Bitfinity Weekly: The Crypto President

Welcome to Issue #142 of Bitfinity Weekly for our #BITFINIANS community. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, sign up here.

What's in Today's Email?

• Bitcoin Bytes
• Global Crypto News
• In the IC
• This Week in our Blog
• Tweet of the Week
• Meme Time
• A Matter of Opinion

Bitcoin Bytes

Hot Air Rises: Alkanes was deployed on Block 880000, a new open source framework and Bitcoin metaprotocol by the Oyl team. Alkanes promises smart contract programmability to Bitcoin, with devs able to utilize UTXOs and webassembly to create trustless and fully on-chain applications. For devs, there is already a working indexer, RPC and SDK to begin building.

Pass the Chips: Gizmo, an "imaginary kitten" drawn by Bitcoin Puppets artist Fou, is now the mascot of a Chinese snack. Puppets community member @xmq0909 turned out to be the entreprising mind behind the product. The puppets community and Fou have both cheered this revelation, as the Ordinals project is centered around anti-copyright and anti-IP rights, making all community assets free to use for anyone.

Easy as 1-2-3-4: Ordinals marketplace Ordzaar has upgraded their launchpad to make it easy to launch new collections, deployable in just four steps. With no intermediary steps or manual approval process necessary, Ordzaar is now the first fully permissionless launchpad in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Global Crypto News

Welcome Home: Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road marketplace, was granted a full and unconditional pardon by Donald Trump, fulfilling a major promise the President made during his campaign to the crypto community. Ulbricht, who was sentenced to double life imprisonment without parole, has been seen as a martyr and living symbol of the cypherpunk and anarchocapitalist ideals of early crypto communities in the years following his incarceration.

The Crypto President: President Trump signed an order on Thursday to ceate a cryptocurrency working group, fulfilling another campaign promise made to the crypto community. The newly created crypto advisory council is expected to work with the president on digital asset policy, crypto legislation, help establish Trump's promised Bitcoin reserve, and coordinate between agencies like the SEC, the FTC, and the United States Treasury.

Colder Storage, Perhaps: Ledger co-founder David Balland was kidnapped from his home in Cher, France and held hostage for 24 hours. Balland was recovered by local law enforcement and treated for minor injuries, though it is unclear at this time whether or not a ransom was paid. Ledger, one of the best known cryptocurrency hardware wallets on the market, has seen minor scrutiny over the years as they have been hit with customer data breaches in the past.

In the IC

Bob and Alice: ICP project BOB (Blockchain-on-Blockchain), along with its sister project Alice.fun, conducted a massive airdrop to its community, distributing to both $BOB holders and traders on the Bob.fun platform, proportional to how much $ICP was spent. The airdropped $ALICE is the governance token for the Alice AI agent on the Internet Computer blockchain.

Part Three: The DFINITY Foundation released the third part of its blog series on how the Network Nervous System (NNS) has evolved; from governance participation incentives to improved privacy measures, the NNS is continuously being improved to strengthen secure, decentralized democracy on-chain.

Plasma Drive: Join the DFINITY Foundation and the ICP community for a special livestream on Wednesday, January 29th, to celebrate the Plasma milestone. You can watch via YouTube. Topics will include "insights into key features, community-driven efforts to improve known neurons" and more.

This Week in our Blog

The Bitcoin community has long been discussing reintegrating OP_CAT (an early-now-disabled opcode sleeping dormant) to improve programmability on Bitcoin. But what is OP_CAT, why was it disabled, and how does Bitfinity fit into the bigger picture? Read this week's deep dive as we cover everything you need to know:

OP_CAT: The Opcode That Could Make Bitcoin Purr

Uncover the captivating journey of OP_CAT, the Bitcoin opcode that was disabled at the start but could be revived and play a role in transforming the world’s first blockchain.

Bitfinity BlogFred

Tweet of the Week

Meme Time

A Matter of Opinion

Last week we wondered what the future of crypto would look like under President Donald Trump. In the days leading up to his inauguration, Trump deployed his own memecoin on Solana and continued to make news for crypto ventures tied to his family's names (like the surprise launch of his wife's Melania Meme token and World Liberty Financial making the news again for making large Bitcoin and Ethereum purchases).

Trump's actions in the days following the official start of his second Presidential term has been more "serious", less memecoins and more about fulfilling the promises he made to the larger crypto community during his campaign last fall.

Among those promises was the release and full pardon of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road who has become a Bitcoin martyr and Libertarian hero in the eyes of the crypto and cypherpunk communities. The Silk Road was a dark web marketplace notorious for a bustling drug trade but it was also one of the first ecommerce platforms to embrace Bitcoin as usable curency, and was known for supplying rarities such as out-of-print books, among its less salacious offerings.

Trump continued to deliver on Thursday as he signed a new executive order to help define and structure crypto policy, fulfilling another big chunk of his campaign promises. Although a strategic crypto reserve has not been officially announced, Trump's Working Group on Digital Assets is set to evaluate and establish criteria for a "national stockpile", which seems to all but confirm it.

Another lauded move is the executive order's prohibition of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) both within the U.S. and abroad. For many crypto advocates, the creation and forcible adoption of CBDCs is antithetical to crypto's ethos because of the potential for threats regarding economic surveillance, privacy concerns, stifling innovation, and more.

How the markets react to all of this is anyone's guess but it seems America is taking steps into a tentatively hopeful crypto future.

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