Recently, a critical bug was discovered on the Lightning Network ⚡

This bug is so serious that a core LN developer chose to step back from the project.

But how serious is it, really? Here's what you need to know 🧵 1/ "All your mempool are belong to us"

The announcement from Antoine Riard last week was met with a lot of fear on X, in part because of the highly technical nature of the issue.

But we're going to do our best to explain what's actually going on 🙏

Turing-complete smart contracts on Bitcoin? 🤖

A new proposal from @robin_linus promises just that, all with no changes to Bitcoin's code.

Need a more simplified explainer? Here's one for the plebs 🧵 Bitcoin's native scripting language is quite limited.

It's one of the reasons we are so focused on scaling Bitcoin through various layers 🥞

These various layers act as building blocks that ultimately bring more utility to Bitcoin.

One big unlock? Smart contracts 📝

1/19

Bitcoin-native domain names?

They may look like BRC-20, but that’s where the similarities stop.

.Sats names aren’t for creating tokens: they’re for creating identities. People have been inscribing names practically since the beginning of Ordinals.

The first inscription representing this is Inscription 58, aptly named: satoshi

And about 100 inscriptions later, @cbspears became the first to inscribe a username with “cbspears” on Inscription 143.

There’s a new Bitcoin layer that looks to combine the transaction speed of Lightning with the privacy of Wasabi and accessibility of Bitcoin itself.

Is this the Layer 2 to save us all?

All aboard the ARK! 🚢 🧵 ARK initially started as a Lightning wallet ⚡

ARK’s founder @brqgoo was trying to build a new wallet that would solve for some of Lightning’s challenges, such as:

💾 Backups
🍀 Offline receiving
📨 Receiver privacy
📲 Inbound liquidity

BRC-20 has a lot going for it, but let’s be honest: scalability isn’t one of them 🚧

ORC-20, a new token standard, is looking to change that 🧵 Here’s a problem:

Every time you want to send BRC-20 tokens, you need to inscribe a Transfer, usually on a third-party service, then send that Transfer to your intended recipient.

That’s two transactions and double the fees! 💸💸

ORC-20 promises a more efficient solution…

There’s a Bitcoin layer you’re not probably paying enough attention to: RGB

Their team has been heads-down building for several years. And their latest release, v0.10, takes a huge step toward enabling Bitcoin DeFi.

Here’s how it works 🧵 RGB may be new to many, but it was actually first proposed in 2018.

It was originally inspired by “colored coins” on Lightning by Giacomo Zucco, plus two concepts developed by Peter Todd: client-side validation and single-use seals (which we’ll explain in a bit).

Creating new tokens on Bitcoin can be done with a single line of code.

It’s called BRC-20, and it’s the reason why there’s been nearly 2 million new ordinal inscriptions in just the past week 🚀 BRC-20 started as an experiment to see if Ordinal Theory could be used to facilitate fungibility of tokens on Bitcoin.

https://twitter.com/1301174192784764928/status/1633658974686855168

There’s a new protocol in town: Bitcoin Stamps 📮

They’re a new way of storing images directly on Bitcoin, but they’re very different from Ordinals.

Here’s why their transactions look like this 👇

🧵… 2/
Bitcoin Stamps, created by @mikeinspace, are a new way of storing images directly on the Bitcoin network, natively.

Bitcoin Stamps split up an image into a bunch of tiny pieces, spread it across many UTXOs, and reconstruct them on the other end.

It’s a bit like this:

We’re on a mission to grow the Bitcoin economy, and over the past few months have been highlighting some of the amazing work happening within the Bitcoin ecosystem.

But what have *we* been working on?

Let’s talk about our roadmap 👇 We came out of stealth a little over a year ago with a core belief: Bitcoin layers represent the largest untapped market for apps built upon trust without centralization.

So, you’ve finally discovered Ordinals.

We’re not sure if you’ve been living under a rock, but that’s okay, better late than never!

You’ve browsed all the collections and want to live your best Bitcoin NFT life.

But then you realize: you don’t know how to inscribe one 😩 Don’t worry, you’re not the only one.

The actual process is pretty technical, and can be pretty laborious given that you need to download Bitcoin Core and sync it up (although it’s a great learning opportunity!)

Rollkit's new integration has allowed for sovereign rollups on Bitcoin 🤯

It's the latest scaling solution for Bitcoin, but how does it compare to the Stacks layer? 🧵 2/
This week, @RollkitDev demonstrated that its new research integration could retrieve and store data on-chain.

In order to write and read data on the Bitcoin blockchain, Rollkit’s integration made use of Taproot transactions, inspired by Bitcoin Ordinals.

The new TwelveFold auction is game-changingly Bitcoin only:

✅ You bid with BTC
✅ Each inscription is BTC-native
✅ Losing bids are refunded in BTC

But despite being BTC-first, the auction mechanism isn’t trustless 🚩 In order to start bidding, you have to first put in a taproot-compatible address and prove you are not a robot 🤖