So, um, this is a really-- Yeah, the fee rate trading competition, I think we're only a few days into it. Um, so fascinating. They talked about, um, who they're-- uh, who's leading it.
They have a, they have a leaderboard with anonymized, um, uh, addresses. But we can see that we've got some people with, uh, fifteen percent, point eight, you know, eighty-seven percent returns. So pretty interesting.
I'll be watching that. Also, in the world of, I would say, Bitcoin Season two-type topics, we have Babylon Labs. Um, Babylon Chain, uh, just dropped a podcast last night with the founder, David Tse of Babylon.
Babylon is launching their mainnet staking this week. If you don't know what Bitcoin staking is, I'm not going to explain it.
It's basically you can use, uh, the idea is you use Bitcoin, which is a proof-of-work-generated asset, to solve some issues with proof of stake.
So I had an interview with David Tse with Babylon Labs, which is on the YouTube right now, the most recent episode. Babylon's just opened up, uh, their staking mainnet in, I think, forty-eight hours.
So we'll be watching this. This happens, um, I think on Wednesday, US time. It might be Thursday. Um, this is a really interesting mechanic.
I think, you know, this is, I believe, the highest raise of any kind of Bitcoin-focused product over the past year.
They raised something like seventy million for this idea, and, um, they're launching with staking some, like, low-cap Cosmos, uh, side, uh, Cosmos chains.
Um, again, you can listen to my episode with David recorded in Nashville, um, a few weeks ago. So I think this is a really, really interesting episode. I recommend you check it out. Okay. Meta-protocol madness.
I'm going to have to breeze through this, and if you are a representative of any of these medi-- meta-protocols or meta-protocol-type things, please forgive me.
I'm gonna try to be very high level, probably dive deeper into another. Um, Bob Bodley has, uh, been one of the best voices for summarizing all these crazy new ideas happening in the world of Bitcoin.
Um, I don't want to endorse any single one. I just find it very, very interesting. So Bob has compiled a master thread. He, he posted a link to all the threads a few days ago, but he covers a lot of the stuff.
And, and we're just gonna kick it off with what I would call, like, these degen, like, side chain meta-protocol evolutions on Bitcoin. The first one's gonna be Fractal Bitcoin, which is a Bitcoin side chain. Um,
it's a merge-mine side chain, which means you can use the same, like, machine that would mine Bitcoin to then also mine this side chain.
And they have this mechanism called cadence mining, where they produce a block on Bitcoin, and they produce a few blocks on Fractal Bitcoin. It is a different blockchain, but it
posts state or Merkle roots, I believe, back to Bitcoin occasionally. The actual documentation's not fully dropped yet. I will be interviewing the, uh, lead guy of Unisat and Fractal Bitcoin, Lorenzo, here very soon.
So DM me if you have any questions for that.
Um, I think one of the interesting things here is, uh, well, actually, let me just show that, you know, they have a testnet and an explorer, so you can go look, and you can see, like, what transactions are happening on testnet, um, who's doing what on testing.
Go look up, like, your addresses. There's a faucet. There have been other faucets to receive testnet Fractal Bitcoin.
Um, I think that's a really interesting, you know, event happening in Bitcoin overall, specifically Bitcoin mining, as I think it's really the first major user traction on a side chain that I have seen in a long time.
You still have Rootstock, which has a lot of TVL locked up in it. You've got Liquid, which is not merge mined, but it is a, a side chain, basically, with a, with a, with a federated bridge.
Um, but one interesting thing when it comes to meta-protocols, I want to, like, zoom back again and say Ordinals itself is a meta-protocol scheme. It's taking a new lens at how Bitcoin works and saying that, um,
uh, we're just going to all agree to some rules which we will additi- we will add in addition to, uh, how Bitcoin works.
And so on top of Ordinals and the inscription envelope data blob, we saw pretty early on the BRC-twenty meta-protocol emerge, which is just saying, "We're sending messages back and forth about token issuance and token state."
So BRC-twenty is a meta-protocol on top of-Ordinals, which is a meta protocol, you could say on top of Bitcoin.
Um, so Unisat has been in the driver's seat for the BRC twenty standard since day one, and they are now allowing issuance, or they say that they will allow issuance of BRC twenties onto fractal Bitcoin. Now,
is a fractal Bitcoin BRC twenty the same thing as a BRC twenty on the main chain? It's not clear. In fact, it actually probably depends upon who is indexing the state of these BRC twenties. What does that mean?
I hope to dive into it deeper in a newsletter coming out tomorrow morning, um, so make sure you subscribe to blockspace.media and subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on our social media.
Um, so this is the most interesting evolution in the BRC twenty meta protocol that I've seen. And if you look at like the-- There's been a lot of discussion on like, um, who is controlling the indexers.
You have the layer one foundation who says, "We want to try to open source these indexers. We want to try to let everyone participate in providing BRC twenty state."
And Unisat has kind of like run along and like, done their own thing and kind-- pretty much led the market as they drive most of the inscription volume and like trading volume.
So now they are, uh, looking at fractal Bitcoin, which is their own blockchain, and saying, "Let's see if we can do BRC twenties, but on fractal." My question is, do those count on the main chain? So we'll have to see.
Again, um, it's very interesting. I think it's mostly popular in Asia. I will be talking more about this as it continues to dominate the narrative.
Then we have subFrost, which is probably a new name to most of you who are watching this because you-- your lizard brains only think of, um, Opnet or Fractal or Track.
But subFrost is this concept that, uh, we're going to make a meta, meta protocol, uh, layer, which says, "We're going to, uh, allow you to use assets and index all of the different meta protocols."
This is from the OIL team, the Metashrew team. Again, I already did an interview with them, um, kind of at the very start of Bitcoin season two. You can see it in one of our first episodes.
Go look at our historical episodes on the YouTube channel, Bitcoin Season two, its first three or four episodes. Um, [clears throat] and the high-level idea here is that you basically create a taproot multisig,
whi-which is a federated multisig, which plugs into the Metashrew meta protocol indexing suite.
And you can create wrapped Bitcoin, which will be tracked by probably a rune, I believe, issued on here, um, which we will consider to be a synthetic wrapped Bitcoin equivalent that you can plug into the different meta protocols.
It's very interesting because at the same time that we see the wrapped Bitcoin wars heating up, I'm the first probably, the first person to even use this term, the wrapped Bitcoin wars, um, happening on Eth.
Um, we are seeing now the wrapped Bitcoin proliferation, or wrapped Bitcoin standard proliferation happen on Bitcoin.
I think this is coincidental, but it's really interesting how they're happening at the same time, because I think the big narrative here is that people are realizing that Bitcoin is the pristine monetary asset.
So we're trying to figure out how to plug Bitcoin into these other layers so we can do more things with it.
You might notice that I just talked about Babylon chain, and that is one which provo-which promotes yield on your Bitcoin. Again, Bitcoin as the pristine collateral.
This is a narrative which I think Bitcoin season two will focus a lot on, not just the podcast, but a, a secular, bigger Bitcoin season two narrative. Um, so, uh,
it actually-- subFrost uses a Frost multisig, which I think is really interesting. There's not a lot of, um, teams that can actually execute with Frost.
This is a new type of like threshold signing and new type of way of building multisigs, not multisigs or just, uh, providing additional rule sets and knobs to twist for the conventional multisig solution.
Um, this is-- Frost in general has actually been kind of a hardcore Bitcoin, um, uh, developed, uh, I would say s- uh, mechanism on Bitcoin. Um, so I'm interested to see.
I'd like to have the, the OIL and Metashrew guys talk about, um, subFrost here very soon. Then we're gonna talk about more meta protocols.
I, I mentioned this, um, the other week, but we have Opnet, which is from the team who c-conceived CBRC twenty and then Moto Swap, and then didn't really deliver a whole lot to market with either of those.
But they got a lot of talk going. They got a lot of, uh, degens frothing, and, uh, they have some very, very, very spicy, uh, goading, baiting takes.
That said, this does appear to me to be something that they might actually deliver, which is a new meta protocol standard to index data blobs on Bitcoin. What does that mean?
They're basically going to post operations in inscriptions or inscription-type objects on Bitcoin and index those with logic with their own indexer. Um, this is very similar to the Proto runes idea.
In fact, it's almost i- it's almost identical, and it's kind of a race to market who can deliver the smart indexing, uh, product first. But the Opnet team seems to be kind of BD, uh, monsters right now.
Look at this list of different Twitter accounts, all of whom claim to be launching different products on Opnet.We will see if, if this actually does go live.
Um, this is a little bit-- this is kind of incumbent upon that team to, like, turn the switch on, go live, and start, um, indexing according to OpNet rule set.
But, uh, the cool thing about a lot of these meta protocols just in general is that you can overlay them on top of merge mined side chains like Fractal.
That means that if it is a, uh, depending on the design, it is conceivable that you could take a meta protocol which works on Bitcoin and then place it on top of a side chain like Fractal or maybe even Liquid or Rootstock.
I'm not sure how that would work. But, um, this is a very interesting trend that's happening.
Um, I don't-- I kind of wonder, I'm speculating out loud here, I wonder if this is all just like, um, just kind of like a, just a mania that we've manifested for ourselves, um, that like it's a very interesting topic to me in particular, and I wonder if any of this stuff will actually be used.
Um, I think the main takeaway is that, is that if it is used, it will generate a lot of additional data on-chain.
It's likely, it's got all the ingredients to like if you think that, uh, arbitrary data on Bitcoin is going to big-- be a big deal, then, um, this is arbitrary data on steroids, more so than your big fancy JPEGs. No, um,
meta protocol on Bitcoin topic would be complete without, I would say, the OG one kind of after Ordinals, which is Track, which says, uh, we're going to-- they were kind of the first to do this, almost like,
I believe it was really floated in like or in November of this past year, where originally as an alternative indexer to Ord, now an alternative indexer to BRC-20, and now they've kind of proliferated into their entire ecosystem they call the Track ecosystem.
I know it's a bit of a meme to anybody listening right now, but it could be, um, I do think this has-- they've been working on this type of system and structure for the longest, and I find it pretty interesting.
They're, they're well-positioned. They have a pretty distributed set of tokens.
I don't know where this is gonna go, but I've tried to like hit the names and the high points of the various players in the space right now, and I'll probably try to find out and track down some more.
Um, before I wrap up, I want to, um, I want to go to Bless's live stream.
Um, shout out to my boy Bless who, uh, has-- is on day four of a, an art project stream where he is live streaming him making three-D art, uh, to thousands of people.
He has locked himself in a room somewhere in Los Angeles, and he is here, uh, in VR, um, barely sleeping, barely eating, maybe not even eating at all, uh, working on, um,
three-D art. So I don't know what he's doing here. He's been live for forever. This man is a machine. Uh, go tune into his stream and support him. Otherwise, that wraps up Bitcoin Season two.
Thank you so much for tuning in. Um, make sure to sub-subscribe to the newsletter. I'll be diving deeper into a lot of these topics that I talked about.
I kind of brushed them over and oversimplified them at a very high level.
But I do think meta protocols on Bitcoin are a major trend and something to be very, uh, attentive to because they could start to really drive fee rates.
As always, check out other Blockspace Media content, The Gort Show, The Mining Pod, Bitcoin Stock Show, and check out our newsletter, blockspace.media/subscribe. Otherwise, thank you very much and see you all next week.
[upbeat music]