原文作者: MacKenzie Sigalos
Source: CNBC
原文标题：Bitcoin’s next gen tokens are here. Inside the Silicon Valley hacker house where 17 coders helped build the new memecoin market
Compiler: Yanan Bitui
In the eastern foothills of San Jose, California, 17 programmers from Magic Eden, a well-known Bitcoin NFT trading platform, are gathering for a week-long hackathon to prepare for the upcoming Bitcoin halving. The employees also have a bit of a special place to work – they rent a spacious 4-bedroom, 3,875-square-meter house through Airbnb.
Much of the discussion about the biennial Bitcoin halving has focused on changes in the amount of Bitcoin issued. However, the Bitcoin halving also coincides with several other significant developments on the blockchain, including cutting-edge programming innovations – which will attract more developers and more venture capital funding into the Bitcoin ecosystem.
Unlike past halvings, the price of Bitcoin, the world's largest cryptocurrency, soared to an all-time high of more than $73,000 in March this year, thanks to inflows from the newly launched Bitcoin spot ETF in the United States.
"Bitcoin has never been more vibrant than it is now – what was missing before was an active developer ecosystem," said Zedd Yin, co-founder and COO of Magic Eden.
Arcade games and spirits
Magic Eden's temporary coder's home is simply furnished, but it also offers a lot of thoughtful services to support the working life of the programmers.
Their daily "work perks" include classic arcade games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Street Fighter in the living room, and a DIY open bar on foldable plastic tables in the dining room.
What's more, these engineers have a big advantage when they participate in hackathons – they know what they're going to do. A few days before the halving, Yin, 33, gathered the team to this house in Northern California. The team has a clear goal: to build the best marketplace trading platform for the next round of digital products on the Bitcoin blockchain. On Monday morning, the Magic Eden rune platform was officially launched, further cementing its position as the leading trading platform for new Bitcoin products.
Over the years, competitors such as Ethereum and Solana have been competing fiercely with Bitcoin for blockchain functionality due to their native support for smart contract functionality. The smart contract feature allows developers to write programmable code snippets, opening up more possibilities for blockchain applications. That's why developers from all over the world are flocking to these blockchain platforms to build applications.
Last year, a Bitcoin programmer named Casey Rodarmor broke that by introducing the Bitcoin version of NFTs, now known as Ordinals. This innovation was used by the developers as the basis for a token issued under Bitcoin, known as the BRC-20 token. The launch of Ordinals didn't initially attract much attention, but eventually brought great praise to Casey Rodarmor.
Late last Friday night, coinciding with the Bitcoin halving, Rodarmor unveiled his latest masterpiece, Runes. Runes are essentially an upgraded version of the BRC-20 token, with superior performance.
"There's a lot of respect for Casey and they think he's captured a fleeting spark," says Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures, "so there's a lot of expectation for runes." ”
From a technical point of view, Runes simply enable the asset issuance of exchangeable tokens on the Bitcoin base chain, which can be stablecoins, meme coins, or any other type of exchangeable token.
For developers, it is important that Runes are more efficient than the current BRC-20 token standard. BRC-20 has attracted a lot of attention as a widely used standard for exchangeable tokens on Bitcoin. Having a widely accepted and recognized token standard is considered the key to unlocking the scale of Bitcoin's decentralized finance (DeFi). DeFi is a decentralized system that parallels the traditional banking system, automating code execution, cutting out intermediaries such as lawyers and banks.
"Exchangeable tokens are indispensable to important ecosystems like Ethereum, Solana, etc., so runes are undoubtedly an important step in the evolution of Bitcoin," said Yin, who previously led all institutional trading products at Coinbase.
Abra's founder, Bill Barhydt, runs a company that provides miners with a range of services, including automated clearing, and access to macro data across the industry. He stated that Bitcoin's own blockchain architecture (Layer 1) does not allow for full scalability. At the heart of the problem is that Bitcoin's blockchain lacks the built-in smart contract capabilities necessary to build complex financial ecosystems like Ethereum or Solana.
BRC-20 tokens, Ordinals, as well as advanced versions of runes, as well as sidechains like Stacks and DeFi on Bitcoin, all show strong potential in terms of user adoption. They will dramatically increase the demand for Bitcoin block space and adoption, and are expected to further drive Bitcoin price growth in the coming years," Barhydt said.
Barhydt further noted, "The level and progress of the new development work that is currently taking place around Bitcoin is truly impressive. ”
Venture capitalists agree with this.
"Never in my entire career have I seen such an aggressive pace of trading in the Bitcoin space," Carter noted in an interview with CNBC.
Bitcoin L2 has seen a surge in attention
Indeed, over the past few months, there has been a significant increase in interest from venture capital firms in these Bitcoin layer 2 projects.
According to PitchBook, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the value of transactions in the crypto industry rose for the first time in nearly two years, reaching $1.9 billion, an increase of 2.5% compared to the previous quarter. Although there is still a big gap from the high of $31 billion in 2021, funds are gradually flowing back into the space, showing that the market's interest and confidence in bitcoin is recovering.
"Bitcoin's layer 2 space has undoubtedly sparked the interest of capital," said Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Stacks. Stacks is an open-source blockchain network that introduced smart contract functionality to Bitcoin.
As a blockchain network independent of Bitcoin, Stacks works with Bitcoin. On the occasion of Bitcoin's halving, Stacks also completed its own upgrade, reducing transaction time to 5 seconds. Compared to the 10 to 30 minute block processing time of Bitcoin's underlying chain, Stacks is significantly more efficient.
Ali emphasized that the focus on a large number of venture capital firms further confirms the view that the Bitcoin ecosystem is poised for growth. He also revealed that the number of Bitcoin-based projects has rapidly increased from 6 to more than 50 in the past six months, which shows that the pace of project launches is also accelerating.
According to a recent report from Austin-based venture capital fund Trammell Venture Partners, Bitcoin startups have experienced explosive growth in the pre-seed funding phase, with the number of deals surging by 360% year-over-year.
Commenting on the findings, Christopher Calicott, the fund's managing director and founding partner, said: "Founders are now more willing to focus on Bitcoin development. ”
In addition, the report also revealed that between 2021 and 2023, Bitcoin-focused early-stage startups raised nearly $1 billion in total funding.
For example, Alpen Labs is applying zero-knowledge proofs, an advanced scaling technology, to Bitcoin and is starting to become active in the market. Most recently, they raised $10.6 million in funding led by Ribbit Capital. Another high-profile layer-2 solution, Build on Bitcoin, or BOB for short, has also successfully raised $10 million in seed funding.
"Innovative technologies such as Ordinals and the BRC-20 token that emerged in 2023 have fueled the momentum of Bitcoin's halving," Ali said. They have reinvigorated Bitcoin's appeal and demonstrated that users will be more inclined to opt for Bitcoin-based NFTs, assets, and applications whenever given the opportunity. ”
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) on Bitcoin
For years, developers have been trying to add extra functionality to Bitcoin's underlying chain. In an interview with CNBC, Barhydt said that the demand for decentralized finance (DeFi), especially yield and lending features, is a key driver of cryptocurrency adoption.
Sidechains like Stacks, for example, have been working hard to bring Solana-like transaction speeds and competitive transaction costs into the Bitcoin ecosystem to alleviate congestion on the main chain and drive the expansion of the entire Bitcoin economy.
The launch of Runes provides a whole new tool for growth for these existing projects. Through runes, these projects are expected to connect to the native lightweight token system on Bitcoin's main chain, without the need to create their own separate token environment.
"Runes provide an efficient system that makes it possible to create and manage fungible tokens directly on Bitcoin. Compared to other token standards, Runes avoids blockchain bloat and enhances scalability," commented Hong Fang, President of OKX Exchange. Hong Fang has worked at Goldman Sachs for nearly a decade and has a wealth of experience.
Ali of Stacks called the post-halving period "Bitcoin Season 2."
"The key to Season 2 is the return of builders to Bitcoin," he said. Users are finally starting to distinguish between Bitcoin as an asset and as a payment instrument. ”
During the week-long hackathon, Yin and his team made another important discovery: Airbnb listings had to be rigorously screened in the future.
The house they rented was equipped with a malfunctioning outdoor gas fireplace, which caused the smell of suspected gas leaks to permeate the entire house. In addition, the house's WiFi was on strike on the first day and completely unusable. To make matters worse, someone on the team contracted the coronavirus.