Daniel Kuhn is a deputy managing editor for Consensus Magazine. He owns minor amounts of BTC and ETH.
In what could be the most pivotal year for Bitcoin since it was invented, Muneeb Ali, CEO of Trust Machines and co-creator of the Stacks blockchain, thinks the network's scalable layer 2s are poised for a breakout. This isn’t just because bitcoin has been setting new all-time highs on a weekly basis recently — largely driven by the introduction of spot BTC exchange-traded funds — but because, more and more, people are using the first cryptocurrency for its intended purpose: as money.
Stacks has been around for a long time, and, to your credit, it has continually innovated. The upcoming Nakamoto upgrade has been in progress for a few years. Answer honestly: Has Stacks built up technical debt — or were there decisions you made earlier that limit what you can do today or that make certain things more difficult?
We are already seeing this. Stacks has this thing called Bitcoin subnets — the work is done but it was never really fully launched because there's so much focus on Nakamoto right now. The basic concept is to use Stacks to do the logic and security in the middle in between subnets, which could be more permissioned, while putting all of the state from the subnet onto the Bitcoin layer 1. This allows you to use BTC liquidity.
If Bitcoin changed its script to something like EVM that would be a drastic change, right? Like you suddenly open yourself up to all sorts of things. With BitVM, yes there are new features, but it’s pretty limited.we have seen that even with limited additional functionality, people can build new things. So I definitely think people will try a lot of new things. What I am excited about with BitVM are very targeted applications, because it's usually an inefficient way of writing a program.
How do you hire and retain these people? How do you incentivize them? The rest of the blockchain ecosystem is actually pretty competitive. When we try to hire Core devs for Trust Machines, we compete with Solana Labs and Avalanche. It's a very competitive market, but Bitcoin is missing in action. Like, they're not even playing that game.
Then there’s the institutional use. Right now, there’s no direct, decentralized way to safely earn yield on their BTC. BlockFi blew up. DeFi didn’t, not even during the bear market. If there's a healthy, decentralized smart contract option that could turn bitcoin into a productive asset from a passive, no yield asset. That’d accelerate institutional adoption.
We still, in some ways, get some benefit from that. It helps people know the offering was transparent and fully legal — it builds credibility for the ecosystem. Another thing that it did was it actually forced decentralization very, very early, before the mainnet launch. The original company exists in some form, but everyone involved went off and formed independent companies and pursued different things. It is an actual ecosystem.
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