The Pomp Podcast - #678 Smart Contracts on Bitcoin w/ Muneeb Ali

Episode Date: October 3, 2021

Dr Muneeb Ali is the co-founder of Stacks, a platform to build smart contracts on top of Bitcoin. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin, smart contracts, decentralization, financial services, MiamiCoin, and why distributed networks are so important.  ======================= Circle is a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stablecoins and public blockchains for payments, commerce and financial applications worldwide. Circle is also a principal developer of USD Coin (USDC), the fastest growing, fully reserved and regulated dollar stablecoin in the world. The free Circle Account and suite of platform API services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading, DeFi, and NFT marketplaces. Create seamless, user-friendly, mainstream customer experiences with crypto-native infrastructure under the hood with Circle. Learn more at circle.com. ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: https://crypto.onelink.me/J9Lg/pomppodcast2021 ======================= LMAX Digital - the market-leading solution for institutional crypto trading & custodial services - offers clients a regulated, transparent and secure trading environment, together with the deepest pool of crypto liquidity. LMAX Digital is also a primary price discovery venue, streaming real-time market data to the industry’s leading analytics platforms. LMAX Digital - secure, liquid, trusted. Learn more at LMAXdigital.com/pomp

what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off dr munib ali is the co-founder of stacks a platform to build smart contracts on top of bitcoin in this conversation we discuss bitcoin smart contracts decentralization financial services miami coin and why distributed networks are so important i really enjoyed this conversation with munib as always and i hope you do as well before we get into this episode though i want to quickly talk about our sponsors first up is circle circle's a global financial technology firm that enables businesses of all sizes to harness the power of stable coins and public blockchains

for payments commerce and financial applications worldwide circle is also a principal developer of usd coin or usdc which is the fastest growing regulated fully reserved dollar stable coin in the world now standing at more than 30 billion dollars in market cap and adding nearly 300 million dollars of net new digital dollars in circulation every single week the free circle account and suite of platform api services bridge the gap between traditional payments and crypto for trading defy and nft marketplaces you can learn more by going to circle.com i've had jeremy allaire the ceo of circle on the podcast numerous times i'm a big fan of their vision and you can't deny how fast that usd coin is growing so go check them out at circle.com and let me know what you

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and ultra low latency technology lmax digital is the market leading solution for institutional crypto trading and custodial services they feature a central limit order book streaming spot bitcoin ether litecoin and bitcoin cash and it's all paired with us dollars euro and yen lmax digital the number one institutional crypto exchange. They're secure, they're liquid, and they're trusted. You can learn more at lmaxdigital.com. Again, lmaxdigital.com. All right, let's get in this episode with Muneeb. Hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests

as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Muneeb here with me. Thank you so much for doing this, my friend. Always great to chat with you, man. Of course. Let's just jump right in. There's plenty of people who have heard of smart contracts on Bitcoin, decentralized finance on Bitcoin, Citi coins on Bitcoin, all kinds of stuff that now seems to be being built on Bitcoin, all being empowered by Stacks, which is a platform that really has brought smart contracts to Bitcoin and kind of empowered this entire ecosystem. So can you start with just reminding everyone

what Stacks is and how exactly this works? Yeah, absolutely. So I think Stacks is smart contracts for Bitcoin. And when I use the wordings like for Bitcoin, I use it very carefully because these are not smart contracts literally built on Bitcoin. Everyone knows that Bitcoin has a limited scripting language and making changes to Bitcoin is something that the community doesn't like, or it's not a good design decision anyway, because you want your money layer to be very stable, very durable, and you want it to have a very small attack vector. You actually don't want the fully expressive smart contract languages on the Bitcoin layer, right? So Stacks is a separate layer. Some people think of that as almost like a layer 1.5. It's not really a full layer 2. It's

not really a separate layer 1. It's a very unique design. Think of that as a blockchain that's kind like connecting to Bitcoin and it has consensus between Bitcoin and Stacks. So really like you can simplify it as a smart contract layer, uh, where these contracts can, uh, read state from Bitcoin, they can, they can react to that state, you can write interesting applications where, you know, part of your application is running a Bitcoin. Part of it is using the small contracts on the stack side. And the main net for Stacks went live in January of this year.

And I think we have seen a tremendous amount of, like, interest from developers. I think there's something like 30 independent companies and startups at various different stages that are now building the ecosystem. You mentioned, you know, CityCoins. The city of Miami has actually accepted a treasury of a new type of asset called MiamiCoin, which is built on top and was launched in a pure mining launch. there's more than $500 million of value locked in a smart contract, in one of the smart contracts on Stack. So I think it is relatively early in terms of traction, but I feel like for the six, seven months that the network has been live after mainnet, we have seen tremendous growth as well. One of the parts of this that's so fascinating is the idea of expanding the Bitcoin economy.

And I think historically, people have thought of Bitcoin as a decentralized digital currency. And there's an importance to all three of those words, right? Decentralized digital and a currency. But you've got this point around most of the financial services or the infrastructure around Bitcoin is centralized. So you essentially have a decentralized currency with centralized infrastructure. You and the rest of the folks working on this seem to be trying to change that. maybe describe how you look at this and then what exactly it means to expand the bitcoin economy yes

so i think like i'm a i'm already bitcoiner i kind of like entered the space in 2013 and in one ways or the other have been actually building on bitcoin system we've tried building applications directly on top of bitcoin we've experienced firsthand some of the scalability uh stuff that people talk about or why bitcoin is designed the way it is designed so So Stacks is actually a result of years and years of work and actually building interesting things on top of it. And the motivation for a lot of things that we've been doing is driven by exactly what you mentioned, that we view Bitcoin as the best money layer.

It has all the right properties. People know the exact supply. We know the supply is not going to change. We know that it was launched in a fair mining only launch. It has a grassroots community. It has a big brand and recognition around the world. And it is viewed as this hard asset, right? Like it's like the decentralized money there.

But interestingly, you would want to use the decentralized money in all sorts of decentralized applications or even have trading. Let's take an example. Let's look at some of the trading volumes for Bitcoin. You go to CoinMarketCap. you try to take a look at where does Bitcoin trade, it would be Binance, Coinbase, FTX, and some of the highest volumes will be against stable coins like USDC or Tether. So that actually feels strange, but a lot of people have just gotten so used to it that I

have my decentralized money. And the way I'm going to trade it is against an asset on a centralized exchange. Whereas if you had smart contracts around Bitcoin, you could have things like USDC. By the way, USDC has announced that they are coming to the Stacks layer, meaning that you will literally have USDC available on Stacks. And developers have built native swaps, meaning that you could do a swap between BTC and USDC by sending a pure Bitcoin transaction. So my question to Bitcoiners is that, do you think that swapping into USDC is better if you can do a multi-sig transaction from your hardware wallet as a pure Bitcoin transaction and then get USDC versus first sending your Bitcoin to a centralized exchange and then

trading it there and then withdrawing your funds from a centralized exchange. I think most people or Bitcoiners would pick that. No, I love the decentralized way of doing it. I don't have to go to KYC. I don't have to take any third-party risk of there's a custodian or there's an exchange that can get hacked and so on and so forth. The interesting thing that I've noticed is they're intellectually aligned. Their values are aligned with this type of decentralized infrastructure.

but we don't see a lot of kind of like momentum or development in the Bitcoin community to actually build these services, right? Like there obviously are some projects, but in the grand scheme of thing, most of these DeFi primitives are actually being built outside of Bitcoin. And I think that's the thing that motivates us, like people in the Stacks ecosystem, that we want to bring like all those primitives directly to the Bitcoin ecosystem. When you think about building decentralized infrastructure around a decentralized currency, is that the only way that this will all be successful? Or is there a world where you could have decentralized infrastructure and a centralized currency, or you could have a decentralized currency and centralized infrastructure?

Does it have to be decentralized, vertically integrated infrastructure and currency? Or is there another path that may also be successful? How exclusive is that strategy? Yeah, I do think that what we're seeing right now is decentralized money, Bitcoin, working on centralized infrastructure. It's kind of like working for the most part, like working quite fine. Obviously, there are problems with exchanges and people kind of learn their lessons and so on. And interestingly, then we're seeing use cases, and I wouldn't name projects, which are more centralized with these decentralized infrastructure. And that's actually leading to some new types of use cases that I would love to see happen in the Bitcoin ecosystem. So I think those experiments are actually showing the path to what's possible if you enable more decentralized types of services.

A good example would be, do you want to put your Bitcoin as collateral for some sort of a stable asset? And actually, you send a transaction, you put up your Bitcoin as collateral, and you can mint some sort of a stable currency and then go and use it. That's like saying, don't sell your Bitcoin, use it as a collateral to get a stable asset that it can use and do it that way. I think, again, Bitcoiners would like it in theory, but for several reasons, like this idea of actually building this stuff natively in the Bitcoin ecosystem, doesn't get enough attention. In terms of what's better, I definitely think that if you start with a centralized layer, it's very hard to build decentralized components on top of it. It kind of defeats the purpose. But if you start with a decentralized layer, then you can keep adding more decentralized building blocks and you can always build more centralized services on top.

And that's why I get attracted to building a Bitcoin, because let's say for some reason people want like faster transactions or whatever you can add a layer like on top of stacks even uh so tax is a more decentralized smart contract layer that gives you faster transactions and people uh can use it if they if they want to right but you can't go the other way around you can't start off with a centralized base layer and then you're limited you can't you can't build a more decentralized thing on top of the more centralized thing and so when you think about this there's a couple of different ways that smart contracts can work uh one of them obviously is um the on-chain smart contracts that most people are familiar with from the smart contract platforms the other is uh

something that's more akin to an off-chain type smart contract maybe give us a overview of what are the two different types how they work and what exactly stacks is doing and why that's important yep uh so i think the way to think about this is um like on-chain contracts are effectively something that are literally running on at the blockchain level so these things are always uh online anyone can can interact with these contracts whenever they want and um they they're almost like networked together right so they are they're like these lego blocks that people can use to build other services right so i'll give you an example if there is a uni swap which is like a you know it's an automated market maker most people think of that as a decentralized exchange

it exposes a certain functionality and then people can use the that functionality automatically in other smart contracts to then glue together the functionality and build other interesting things right so for that you kind of need to be on chain you need to be networked together and be global so these are kind of like the smart contracts that most most new blockchains like i know there are a bunch of like new layer one blockchains out in the market now they when people talk about smart contracts they're talking about these on-chain fully featured smart contracts and then there are obviously uh bitcoin has a more limited scripting language it's on chain the bitcoin script uh but it is fairly limited for security reasons right so people have come up

with this second form of smart contracts which are off-chain meaning that a lot of the state is off-chain or maybe you need to talk to people before doing a transaction with them you have to basically coordinate with them set up a transaction so the examples for these types of languages or approaches would be dlcs that are actually quite quite popular in bitcoin communities at least the idea of it and rgb which is a project in the in the lightning community which is also approaching smart contracts from an off-chain component. And I think the main reason these approaches are off-chain is because you can't modify Bitcoin. So if Bitcoin has a more limited stripping language, you're trying to add this functionality in an off-chain manner.

And what a lot of people don't realize, and this is where I wish that people can be better educated about these things. Personally, I think these approaches are great and they bring new use cases to Bitcoin and they should definitely be explored, but we should realize the limitations here as well you cannot build a full-fledged d5 ecosystem using these approaches because they're very limited you can't you can't have uh smart contracts that are online all the time that you can interact with in a permissionless manner like some of the ux of using a dlc actually looks like you are coordinating with the with the party you want to transact with offline uh you're signing like 10 different potential transactions or maybe there's an article involved and then you're

manually broadcasting them it's very clunky and i think you you you can't expect the type of functionality from a modern uh smart contract language and confuse that with with a dlc or rbg type approach so what we did um at sax is like our our motivation was to bring fully featured smart contracts as people have come to experience them uh in the in the previous years and try to bring that functionality to bitcoin and to do that that's why stacks is a separate smart contract layer it's almost like a like a blockchain itself i call it like layer 1.5 and you get the full featured smart contracts there people can build the the automated market makers the lending protocols nfts like all these types of different features that you've seen in crypto now that's

possible because of the fully featured smart contracts that stacks is bringing uh bringing to bitcoin when you think about what this empowers obviously defy on bitcoin is a huge component of it uh do you see this being able to create feature parity between the smart contract platforms and now on top of bitcoin uh or would there be some difference in functionality or features Yes. So I think when we were starting off, obviously we wanted to be very careful about security. We were dealing with some unique type of constraints because you can't change Bitcoin. So we had to make all the changes on the stacks there. And we came up with this programming language called Clarity. It's not Turing complete like the Solidity language that has been used on

on Ethereum, mostly for security, right? So think of that as a slightly limited subset of a full Ethereum complete language, but it gives you a lot of security benefits. And interestingly, so far, working with like a ton of developers and so many startups that are building on stacks, we haven't encountered a single use case

that you can't implement with clarity on stacks that you can implement on Ethereum. So in terms of like feature parity, it's literally like anything you can do on Ethereum, anything you can do on another newer L1 blockchain, you can literally implement that in this smart contract layer, which is amazing. I was actually quite pleasantly surprised to find that

because I thought maybe Clarity would be limiting in certain ways because we focus so much on security, but it turns out that it's basically a decidable language, meaning that if your program is decidable, like you know what the program is going to do, you can express it in the language. And by the way, it's a good thing. You should know what your program should do

if you're writing a smart contract, right? So that turned out to be a really good feature. When you think about clarity, is this something that most developers can immediately just pick up and start to code in? Or is it something similar to solidity where they actually have to go and become somewhat specialized in it?

Yeah, so I think there's always a learning curve, right? So if you're, if you want to write a smart contract and you're a developer, there's always going to be a learning curve to understanding how to separate those things into two. One is, one is the syntax of the language, like, you know, how JavaScript has a different syntax from let's say C. But then the other thing is the new concepts that you have for smart contracts, like how you interact with the blockchain, how you have these unique type of things that only smart contracts have and not a normal programs don't have that. So I think Clarity has both types of learning curves, right?

You are learning about smart contracts and how they work, but you're also learning a new syntax as well. And in Clarity's case, the syntax is actually very similar to Lisp. So a bunch of people who like programming in Lisp, like they're diehard fans of it, we mostly did it for security reasons. I think our lens on all of this is that the number one feature you should be optimizing for

is safety and security. Like it's not about speed. It's not about ease of programming. It's mostly about how secure your smart contract is going to be. And in our case, you can have mathematical proofs of correctness that the program is only going to do what it's supposed to do and it won't do anything else. When you think about the DeFi capabilities, I think the promise of decentralized finance is that you can do, obviously, transactions in a decentralized manner or payments. You can do buying and selling on decentralized exchanges. You can do decentralized lending. You can do pretty much anything you can do in the legacy financial system in the decentralized manner now. Is that ultimately what can get accomplished here? do we think we can reach a fully decentralized financial system where the infrastructure is

built on top of and around Bitcoin? Or will we have to rely on other blockchains or some sort of interoperability? How do you view the dependence on other things versus the ability to build a fully decentralized financial system exclusively on top of and around Bitcoin? Yeah. Let me separate two things here. So one is about the decentralized economy itself. And sometimes I'm talking to my friends on Wall Street, and the way I describe this is, what if I tell you that I could give you better insights into the type of risk that exists in the various systems that are hooked up on Wall Street? The answer to that is a thousand percent yes. Every single analyst, every single trader wants to know the type of risks that they're trading against or the products that they're trading. Right.

And the superpower of DeFi is that that risk could be fully transferred, meaning that you can actually analyze every single collateral, every single assumption, every single piece of code that is there. And I think that's kind of like the real superpower of DeFi. And we have actually seen it work. Like imagine that, let's say four or five months ago when there was a 38% correction in the market, the DeFi protocols actually worked as expected, right?

Like people were liquidated, like those liquidations closed. Obviously prices came down, but it wasn't a catastrophic failure of the system where the system just came to a halt, which is what would happen on Wall Street if a correction like that was to happen because there are so many black boxes. There are so many kind of like human relationships.

Like if you talk to some of the Wall Street insiders, they would tell you war stories about, you know, the market crash, like 6% and how they were making phone calls to cover like their friends' investments and whatnot, right? Like none of that exists in DeFi. Like you, it's all automated. It's all computer code.

It has full visibility. So I think in that sense, this is purely from a risk perspective and transparency perspective, a strictly better system than what exists in the Wall Street. And I think it's just open source code and it is evolving so quickly. It's pretty much like writing is on the wall that this is going to happen. And then the question becomes, what role is Bitcoin going to play in this? And I think Bitcoin has a huge role to play here. Bitcoin, obviously, is the best, most secure financial asset.

It's the durable store of value that everyone can really depend upon. But you want to make Bitcoin productive, meaning that if you think about traditional assets, the dollar has value because the dollar is the thing that everything trades against. The dollar is the thing in which people want to put up their clash. And I think Bitcoin community should actually think of Bitcoin as that asset, that it should really power the world of DeFi, like in the sense that assets should trade against Bitcoin because any value that these assets have, it should be measured against Bitcoin. Like if I'm trading something against Bitcoin, then Bitcoin is the unit of measurement, right? Bitcoin is the reserve asset against which everything trades. Bitcoin is the default asset where we use it for putting a collateral and so on.

And interestingly, like Bitcoin obviously is such a powerful asset that people are trying to pull Bitcoin into their ecosystem. And they're trying to do that by wrapped assets, which could be custodial or could be a little bit more decentralized way of issuing these assets as well. But that's not native to Bitcoin, right? Like you're effectively taking Bitcoin and you're issuing some sort of a derived Bitcoin asset on another blockchain.

And you're inheriting all of the potential security issues of that separate system versus bringing the ability to have DeFi to Bitcoin directly. And I think, by the way, it's not just DeFi either. Like smart contracts enable any type of applications people might be interested in i think nfts could be a great example because they took off recently like imagine what's the what's the value in an ft i'm not going to get into the debate and debates about you know you can copy the jpeg or something i think people have exhausted all of that

but if you look at fundamentally why an nft has value it has value because you can prove the ownership and you can prove the provenance of of that asset that hey it was it traded at this price at this date and here's the full history of it like what is a better source of ownership and provenance than bitcoin right so if you're minting these these nfts on bitcoin and they don't you don't have to store that data in bitcoin bitcoin is just seeing hashes when people are doing things on on stacks right but you can actually mint uh interesting artwork using bitcoin uh bitcoin block data uh there's even a video game people should go check it out it's called moon ray where uh land in in the game is actually defined by the scarcity of the bitcoin

blocks and you can have these uh generative art uh that is created within a game based on bitcoin blocks right and imagine how rare a bitcoin block is and if you're creating artwork inside a video game that is based on a particular bitcoin block the bitcoin block is never going to repeat again in history so just as a historic historical artifact that that art generative artwork is going to be valuable so i think time all of this back to the abilities we already have with bitcoin actually makes use cases like defy like nft even better than what we see out in the market and obviously it expands the bitcoin economy because then bitcoin will be used to do auctions of these NFTs

to support kind of like, you know, secondary markets for these types of assets. The more application people are able to build around Bitcoin, the more valuable Bitcoin is going to be, right? And I feel like for some reason over the past couple of years, I've been in the Bitcoin community long enough

that I think back in 2013, 2014, people are actually much more open to building more applications around Bitcoin. I feel like during the ICO craze of like 2017 or so, we've just developed like such a negative reaction to all types of applications that the narrative has somehow become leave Bitcoin as a store of value. We don't care about any applications, no DeFi, no NFTs. And I think that attitude in the Bitcoin community can result in kind of like not unlocking the full potential of Bitcoin, which in my view, we unlock that by

building like all sorts of applications and all sorts of different innovative things directly in bitcoin ecosystem talk to me about city coins that seems like another really interesting kind of use case here where uh for those that uh don't know uh city coins essentially is the idea that a local municipality uh is able to uh leverage this brand new type of mechanism uh and generate yield for themselves uh that they can claim um and the city of miami recently is the first city to go ahead and say yes we would like to participate in this uh they received i believe over five million dollars uh from uh the miami coin uh which is one of many city coins and uh appears to uh kind of continue to be working for them so maybe just describe you know how it works and then what you

think about something like that being built on top of bitcoin yep so i think uh so let me let me first describe stacks and how it links with it right so stacks the asset is a gas asset uh so it doesn't compete with bitcoin actually it can't even exist if bitcoin doesn't exist because uh the consensus works only uh with the bitcoin blockchain itself and even stacks has value because it is a bitcoin yielding us if you hold the gas uh token which is tax and uh you kind of lock it up in a smart contract you can earn bitcoin from the protocol right and those earnings are around like 10 and people are actually getting real bitcoin transactions on the main bitcoin chain uh as rewards and i think that's that's that's like one of the native

features of the gas asset that it has a bitcoin yield that has to and and this idea of city coins uh think of that as like a public private partnership that the the city because the city of miami has now officially accepted the treasury like obviously you know people can assume that they are taking this project more seriously and they would be willing to engage more with it right so the people who uh call it like you know the community of miami doesn't you don't have to physically be in miami but have an interest in the city and you fold the the token that represents you know the community of miami and then there can be all sorts of different use case of it right like for example uh if let's say the mayor of miami is making really good policies

uh for the city and the city is actually growing maybe there's more interest in miami coin itself and people are actually buying it right versus you could short like an sf coin if every time there's a bad kind of local policy decision so it can almost work like as a futures market for that for that city or uh that's kind of like my lens on it like not not the official thing uh it's a very community-driven project uh and i think uh the the way the the city coins uh project community kind of like described it that it's really a way for the the people to partner with the government right because now the government is getting a slice of of the treasury and people can have a say in or start a conversation about what should they do with the funds like for example this part of

the five million dollars that were generated uh maybe maybe people want to see more crypto hackathons maybe they want to see like more applications being built or more initiatives that brings kind of like you know uh more innovation to the city and interestingly uh let me tie this back to the to the yield i was talking about with stacks like because Stacks has a native Bitcoin yield. This asset that is built on Stacks is built in a way that it can also have a Bitcoin yield by proxy. So the city of Miami could actually decide that they just want to park their $5 million treasury. By the way, this treasury might keep growing, right? Because constantly when mining is happening for Miami coin, the size of the treasury is actually going

up because part of the mining proceeds are going into the treasury. But they could actually lock up the treasury and start earning a Bitcoin yield, which is a very interesting way to introduce Bitcoin to a city government and kind of like put Bitcoin on their balance sheets. What does it look like if they were to lock it up and earn yield? Is that yield single digit percentages like you would expect in the legacy world? Is it some of the crazy numbers that we saw in the smart contract DeFi world or somewhere in between?

It's 10% right now, right? So people can go to stacking.club to see that how the yield has performed over the last six, seven months since the launch of Stacks. But it's hovering around 10%. That's not bad at all compared to, you know, buying treasuries or whatever other options they would have in the legacy world. Absolutely. It makes you wonder, like, you know, after experiencing some of the yields in crypto, Like I look at my yields in the traditional bank and I'm like, you know, someone's ripping you off.

Absolutely. When you think about kind of where all this is going, is it just more and more people building on top of stacks and using the decentralized digital currency of Bitcoin and building decentralized infrastructure around it? And that's kind of the future and let's just hand it over to as many people as possible and see what they can do with it. Or is there some other plan or hope for where this all goes?

I think one thing that I've noticed in the last six months or so is that I'm really excited about the interest in the developer communities, right? So developers are organically coming to this. They're really excited about this idea of making Bitcoin programmable, of expanding kind of like the Bitcoin economy. They get the value prop of Bitcoin that, you know, Bitcoin is hard money, it's decentralized money layer, and they want to build interesting things around it. I think the work that we have done is resonating with developers. Like I am still somewhat surprised or like I don't fully get it that in the broader Bitcoin community, there is still kind of like resistance to the idea that, hey, what is this separate layer? Why is there a separate gas asset? that even though we have baked in this functionality,

that people can even just do pure Bitcoin transactions and pay the gas fee in Bitcoin if they want to. It's available for a subset of functionality right now, but it can be expanded upon so that, you know, if you really want to pay gas fees in Bitcoin, you can do that. It's going to be a lot more expensive because block space on Bitcoin is much more expensive and you'll have to pay a much higher price

versus paying the gas fee in a layer where the block space is not that expensive. and you can actually pay a cheaper fee, but you can do that. And I do think like one of the things I would love to see in the coming months is more Bitcoiners kind of like opening up to the idea of applications being built on Bitcoin.

And I think sometimes I see, you know, people criticizing Bitcoiners like, hey, what do you even do with your Bitcoin? And the reality is you can do a lot of things with your Bitcoin in a decentralized way. That functionality is here. Yes, it wasn't there like three years ago or four years ago, but as of this year, not just Stacks, I think there are other projects as well and they're maturing and they're bringing these applications to Bitcoin and the community actually embracing the movement for being a decentralization movement, not that, hey, I'm going to hold an asset and basically just sit on it. like this movement is about like building an entire financial infrastructure or even non-financial use

cases uh where you know you don't want to rely on companies and actually have this self-sovereign software uh that you use and you know you don't need anyone's permission to use that that's what people got got in into crypto for or got into bitcoin for right so i feel like more of these use cases coming to bitcoin and uh kind of like people actually uh utilizing these applications and even poking holes in them or improving them. It's all open source software. I'd love to see that more in the Bitcoin culture. What are you most looking forward to?

Like if there's one thing you're like, hey, I would love to see somebody go build this one thing or there's some milestone. What is the thing that you're looking for? Yeah. So I had this idea of a Bitcoin lending application where your Bitcoin actually stays on the Bitcoin chain. So you could put up collateral in a smart contract on the Stacks layer, whereas your

Bitcoin transaction, let's say that I wanted to borrow from you. So I would put up, let's say, 200% collateral in a smart contract. You would send a Bitcoin transaction to me, and then a clock starts on the loan. Let's say it's 150 blocks, which is roughly a day. And if I don't give you the Bitcoin back plus interest, you automatically get the collateral, which is 200%. So you can go and buy more Bitcoin. I think an application like that could be super interesting because it is a completely

trustless decentralized way of lending out your Bitcoin and then earning an interest on it. And you're kind of like, you don't need to trust anyone. You just need to verify yourself that this smart contract is going to release the collateral to you if you don't get your bitcoin back and so when you see that kind of playing out the whole idea of bitcoin as pristine collateral feels like that's something that wall street has really woken up to do you see the institutions coming in and using this or is this more focused on retail and what i would call like bitcoin centric tech companies yeah so i think right now the people

who are kind of like really using this stuff like they are early adopters and they're just excited about the idea of these types of applications around Bitcoin, right? So there are people in our community. So I think of Stacks community as almost like either a subset or overlap with the Bitcoin community. I think most of the Stacks community members would like self-identify as Bitcoiners, but some of them are just developers who are here to build stuff and they don't have like strong views about anything. So that's where we are right now. I do think that more retail use might just naturally come first because these products are built by developers.

They might be a little bit more clunky at least initially and so on. But I do agree that because Bitcoin has such wide adoption in the institutions that we might actually start seeing more institutional adoption for some of these things, maybe even faster

versus compare that to a separate ecosystem. Like they would actually have to try and convince the institutions to hold their token, right? Because Bitcoin is already kind of like accepted with so many institutions that you kind of like sidestep that step, which step might be like, you know, a really big roadblock

for more adoption of these applications in the wider institutional space. Makes sense to me. I tend to think you're onto something, my friend. Where can people go learn more about stacks or any of the infrastructure that's being built on and around it? So the best place would be stacks.co,

which is like a community website for the open source project. It has links to a ton of other stuff. If you want to see like all the cool stuff that people are building, there's an independent accelerator that just had a demo day. You can follow them at stacks startups

and they had 25 teams. I think I might've mentioned a bunch of them. this this uh this full rpg video game uh there's like very interesting stuff around nfd marketplaces there are new types of like stable uh coins that uh where the collateral can give you a bitcoin yield if you want to play around with some of these interesting things being built uh go to add stack startups and they have a list of like you know the companies that just came out literally like last week from their cohort one. So that would be a great place to actually see

what people are doing with the technology. Awesome. And then where can they go follow you on Twitter? So I am at Muneeb, which is my first name. M-U-N-E-E-B. Got it. Listen, thank you so much for doing this. You guys have made a ton of progress

since the last time we did this. And I think that it's pretty obvious the vision that you've had for this is coming together and people are starting to build on it, people are starting to use it. So it'll be fun to do this again in the future so you guys continue progressing. And I'm obviously a big fan,

so I'll be cheering you on as you do that. Awesome, thanks. Thanks so much for having me, man. Super excited.