#11 - September 15th, 2020
⚡Mobile Trading, DLCs, Lightning Gaming and much more!
Welcome to the 11th issue of this newsletter which covers market trends, Lightning Network developments and updates about LN Markets.
If you enjoy this content, feel free to spread the word!
⚒️ Building
We have pushed a new release with some cool features:
History of all your deposits and withdrawals in your profile section (upper right of your trading screen)
For all closed positions, addition of the Exit Time and and Exit Event in the Closed Positions blotter:
Optimization of the front-end for instant trading, directly from your smartphone. Here is how you can create an account, enter a position, close it, and get funds back to your wallet in less than a minute!
We also did several bug fixes over the summer. A big thanks to our community for pointing them out to us and helping us resolve them quickly.
We have more coming. Our next big release will include the much requested doc for our Open API: the start of the Lightning trading bot era 🤖
🤓 Discreet Log Contracts (DLCs)
Discreet Log Contracts is a system that could enable setting up contracts between two parties directly on the Bitcoin blockchain, while minimizing the trust required in the oracle that provides external data, with a low block data footprint and in a more private manner than current smart contracts implementations.
Indeed, by creating a DLC, two parties can form a contract based on preset conditions without revealing any of these conditions: its appearance on the Bitcoin blockchain is no different than an ordinary multi-signature output.
First proposed in 2018 by Thaddeus Dryja, co-author of the Lightning Network white paper, the first DLCs are now live on the Bitcoin blockchain!
Chris Stewart, Suredbits founder, and Nicolas Dorier, the man behind the awesome BTCPay Server, have recently entered a Discreet Log Contract regarding the outcome of the US elections, using two different implementations:
DLCs are part of a new wave of innovation coming to Bitcoin that leverage it as a powerful financial infrastructure, exciting times!
If you want a deep dive into DLCs, Marty Bent’s podcast with Ben Carman from Suredbits is here for you:
🎮 Lightning Gaming
The Lightning Network enables new business models for gaming companies. Indeed, with the ability to proceed instant and cost-efficient payments, game developers can offer to their players in-game rewards in the most desirable and neutral currency on earth! Here is a great overview of the Lightning gaming space by ecurrencyhodler:
🔮 Reading: Decentralized BitMEX
A long and interesting read from the team at Multicoin Capital on non-custodial perpetual swaps, the different implementations and necessary trade-offs between safety vs liquidity/leverage, flexibility vs simplicity, oracle safety vs speed, and between different levels of decentralization:
With LN Markets, we have decided to focus on the speed of fund transfers. We believe that it is the strongest value proposition to build a decentralized BitMEX.
An other interesting read - an update on RGB protocol with Giaccomo Zucco:
RGB entered beta in June and the first wallets supporting this protocol are due in a few months.
⚡ Bonus
The IRS has published a contract opportunity for a pilot cryptocurrency tracing solution that would enable their agents to:
“trace transaction inputs and outputs to a specific user and differentiate them from mixins/multisig actors for Monero and/or Lightning Layer 2 cryptocurrency transactions with minimal involvement of external vendors”
As Marty Bent puts it:
As an hedge against global macro events, NASDAQ-listed MicroStrategy has doubled down on its plan to switch its US dollar treasury to magic internet money. MicroStrategy has just acquired nearly 17,000 more bitcoins, for a total of 38,250 bitcoins at an aggregate purchase price of $425 million:
And finally, we would like to thank all our users for their support from the very start, and are humbled by the kind words of Bitfinex CTO Paolo Ardoino!
Please feel free to reach out to us on Twitter and Telegram.
Thank you all for the support and let’s keep building a BILLION sats company together!