Magic Eden programmers gathered at an Airbnb in San Jose, California, to hack in preparation for the so-called Bitcoin halving.
Aamir Hussain
In the eastern foothills of San Jose, California, 17 programmers working for Magic Eden, maker of the popular ordinal marketplace, squeezed into a 3,875-square-foot, four-bedroom house rented on Airbnb. Their goal was to spend a week carrying out the hack in preparation for the so-called Bitcoin halving – an event that is baked into the blockchain’s code and helps avoid it through programmatic monetary policy inflation.
Much of the discussion about the halving, which occurs approximately every four years, has to do with the fact that new issuance of the world’s largest virtual currency will be cut in half. But locking in the halving blocks also coincides with several other major announcements on the blockchain, including cutting-edge programming innovations that are expected to attract more programmers and more venture capital into the Bitcoin ecosystem .
Different from previous halving events, The world’s largest cryptocurrency Bitcoin price hits record high above $73,000 in March as record flows enter Bitcoin ecosystem via newly launched US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund
Zedd Yin, co-founder and chief operating officer of Magic Eden, said: “Bitcoin has never been so healthy. What was missing before was a vibrant developer ecosystem.”
Some of Magic Eden’s programmers took time off from their hacking jobs to play arcade games.
Aamir Hussain
Arcade games and spirits
Magical Eden’s pop-up hackhouse is humble but has a few bells and whistles to keep a skeleton crew through the week.
These include Ninja Turtles and Street Fighter themed arcade games in the living room and a DIY open bar on foldable plastic tables in the dining room.
Another clear advantage for engineers participating in hackathons is knowing what they want to build. In the days leading up to the halving, Yin, 33, gathered his team under one roof in Northern California with a clear goal in mind: writing code for the new wave of digital products coming to the Bitcoin blockchain and launch into the final market. Magic Eden’s Runes platform went live on Monday morning, helping to solidify its position as the go-to forum for trading these novel Bitcoin products.
Over the years, rival chains such as Ethereum and Solana Functionally competes with Bitcoin because both have smart contracts—that is, pieces of programmable code—built natively into the base chain. This is one of the main reasons why developers around the world are flocking to these blockchains to build applications.
Magical Eden’s pop-up hack house includes arcade games and a ping pong table with a full bar.
Aamir Hussain
Enter Casey Rodamo.
The popular Bitcoin coder turned this dynamic on its head last year when he introduced Bitcoin’s version of non-fungible tokens (called ordinals), which developers eventually used as Bitcoin’s issued tokens (called for the BRC-20 token). The launch started quietly but eventually earned him huge acclaim.
Late Friday night, just as the Bitcoin halving began, Rodarmor launched his latest creation, Runes, which is basically a better, more efficient version of the BRC-20 token.
“People really respect Casey and think he caught lightning in a bottle,” said Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures. “So people have high expectations for Runes as well.”
Technically speaking, Rune simply implements the asset issuance of fungible tokens on the Bitcoin base chain. This could be a stablecoin, a memecoin, or any kind of fungible token.
This is significant for developers because of its efficiency relative to the existing BRC-20 token, Bitcoin’s widely used fungible token standard that has received widespread attention. Having such a universally accepted token standard is seen as key to helping scale Bitcoin’s decentralized finance. Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a parallel banking system that eliminates middlemen such as lawyers and banks and relies on code execution.
“Fungible tokens are an important part of every meaningful ecosystem like Solana and Ethereum, so Rune is an important step in the evolution of Bitcoin,” said Yin, who helped lead the product for all institutional trading products . Coin Library.
Bill Barhydt is the principal of Abra, a company that provides miners with a variety of services including automated clearing and access to macro data across the industry. Achieve 100% expansion. The problem has to do with the fact that Bitcoin’s blockchain lacks the built-in smart contract functionality needed to recreate the bank stack of chains like Ethereum or Solana.
“The BRC-20 token and serial number, its successor rune, sidechains such as stacking, and DeFi on Bitcoin have all shown strong prospects in terms of user adoption, which will greatly increase the demand for Bitcoin block space and adoption. , I believe this will create a positive feedback loop that will further drive Bitcoin prices higher in the coming years,” Barhydt said. “The level of new development work happening around Bitcoin is really impressive,” he added.
Venture capital agrees.
“In my entire career, I have never seen the pace of trading in the Bitcoin space be this intense,” Carter told CNBC.
Over the course of a week, the Magic Eden team gathered in an Airbnb in San Jose to write code for a new digital asset market that would go live during the Bitcoin halving block.
Aamir Hussain
Bitcoin ‘second layer’ interest soars
In fact, venture capital interest in these second-layer Bitcoin projects has been increasing over the past few months.
brochure says In the fourth quarter of 2023, the transaction value of the cryptocurrency field grew for the first time in nearly two years, reaching $1.9 billion, an increase of 2.5% from the previous quarter. While still well below its 2021 high of $31 billionfunding is rebuilding interest and trust in the field.
Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Stacks, said: “Capital’s interest in the second layer of Bitcoin has definitely awakened.” Stacks is an open source blockchain network that brings smart contracts to Bitcoin.
Stacks is a separate chain from Bitcoin, but the two can work together. The project also launched its own upgrade at the time of the block halving, reducing transaction times to five seconds, compared to the 10 to 30 minute block times associated with Bitcoin’s base chain.
“Such venture capital interest has consolidated the development momentum of the Bitcoin ecosystem,” Ali said. He noted that the launch of Bitcoin projects has also accelerated in the past six months, from six projects online to more than 50 indivual.
A new report released by Austin-based venture capital fund Trammell Venture Partners found that the Bitcoin startup industry had a breakthrough year in the pre-seed stage, with the number of deals increasing 360% from the same period last year.
“Founders do want to be exclusively Bitcoin-based,” Christopher Calicott, managing director and founding partner of the fund, said of the findings.
The report also noted that early-stage Bitcoin-native startups raised nearly $1 billion from 2021 to 2023.
Take Alpine Laboratories, for example. The second-tier project, which brings cutting-edge scaling technology called zero-knowledge proofs to Bitcoin, has just emerged from stealth mode with $10.6 million in funding led by Ribbit Capital. Another popular second-layer solution called Build on Bitcoin (BOB) has raised $10 million in seed funding.
“Ali said Ordinals, BRC-20 and other innovations emerging in 2023 will really help build momentum ahead of the halving. Assets and Applications.
In the eastern foothills of San Jose, California, 17 programmers working for Magic Eden, maker of the popular Ordinals marketplace, squeezed into a four-bedroom, 3,875-square-foot house rented on Airbnb.
Aamir Hussain
DeFi on Bitcoin Orbit
For years, developers have been trying to add additional functionality to Bitcoin’s base chain. Barhydt told CNBC that demand for DeFi — specifically yields and loans — is a key driver of cryptocurrency adoption.
For example, sidechains like Stack have been working to bring the speed and competitive transaction costs of Solana-type rails to the Bitcoin ecosystem to relieve congestion on the main chain and allow the entire Bitcoin economy to scale.
With Rune, these existing projects have a new tool with which to grow, as it enables them to plug into a native, lightweight token system on the main Bitcoin chain without having to generate their own independent tokens. currency environment.
Hong Fang, president of cryptocurrency exchange OKX, said: “Runes provides an efficient system for creating and managing fungible tokens directly on Bitcoin, which can reduce blockchain bloat and improve scalability compared to other token standards. “This has significant implications for second-layer solutions and sidechains working to scale Bitcoin,” added Fang, who has spent nearly a decade working on it. at Goldman Sachs.
Stacks’ Alibaba calls the post-halving environment “Bitcoin’s second quarter.”
“The theme of Season 2 is developers returning to Bitcoin. Users are finally separating themselves from Bitcoin as an asset, as a rail,” he said.
For Yin and his team, another takeaway from the Rune Hackathon was the need to conduct more due diligence on Airbnb properties.
The team’s outdoor gas fireplace wasn’t functioning properly, so there was a constant smell of gas leaks throughout the week, the rental house’s WiFi went offline on the first day, and a handful of people contracted COVID-19.
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