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What is up you beautiful people!

Time for another edition of This Week in Bitcoin. We got some exciting news on Lightning, a few big announcements from Stacks startups, Liquid actually have some news this week as well. Lets jump in, but first!
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Shoutout to The Stacks Foundation for sponsoring this podcast.
If you want to get started building on Stacks and push the mission forward of a user-owned internet with Bitcoin as the base layer.
Check the links below.
Learn Clarity: https://start.stacks.org/
Learn more about Stacks: https://stacks.co/
Apply for a grant: https://stacks.org/grants​

Stacks

• ALEX (DeFI platform) announced same big news in their latest newsletter.
  • The first is a new update to their orderbook currently on Testnet. In mid July, an update is coming out that brings market limit orders, stop-limit orders, a suite of analytics for traders. Basically a bunch of features you usually expect from a centralized exchange. Hit me with that 🔥 emoji.
  • Second big announcement is a bridge to wrap assets. They will allow USDC on ETH to be wrapped by Tokensoft, and sent to your Hiro wallet for use across Stacks as xUSD. More liquidity, but more importantly, They are building the infrastructure to bridge all kinds of assets from others chains into ALEX. Majorly bullish on this move as it evolves and decentralizes.
• Xverse Mobile Wallet pushed an update that brings a sleek new interface to show your stacked STX. You can see your progress in the current cycle and other goodies in the new UI. Tweet​
• Byzantion becomes Tradeport. The best NFT marketplace on Stacks for traders, is now cross-chain with integration with NEARprotocol. It's pretty cool to toggle different chains on and off with the click of a button and see the stats change in real time. Safe to say this is only the beginning for the Tradeport team. Watch out OpenSea & MagicEden.
• I released a great episode with Ragnar Lifthrasir (Follow him on Twitter). Ragnar is a freedom tech entrepreneur with a focus on privacy and security. We cover a bunch of topics around guns, Bitcoin, privacy, and much more.
  Listen to episode 87 with Ragnar Lifthrasir right here​

Lightning

• Surely you've seen Mempool.space. The iconic block explorer for Bitcoin to see how full the network is.
  They have now added a dedicated page for Lightning! Check it here. You can see interesting stats like current network capacity (4684 BTC), How many LN nodes there are (15,840), where nodes are hosted, and other goodies.
  Continue to be impressed at how much is happening on Lightning.
• Alby announced their latest tool, A Wordpress-Lightning extension. Now you can easily integrate Lightning into any Wordpress blog and either receive Lightning donations with little friction, or put portions of your content behind a paywall that has to be unlocked with a Lightning payment. The value4value movement continues.

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RSK

• RSK's latest network upgrade appears to have went through without a hitch. Code-named Hop4, It was set to go live around September 1st. I was curious how mining hash rate would be affected by this update. It doesnt appear affected at all, with total hashrate of RSK sitting around 51% of the BTC hash rate.

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Liquid

• Xdex is a new exchange coming to Liquid. It will offer the ability to exchange any Liquid blockchain assets across the Tdex protocol. Announcement
  If you have no clue what Tdex is, Dont worry no one else does either. It sounds pretty interesting.
  Tdex integrates directly with the Liquid wallet and lets you swap assets with other users easily without giving up your keys.
  It allows market makers and liquitity providers to come in and facilitate trades that would be difficult otherwise.
  Xdex brings a better front end to these tools while still maining peoples self-custody.
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  I don't know who is gonna use this, but its still cool tech.

That's it for this week's edition.
I'll leave you with this cool little video snippet I found between Edan Yago from Sovryn and Dustin Hoffman from Bankless.
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Pomp 🌪 @APompliano DeFi on Bitcoin is the most mispriced opportunity in the entire industry. If successful, it renders most of current DeFi projects unnecessary. Low probability of success, but incredible asymmetric payoff if it occurs. Exactly why I backed @SovrynBTC. pic.twitter.com/NZLVP2GZwr May 25th 2021 261 Retweets 1,626 Likes

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Peace!
-Jake

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Hit that button.

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