@mattpocockuk My favorite way to consume knowledge is YouTube. You are hands down my favorite channel. Please keep it up! If I make it rich one day I’ll be sponsoring you with no expectations in return.
Today, Satflow’s Rune/Ordinal exchanges go live! Secure purchase (non-snipable listings), sweeps, bulk ordinal bidding, and advanced counter-snipe tooling are now available to everyone trading Ordinals and Runes at zero cost! Bitcoin is on the presuppose of major unlocks with upcoming soft-forks, L1 protocols, and a thriving L2 ecosystem (Bitcoin Season 2). But it wasn’t always this way on the mother chain. How did we get here?
My journey with Bitcoin started in 2013, when I was tinkering with Bitcoin mining in my parent's basement. Like many others, I got sucked into the defi experiments on Ethereum and other chains during the 2015 - 2022 era, and soon, Bitcoin was a distant memory.
Fast forward to the genesis of Ordinals, when @kiwi_dream, @anatolie And I noticed that Cryptopunks were actively being inscribed on Bitcoin via Ordinals. We threw together bitcoinpunks (dot) com as a test in "first is first" asset minting on Bitcoin. It quickly minted out as the first 10k PFP collection on Bitcoin, inspiring BRC-20 and other metaprotocols. We went on to ship the first Ordinals marketplace to do $1M of daily volume, @Ordinals_Market in an all-out 2 week sprint to plug the gap for trading early-Ordinals collections.
Metaprotocols came, and went, but the trading activity persevered. We spent last year minting BRC-20s, Bitmaps, and then the most fun mint of all; Nodemonkes. It was clear that the market was ready for institutional-grade tooling for Bitcoin traders as asset values had approached billions in value with our 0.03 Nodemonkes mints souring to over 0.7 BTC a piece just a few weeks later. We noticed that the mempool was becoming saturated with traders utilizing "RBF," competing using Ethereum-like MEV methods to snipe trades from unsuspecting users. Enter Satflow.
It was time to build tooling to fit the now-millions of dollars in value trading daily for Ordinals and fungible tokens. We spent most of this year building in private beta, building a mempool-first exchange @ Satflow. Bitcoin's 10-minute block time presents a unique challenge for natively trading and collecting non/fungible tokens. Users have 10 minutes to move around assets, buy Runes, and buy Ordinals, all before confirming on-chain. Since the state of a user's wallet can change so much in those 10 minutes, we spent much of the year building Satflow to display a user's real-time wallet state with our mempool-first exchange. It changed the experience from "click once and wait 10 minutes" to a user's ability to do so continuously based on the mempool state.
Today, I couldn't be more optimistic about the future of asset issuance and trading on Bitcoin L1. With its ETF approval, Bitcoin is cemented as the gold standard denomination of the Crypto industry and thus ideal as the unit of account for trading fungible and nonfungible tokens. We have some great backers (too many to mention here), but a special shoutout goes to @FarmerJoe0x, @delitzer, @DavidFBailey, and @jessewldn for making this possible. We're excited to build Ordinal/Rune exchange tooling for pro traders at Satflow and look forward to "Season 3" of Bitcoin. Stablecoins, AMMs, and expressivity are all coming to Bitcoin L1, unlocking the industry's sleeping liquidity giant. We're just getting started; stay tuned for what's next @satflow. 🫡
Every time I teach a new session of my Intro to Computer Science class, I am increasingly convinced that Python is in fact a really bad first programming language.
If you are using VS Code to write TypeScript and get annoyed by cmd+click teleporting you to a type definition instead of the implementation:
Settings UI: "Prefer Go To Source Definition"
or settings.json: "typescript.preferGoToSourceDefinition": true
You are welcome 😌