Day 18: Stacks will be the Paypal mafia of Bitcoin

I had hotpot up in Shenzhen about a week ago with the Ryder and Xverse teams. Xverse just closed their $5 mm seed round and the Ryder team was in town working on the commercial for their new hardware wallet.

Prior to Xverse, Bitcoin wallet innovation had mostly stopped. There were a bunch of new Lightning wallets that also have Bitcoin wallets but don't work reliably are custodial.

Prior to Ryder, development on hardware wallet UX had also stalled. Ledger just keeps adding more tokens and Trezor...I don't know what Trezor is doing. Both just punt on the "what to do with seed phrases problems" and "solve" it by giving users a piece of paper to write it down. They gave up. Nobody likes to use their hardware wallet...we use them only begrudingly. What Ryder's come up with will revolutionize this.

And just before writing this, I just had a call with Chris of Console...he's got some ideas on Web3 chat that I think might revolutionize communication for those who want to use their own identities with BNS and ENS names.

Let's just say I'm totally blown away by all three of these teams...and it's mind-blowing to me that they all came out of the Stacks family and are building on Bitcoin. It's incredibly motivational to see what former colleagues and peers I met along with the way are capable of.

We built a lot tech while I was at Blockstack, but I think in the long run we'll find that the most valuable thing we built was the community of builders and entrepreneurs that's building on Bitcoin. Really excited to see where things go next!