Okay, today on the show, I'm joined by Alex Miller of Stacks Labs. In this show, we're gonna dig into the Stacks ecosystem, what Stacks Labs is focused on, and his experience in building the Bitcoin ecosystem. Welcome, Alex. Hey, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. So first off, drew you for what first drew you into Bitcoin? Tell us that story. Yeah, so funny enough, my first interaction to Bitcoin, actually, I guess it probably goes back to 2011 or 2012 when I was working at Stack Overflow and we hired a new head of product who to this day is one of the most ardent true believer Bitcoiners that's probably ever existed, runs a Bitcoin company now and very bought in. And so I think, you know, I'd probably read about it, I think before then, but that was kind of my first introduction into it. And I think the thing that ultimately drew me to it is I'm pretty dedicated free marketer. I like free markets. I like competition. And while I don't necessarily fully subscribe to the idea that Bitcoin is going to replace all money and become the thing, I don't think it ever really was. It certainly doesn't have the capacity to scale and do that directly on it. I think it is an incredible competitive force for government-run fiat systems. Ironically, of course, like the best example for this is the way that the US dollar exists for a lot of other economies and things right if you're in a lot of parts of Southeast Asia or South America, right you have like this secret secondary economy that's The US dollar and that it's a lifeline for people right? It's it's really important that they have this alternative to their government run system And I think Bitcoin is like the thing that can exist throughout time as the global alternative to that And so again, just as like a free marketer and a guy who likes competition, that was really appealing to me. And as someone who just kind of, again, big believer that like capitalism is the greatest force for lifting people out of poverty and improving lives over time, I really liked the idea of having that thing. And one of the things I've kind of enjoyed seeing over the last decade plus of it is that despite what else has come about, whatever other innovations happen and things in crypto, like I was never one who really thought the flipping was ever going to happen. think. We can all probably pretty agree at this point that Bitcoin is the thing that is locked in as the store of value and that unique ability of it to decentralize trust and have it established itself as the asset and the thing to do that first is really pretty incredible about it. Yeah. First off, I love Stack Overflow and was very active in the early days. And I'm curious about this guy who introduced you. Like, what was the thing that, like, was he just incessant and just kept bugging you about it? And you found like, like, relented, is that fine, I'll learn about it. And then it turns out you just love it. Was there any, like, one specific thing that made you really curious? I think, like you said, I think the thing that made me curious about it was the total side channel nature of it, let's call it, right? The fact that it existed completely outside the need for any core interaction to it. Obviously, you still need to really gain adoption. A lot of things like fiat on-ramps and off-ramps and connections into the traditional financial system. Obviously, part of what's driven so much of its adoption in the last year, last couple of years, the driver of this cycle has very heavily been adoption. by the core financial system, but it doesn't need it. And I think one of the things that Manib, the founder of Stacks, will often say, and that I think is true, is that the true innovation of Bitcoin wasn't really anything about money or anything. It was about decentralizing trust, the ability to allow any group of people anywhere in the world to agree that this is the thing that. And of course, that's what drove so much of the excitement around the idea of blockchain and ledger technology and all those things and it really is right it that really is a very powerful concept in the same way and of course based on the idea of like public key cryptography But there's something about even yet just that underlying cryptography That's like it's so brutally simple of like the way that like PGP or any public key cryptography works but it's so fundamental, right? Like you, and it enables so much to be built on top of it by doing it. And I think that's the thing that was really interesting to me. Yeah, that's really cool. uh If I could just share real quickly, I got into it. I was in an electrical engineering class and we were studying about these signals on an airplane and um these sensors on an airplane. And the question around like, what if one sensor is wrong, but then the other says something else? Like, how do you know, how do they coordinate and how do you know which one's right? And that, that question really led me to really start learning about like consensus and like in and how how systems uh kind of coordinate when there's like no central coordinating kind of body and that led to really studying bitcoin which is pretty amazing that you know i got into it through kind of sensors and the yeah I think that's cool. I mean, I think, you you hit on something else, or that sort of leads on to something else that I think is very interesting, which is, you know, you can always build greater levels of abstraction and control and centralization on top of a decentralized system to make it work in the way that people want. Obviously, the internet is built this way, right? And like the walled gardens of the internet. And that's a good thing. You can never build decentralized on top of centralized, but you can build centralized on top of decentralized. And that's actually a really key thing, because most people don't want the fully decentralized thing. Because for like a term, it's a shit user experience. And it always will be. Because you're giving up. There's an old saying like in the info in all forms of security. The number one trade off on security is convenience. And the same is absolutely true on decentralization uh and trust, right? To maximize trust or minimize trust, depending on how you want to look at it, and maximize things like decentralization and consensus, you have to give up a lot on user experience. And that's the reason that a lot of people use Coinbase. I use Coinbase for stuff, right? There's certain activities for which Coinbase is absolutely great, because you can build this really nicely done centralized service on top of the fully decentralized thing. But you can be damn sure I don't store most of my Bitcoin on a freaking centralized exchange, right? It's in self-custody on distributed multisig and things like the way that it should be. And I love that aspect of it, right? I love that aspect of starting with the absolute most decentralized because you can always build better user experience and centralization on top of that. Yeah. Let's get into what you're doing at Stacks. And I want to read kind of the homepage really quick uh as a jumping off point. uh So on the Stacks website, stacks.co, it says, activate the Bitcoin economy with the leading Bitcoin L2. Use and build apps that leverage Bitcoin as a secure base layer. Could you help unpack that for us? Yeah. So Stacks is probably one of the two oldest, either the oldest or the second oldest Bitcoin project, I think, out there, right? It goes all the way back to like 2013. know, originally called One Name and Blockstack and now just drop the block, just Stacks. So. You know, the entire idea behind it the whole time has been, again, that Bitcoin is this incredible asset. It's did this incredible thing of decentralizing trust. But it's also been pretty clear, and certainly, obviously, since the block-sized wars of 2017, that it's not going to scale to global capacity. um And I think there's very good arguments for why it actually even shouldn't. But it's got slow 10-minute block times. It does not have inherent programmability to it. It doesn't kind of need to though. It is the digital gold. It's the asset. It's the store of value. That's how I've kind of always viewed it as what it was going to be. Again, lots of fighting back and forth on that, but that's what it is. But we were talking so much about trust and consensus, right? And if you can find a way to leverage that trust without having to like take the risk of changing Bitcoin too much to do it. That's incredible because you don't want to change Bitcoin too much because everything you add to it, any complexity you add to it, does add a risk to it. And so the entire idea of the Stacks project from the beginning, we've gone through different iterations of the best way to execute on it, but the entire goal of it has been cool. Can you make a layer that adds speed, programmability, functionality, capability, scale to it? but still is fundamentally like settled back and secured by Bitcoin so that you get the best of both worlds there, right? You get the innovation, the adaptability of this speed, the scale, but you also get the security of Bitcoin. And so that's what we're going with there. And so like, if you look at Saks today, you know, it's a very, from a technical architecture, I think it's a very interesting thing where it's, you you can call it a layer two, a side chain, whatever you want, but basically it's, almost, it's its own proof of stake network that runs on an ongoing basis. in between Bitcoin blocks. But then as part of the core mining process of Stacks, every single transaction that happens on Stacks is hashed and written to the Bitcoin blockchain every time there's a Bitcoin block by what is fundamentally a proof of work system. So you basically get this proof of stake system generating blocks every few seconds in between, and then every 10 minutes, air quotes, since we all know Bitcoin is really 10 minute blocks, but every 10 minutes it... use as a proof of work system to hash all that to secure it on the Bitcoin network for it. And yeah, and that's really just has always been our goal is how do we extend Bitcoin? How do we help it fulfill its promise sort of in the idea by making it scalable and programmable enough for like everyone around the world to use? Yeah. And I've listened to Munib a number of times. mean, he's you know, OG in the industry and Stacks is one of the projects that been around for a long time. A highly respected project. uh There's a lot of different, the design space in the Bitcoin L2 ecosystem is really wide. It's wide open. um And there's multiple kind of approaches to like what an L2 looks like on Bitcoin. uh I've met with a couple that are using ZK, for example. um And I'm curious if we were to do like a compare and contrast between, know, it stacks as an L2 and how it's different from other L2s in the Bitcoin space. I wonder what that would look like. Is that something that you could kind of help paint the picture on? Yeah, I was gonna say you can, I think, ask 10 people for a definition of a Bitcoin L2 and get 20 different definitions of what they are. I think our goal has always been to use whatever like the greatest, the best technology there was at any given time that was actually productizable and usable in a way. I think ZK is super interesting, but I also think ZK is still very much in like an R &D phase. And there's a bunch that we're doing around it. uh and research that we're doing on with stacks. think it's probably ultimately where a lot of the industry goes and where we end up for it. But it's also fundamentally not actually really fully usable in production at this point. which is why, again, we went with the architecture that we have. And again, that's inherited from like when the current version of the project started writing its code, like 2019. Right. And there's been obviously numerous upgrades to it since then, but it kind of fundamentally architects back towards there. So I'd say, yeah, you have a few things. You have folks who have fundamentally like, you know, a core chain architecture like us, where you have its own mining system. you know, I think different folks have different levels of connection to Bitcoin in doing that. I think you have a lot of projects that are just like an m And we'll kind of claim a connection to Bitcoin, but don't really have one besides saying that they do. I think we're pretty unique in our mining for the chain is dependent on Bitcoin, right? Like the bids, the actual interaction around mining for stacks happens on the Bitcoin L1. And then so, you know, like actually even ultimately contributes back to Bitcoin security budget because the miners are spending Bitcoin to mine the blocks. You've got kind of ZK or just more generally roll ups that people are working on. You've got the bit VM bridge ah that again kind of sub form you could argue of ZK or not. But you know, there's an entire kind of set of chains that are all looking at the bit VM model. You've got the channel like kind of the state channel model uh like that you see with the lightning network and you've probably got other models that I'm already also forgetting about now. But I think most of the research, most of the development right now I'd say is kind of layer two chain models type we're doing are roll up models. Got it. Tell us about the ecosystem. Stacks has been around a while and has had a chance to build up uh a pretty healthy developer ecosystem. um Give us a sense of what that looks like, how many apps are on, maybe how many developers are active on the Stacks network, and maybe any other kind of initiatives that you guys are doing to... either grow awareness to more developers or invite them into the ecosystem to build stuff. Yeah, so yeah, especially the Stacks Foundation and then Hero, the DevTools company in this space, have spent years, I think, working with lots of developers. And I think we have like the fifth fastest growing developer base in crypto, definitely the highest of any. Bitcoin project and that's been, again, years of work that it takes, I think, to build a really good developer ecosystem. Of course, that's like ultimately what my background was, as we were saying, I eight and a half years at Stack Overflow, which is of course all about developer ecosystem. And it's actually my first job in Stacks was at Hero, where I also still work in addition to labs. And the reason was it was like it's Bitcoin and it's developer tools. Like those are two things that are great. I love those things. Of course I should do that. So, you know, I'd say, you know, from apps is one of the things we're trying to do is, and actually, I guess this goes back to your original question of like, what's it mean when we say activate the Bitcoin economy? There's not one thing we're trying to do, right? You have chains that are only trying to do DeFi or that are only trying to do Lend or something, right? That are very narrow focused protocols. And while like it's Bitcoin. of course, like DeFi and financial applications are going to be a huge thing on top of it. that doesn't make an entire economy, right? Like an entire economy has richness across the board. Yes, it has pure financial applications, but it also has things like art and connection and entertainment and the entire swath of an economy. And so we want everything built here like that. And so, yes, we've got developers working on everything from DeFi to meme coins to trading ah to, I mean, actually there's Block Survey, which is literally a survey application built on top of it. So, you know, there's, I'd say, dozens, if not hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, hundreds of active developers in it. ah I've got, you know, a bunch of different builder chats that I'm in on a daily basis. I think we have, like, a very robust and very, I don't know, I think one of the friendlier and better developer ecosystems and just user ecosystems that are out there. And I think that really does go back to the original roots of the project and how long it's been around, right? It's very funny. Like I ironically was relatively new to the project and that I really only came across it in 2020 and then joined it in 2021. But I will regularly meet friends or I have friends out here where I live who were part of the Blockstack ICO in 2017 and 2018, right? And that's it for anyone who doesn't know, that's actually a unique one. We're the only chain that really successfully did an SEC qualified reggae offering for tokens, right? And I think, again, it goes back to how we've tried to really build everything in the most transparent, trustworthy, right way from the beginning of doing that. But it's really amazing, is I'll still meet people who knew of this project before I did, who bought into it before I did, and still have their tokens from it, right? Or stole active members. of the ecosystem. I think, you know, short of like Bitcoin and Ethereum, I think we probably have a number of like the longest tenured people in crypto as part of the project. I believe it. um I've been listening to Munib and he used to jump on a lot of podcasts and I've listened to a number of them and have learned a ton. I mean, he's just an incredible, just really educator and inventor. um Any specific applications that you're especially excited about and what are they doing to... You know, the thing in crypto is like narratives shift really fast, right? And attention is very fleeting, probably less so on the Bitcoin space because it's, I uh think people are more, I don't know, they have more conviction, I think, versus like in other ecosystems where mindshare really does shift very fast and attention, know, everything's like, squirrel, and then they're off to something else. um I'm curious if there's anything specific that you're excited about and the go-to-market for that type of application. Yeah, you know, it's funny what you say about Bitcoin because I think you're correct and for better or worse Bitcoin is slower moving than any other crypto out there. But of course, that's also because it has more to lose and it has more in its base than anything else. And I mean that in many, many ways of the word. I think if you look at the Stacks ecosystem today. So the thing I'm most excited about, which is partly an application, partly a consensus level thing, it's something we built at Stacks Labs. It's called dual stacking. ah And you speaking there was like this is something that we absolutely took inspiration from a number of other projects in the crypto ecosystem I think you know that is one of the things that's very cool about crypto is if you look out there's there's so much going on that you can take a lot of inspiration and do a lot of learning from other people and if you're not doing that you're just kind of wasting cycles on it, but the idea is you know, so one of the other things that's really unique about stacks is our mining system gives off Bitcoin itself, right? Because basically the way it works is, and when I mentioned the proof of work system is, if you think about like proof of work mining for Bitcoin, you pay electricity to win Bitcoin as a miner, right? With Stacks proof of transfer mechanism, how our mining works, it's like one layer up for that. You bid Bitcoin to win Stacks, right? And so all that Bitcoin that miners bid then gets distributed out to people that... are locking up their stacks or stacking them, right? So it works very similar to staking in other ecosystems, but instead of it being like inflation where you just earn the native token by stacking, you actually earn Bitcoin by stacking. And so one of the things we decided to do is we launched a new kind of wrapped Bitcoin asset called SBTC. Shocking how we named that one, right? You know, and it's backed by this very robust signer network. Ultimately, it's part of consensus on the Stacks Network. backed one to one all the time. It's just meant to, you know, again, a form of Bitcoin that is faster, more programmable, but still fundamentally decentralized. You shouldn't have to go to a single custodian and engage in like a taxable transaction to peg your Bitcoin in 2.0 and L2. And so what we said is like, all right, well, you've got all this Bitcoin on the network, right? We've got thousands of Bitcoin that's pegged in as SBTC. Why can't they participate? in stacking as well with that. And so we came up with kind of, again, looking at a lot of inspiration, absolutely, with this dual stacking model where if you hold SBTC and you put it into stacking and you can then like take it from there and redeploy it into DeFi, um you earn a base yield on there, right? Like 40 to 50 basis points. And then you can up to 10x that yield by stacking STX alongside it. And so you can earn like four or 5 % yield on your STX, sorry, on your SBTC, while also earning like eight or 9 % yield on the STX that's stacked alongside it. And so you end up with this combined yield, you know, well over five, six, 7 % between the two of them, all just for, again, participating and staying in things. like, I think that's a very cool mechanism to do that really increases the base for the number of users who can come in. And also again, for a way to earn on your Bitcoin without having to take like counterparty risk on it, know, via lending or other things. And again, you're seeing a lot of different Bitcoin staking models that have come out, but I think fundamentally they all have you earning an alternative coin, an altcoin on it. We're the only place I think that you can come and you can actually be directly through like the consensus model earning Bitcoin for holding your Bitcoin. um And I think that's it's a it's a really cool product I think it's one of the best executed products we've ever done in the ecosystem just from like a user interaction perspective But most importantly like it takes advantage of this thing that I think is very unique about stacks and I think just is something people want because again as we're saying like Bitcoin is the store of value. It's a thing that people want as an asset, but ideally you want your assets to be productive Yeah, here's some numbers that might add a little color to what you just shared. So the Stacks ecosystem just crossed 600 million in TVL. It's probably a lot more than that since the publishing of your initial note on the Stackslabs.com website. 5,000 BTC are now pegged in through SBTC. That's really, really meaningful. Who's participating in this? And tell us about the user experience, because I get the sense that You kind of have to be in the know and kind of know how to do stuff in DeFi or BTCFi to be able to participate in this. But what about like institutions that may want to have some skin in the game and exposure to Bitcoin through SBTC but don't know how? And so maybe like an institutional play there. Yeah, I'd say we have everything from people who own like $10 worth of Bitcoin to people who own 10 billion. And I know of at least one person who literally has $10 billion worth of Bitcoin. That's a statue. and everywhere in between on it, right? So, you know, I will say one of the challenges that we've added, or, you know, I guess complexities to what we do is that Stacks is not EVM, right? It's we have our own smart contract language called Clarity and it runs on a Clarity VM, which does add a whole lot of joy every anytime we're doing integrations with anyone, but. Right off the bat, if you're using leather or X-verse as a Bitcoin wallet, right, which are two of the most popular Bitcoin wallets, especially for anyone who's doing like Ordinals or Runes or anything, any meta protocols on the L1, those were both originally Stacks wallets, right? And there's actually a whole interesting story, I think, of how a lot of the kind of initial developers and initial players in Ordinals were Stacks companies, because again, they'd been building on Bitcoin for a while. And so the, you do need to have one of kind of those wallets. There's also a couple others like a SIGDA and also if you're an institution Fortify that can are kind of fully stacks compatible and can mint SBDC can participate in stacks, DeFi, all of those things. And so yeah, like I said, we have everything from like the smallest retail users up to the largest whales and the largest institutions who are all doing it. Because again, ultimately, I think like the idea of Bitcoin DeFi that's actually settles back to secure by Bitcoin built on top of it through a project kind of with this like long a tenure is attractive to a lot of people. Yeah. So as the CEO of Stacks Labs, like what is your mandate? Like what's your, like if people were to, what's that? Grossex. growth stacks. Yeah, I think it's really that simple. It's how do we make stacks? the biggest Bitcoin ecosystem out there and how do we make it useful to people? How do we enable developers to build? How do we bring on new folks? How do we bring in new liquidity? Because again, go back to the front page of stacks.co, right? Activate the Bitcoin economy. That's a really big vision. It's a really big complex problem that has a lot of moving parts. It's not a two-sided marketplace. It's a 10-sided marketplace to make it happen. And so my job is just fundamentally like, do we ship well and communicate this to people so that we can get everyone in the room and build together? With such a massive mandate, how do you prioritize your day? What do you focus on first? Well, try and not let other people prioritize my day, which I think is very hard when you've got a team, right? A lot of people have a lot of questions, a lot of demands for you and things. um My day always starts first thing. I'm not kidding you with GMs and chat. I'm not kidding. Got to drop the GM in chat to start the day. um I'd say. I really like the standup model, right? I try and pull out of doing as many one-on-ones honestly at this point as I can. I try and discourage the use of DMs wherever possible too in it, is like everything in public channels wherever possible. uh Quick daily standups. I don't even love weekly meetings because I think with weekly meetings, people tend to hold questions too long and I'm like, look, either ping me about it or drop it in a standup or something, but like get things cycled. quicker because I fast cycle times are one of the most important things that you can do for keeping iteration going quickly. And then other than that, it's the, you know, I think the CEO, someone once gave me like the old bus driver analogy for a CEO, right? You're like a bus driver and your job is to keep the bus pointed in the right direction. So strategy, the right people on the bus recruiting and gas in the tank. Don't run out of money on it. And I, you know, I still think about that a lot. And my goal is like, okay, Do we have a cohesive strategy? Does everyone understand what that strategy is? Do they understand their place in it? And then there are certain roadblocks that can only be removed by the CEO, right? Or where stuff has to come up. But like, I don't want to be making every decision, but sometimes there is the exception handling that like has to happen. And so that's how I kind of think about it. And then the final last little piece is to nitpick the shit out of everything. It's kind of that like, you should be obsessed about the strategy and the top level stuff. And then you should also be obsessed about the final word on the web page and making sure that the button acts the exact way that you do. Just because sometimes when people are working on things, they lose perspective. And I think if you as a CEO aren't obsessive about a lot of different parts of this thing, it's very hard to make sure that what you ultimately put out is a high quality product. Yeah. I often wonder about like the cypherpunk kind of community and the roots of Bitcoin and how in some projects, like we're seeing a lot of kind of professionalization in especially in these projects and as you're describing, you know, the standup model versus, you know, one-on-one, like you're like, you guys are like professionals. How do you reconcile kind of the professionalization of, you know, projects inside the Bitcoin really inside crypto in general and kind of the cultural kind of roots of Bitcoin. Sure. I mean, I don't think there is really any inherent tension to that. I think if you look at many of the original folks who were around Bitcoin at the beginning, like they were deeply professional. Like, yes, they were cyber punks and they wanted to do different things, but it's not like they had no experience in what they were doing, right? A lot of these guys had built companies before and built projects before. I think one of the funny things is, and again, this is something I've learned over, you know, 15 plus years in the startup world is, How you get people to work together to do a thing is not really that different depending on what you're doing, right? Like the fundamental aspects of how people work together are pretty consistent. And I think you have to have different experiences in life and know how to mix those together to make it happen. So like we're professional in that we have a lot of people who have built companies before and who have been parts of big projects and things before. but we're also not corporate in it. I think one of the big things that we're getting very good at doing is figuring out what is the right amount of structure and process around it so that you produce things consistently and fairly for people, but also that you're able to iterate quickly. ultimately, if people are going to build things on top of you, you have to provide stuff to them. You can't just random willy-nilly ship things. You do need to give them a rollout process and good release notes and all kinds of things. And us, even we could be better at that on ongoing basis. But yeah, it's funny. A lot of the kind of most cyberpunk people that I know in the ecosystem, not just stacks, but in crypto in general, they've all built companies before. They've all done things before. um And I think it's also just part of that experience that gave them the views that they have. Yeah, you use a word that's, I think, more better to describe what I was trying to say. You use corporate. We definitely are professionals and professionalizing is a good thing. But the corporate piece is, I think, the thing that I was trying to get at, but I didn't because I didn't have the right words to share. I think you want to be professional, but you also want to still have a soul. It's got be. And I think when we talk about corporate, the thing that normally I think a lot of us mean when we say that is soulless, right? As you as a man your mandate to grow the Stacks ecosystem, like how do you think about like, like what does that mean? Like how do you think about brand? How do you think about like what KPIs are driving kind of whether or not like it's things are going in the right direction? Can you share any of that? Yeah. Transaction volumes, activity. um I think share of voice and general sentiment are really important. think especially when you're, it's funny, crypto is both old and very young. And so I think just understanding sentiment and where we're going is a very big part of it, even though there's really no great. concrete metrics for those kind of things. It's a little bit of finger in the air and just knowing it. But again, you see it also through developer activity, through transaction activity, through the quality of the applications that are getting built in, the monetary velocity, how much are things moving through applications and continuing to go. Those, think, are all really like the fundamental aspects of it. Any kind of marketplace, any kind of economic engine that you're trying to build, that's what you want to be looking at. It's the same things that we do. Yeah, at least in the Ethereum kind of the alt space, there's a project called Kaido. And Kaido helps to kind of quantify mindshare, which is really just the level to which people are talking about your project or anything related to your project and attempts to quantify that. But it also does another thing. Not everyone's voice is equal. And so it tries to kind of quantify what influential people are talking about is I wonder if there's something like that in the Bitcoin space that could help to quantify mindshare. I haven't seen it, but I'm guessing I'm kind of surprised they haven't expanded out to that as well, but you certainly could. yeah. How do you think about the other L2s? Do you see them as competitors, co-opitition, collaborators? um I think it's a mixture of it. Like I think you know, obviously any group of people that Were competing in start I say friendly competitors in many ways I think ultimately like yes We're both competing today for a lot of like the same attention, especially the same investment from people but also ultimately Again, the pie is still such a small, small piece of what it's ultimately going to be that it's very much not a zero sum game right now. And I think the ability to collaborate and work with them again, you see this with how many projects, including us, put research behind BitVM, right? Or invested in things or tried to, you know, we put a lot of work behind the Bitcoin layers narrative starting three or four years ago, because we just saw like, look, if everyone's off thinking they want to build over here, do this thing like we would need people to realize how much potential there is behind Bitcoin, right? And obviously like, you know, the creation of ordinals did a huge, huge amount for that and for kind of unlocking that imagination for people. So on one hand, yes, like absolutely there's competition with other folks, but I think also there's a huge amount of shared learning, shared research, and we're ultimately, I think a lot of us, all still building towards a lot of the big same vision, right? Want to see the same stuff in the world. I'm obviously also talking here about like legit projects versus people who are just like trying to get in and pump something to like 20 million bucks and run away with it. Fuck those people. But for folks who are actually trying to build something like I love talking to them. I love thinking about what they're doing versus what we're doing, how we're approaching it. And just knowing that at the end of the day, like we're all kind of driving towards the same place. Yeah. What's the role of Stacks Labs? Look at this situation, for example. Let's say there's a developer team that's building on Stacks, um but their end customer is retail, whatever it is. Maybe let's take the example of the survey application. What's the role of Stacks Labs in helping that project get end customers, with uh really their go-to-market? maybe anything like around accounting, is there, or operations, like what's the role there of, you how you help them be successful because Stacks Labs ultimately is in service of these developers. Yeah, yeah, I mean, our main role is to build like the block, build market, the blockchain, make it accessible to users and things, build all the core infrastructure of the ecosystem. As part of that, we obviously have, we have a ton of developer resources. And then there's other folks in the ecosystem, like the foundation and the endowment that are more likely and like will provide more grants and things to promising teams and help invest in them. And you've also got like stacks accelerator. So there's a lot of different orgs providing resources into things. I think our core role is really about the fundamental architecture and infrastructure of the ecosystem, helping people onboard into it easily. a lot of our developers then too are just available and accessible on Twitter and in our Discord and things like that for questions and stuff like that. So we're probably not gonna help you like. build the company in detail, again, you've got things like the Stacks Accelerator and the Endowment that'll fund things like that. Got it. And his stacks labs part of like involved in the accelerator or the uh any activities from the endowment. Yeah, so the Endowment Fund Stacks Labs itself and has actually owned Stacks Labs as well, um but is also based offshore because that makes it easier to do a lot of the investment things and has just kind of the greater purview over things. Yeah, like I said, ultimately we're really focused on the core chain stuff for labs, as again, a lot of the foundations are, but part of that is also creating the entire developer ecosystem around it, right? So like there's certain parts of that that we take and we'll do, and then there's certain parts that other folks will weigh into. got it. You spoke at um Washington DC recently and I'd love to talk about that. What was the process by which you were invited and how did you feel as you, I I imagine you were probably really excited and nervous and what was that experience like testifying in front of Congress? Yeah, so we've been involved on the policy side for a while now, and especially through the Blockchain Association, as well as kind of a couple of the investors in the Stacks ecosystem. So in particular, yeah, so back in May, I went down and testified in front of Congress as part of a roundtable or on the Market Structure Bill. So the Clarity Act, which is now pending before the Senate and fingers crossed will go through there. It's passed the House, waiting on it to pass the Senate. It'll definitely get signed if it does. the reason that they, so basically the House Agriculture Committee staff reached out to us because, know, again, very old project. We're well known around Washington, D.C. for having done this reggae offering for tokens. And... One of the funny things about it, as I testified about, is we ended up spending more on compliance over the last six years since running that Reg A offering than we raised. We raised about $15 million in the Reg A. There was also additional stuff like through Reg S and Reg D. But through the Reg A, which was basically retail sales in the US. We spent several million dollars to get it done. We then had to fight off an SEC investigation after it. We've had massive annual filing compliance costs. And so part of what I was down there talking about is like, look. We need a market structure bill because if you want people to come in and register right and to do things the right way and to be inside a framework Hey, that's good for good projects and we'll keep out bad projects But like right now basically you're making impossible for someone who wants to do this the right way and that rewards and incentivizes bad actors So like I said oh kind of our general story was still, was known there, but then members from like House Financial Services and House Agriculture reached out to us. We talked to them some and then they were like, hey, will you come down and like testify as part of this thing? And so went down there, did it. was a crazy experience. The amount of adrenaline that I think goes through you when you're like in front of a house panel like that. The funniest thing is that when you're done, it's just like over with no transition, right? Like they bang the gavel and they're like, all right, thanks everyone for coming. We're done. And like two minutes later, you're outside the room and three minutes after that, you're outside on the street and you're like, okay, there's just like zero transition income downtime from it. But it was a really fun experience. It was great getting to meet. I met with a number of other kind of representatives and senators while we were out there as well. It was really good to get to talk to them about it because I think a lot of people hear a lot about crypto and things in the abstract and it just sounds technological and weird and why that. But think getting to talk about it from a true small business point of view and where you're look, we tried to do this and these are the specific problems we ran into and here's where they made it hard. Here's how you can make it better and do it and encourage people. um It was really gratifying to get to be a part of that and it was to get the feedback from legislators and from staff, like, okay, this helps us really understand what we need to do and think about it. I like that you framed it as a small business, like what the experience was like as a small business, because I've had the same conversation with a number of people and a number of projects. And at least on the Ethereum side, they describe themselves often as like a project, but it's really like a small business. They're trying to build a product, get customers, make revenue. And I think the framing does a number of things. When you're a when you define yourself as a small business, it helps you to kind of optimize on things that help your business last versus if you're a project, then oftentimes, at least on the Ethereum space again, ah you kind of over-optimize for like the token, which does very little for the actual product or business that they're actually building. And I think it makes a big difference. ah How is that framing you think received in the Bitcoin ecosystem? Is it? Is it cool to define yourself as a small business versus like a project? Yeah, I think so. I think actually in a lot of ways for a lot of like deep Bitcoiners, they I think prefer that framing. And in a lot of ways, it's also more true in the Bitcoin space, right? Because sort of like you have Bitcoin as this asset and token there, but you have fewer tokens and things built on top of it. you really do have more businesses that need to be built with a cash flow basis or that need to be built with like some kind of way of providing a service and a value on top of it. So yeah, I think the interesting thing is there's probably more small bitcoins, sorry, small businesses in Bitcoin than any other ecosystem. I love that. think that's, I think if all of crypto would be more healthy, I think, or much healthier if, if we just kind of looked at these things that we're building, like these are not just applications, they're not products or projects. They're, they're actually small businesses. And, you know, and the aim is like, how do we add value? And I think that this, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And that, that gets lost a lot, at least in the circles that I'm in. And I think it's really a shame. I mean, I'm glad to see that that's a good framing that people are, you know, accepting the Bitcoin space. Let's fast forward, let's say, I don't know, a year, two years from now. And if everything goes right, according to your plan and to your vision, like what will the Stacks ecosystem look like two years from now? I think just a bigger version of what it is now. You know, as you said, we've got, you know, 5,000 BTC pegged in on SBTC. I'd like that to be 50,000. And um not just because like, I'd love to have 50,000 Bitcoin pegged in, but because that's just indicative of how much like economic activity is happening on it how much is moving through like the small businesses that are getting built on top of it. I'd love to see, again, both the growth in the number of DeFi applications and the amount of lending and borrowing that's going on. I think the ability to take loans against your Bitcoin is one of the things that will just be a very long-term, highly desirable thing for people to do, period, around Bitcoin. But again, the number of other projects and things, I think it's that activity and the presence of people around doing things like that that allows the rest of the economy to flourish as well. It's literally like New York City, right? Finance might be the core of it, But everyone being there for finance is what enables so much more to exist. um Yeah. And then, you know, people just moving over. I'd love to see, like, again, other projects from other ecosystems running over, but even more than that, just new people onboarding who hadn't tried anything before, who, you know, like the idea of Bitcoin, who want to maintain as much custody over their Bitcoin as they can, but want more functionality, want it faster, want it cheaper to work with. Yeah. I personally work in DeFi myself and for my day job, but I work with lots of DeFi projects in multiple ecosystems and have met with a number in the Bitcoin, BTC, FI space. And uh one kind of clarion call I've heard a lot is if only like 5 % of all the BTC was actually in DeFi, mean, it would like double or triple whatever it is in the Ethereum and Solana space. um How do we get there? Because so far it's been kind of hard to actually unlock all that the liquidity in Bitcoin to make it available in kind of these decentralized kind of financial systems. Yeah, you have to build things that people actually want, right? And I think the so much of the early DeFi was based on, you know, artificial yields and then, you know, incentives and chasing things. And fundamentally, if people aren't coming in, it's because you haven't built something that like they want or need or that they feel there's value in for them. I think on average, you know, the average Bitcoin holder is the average Bitcoin is held by someone who's much more conservative than Ethereum, right? It's like, yes, Bitcoin speculative, but also not in the same way that Ethereum or other altcoins are and honestly for them, have stacks, right? Like it's not. It's just it's it is the stable asset, at least on a relative basis with crypto. And so people aren't going to take the same chances with it on it. A lot of people owning Bitcoin also got burned really badly in 2021, 2022, right? With BlockFi and Celsius and, you know, Voyager, a lot of stuff there. And so I think that really set back Bitcoin DeFi adoption, even though Bitcoin DeFi was kind of thought as a thing then. You still had to give up your custody there. I think so much of the research and the development work that's going on right now around Bitcoin. And again, this is true with BitVM. It's true with lot of the work we're doing in Stacks is how can you allow people to make use of their Bitcoin with minimal trust assumptions? Yeah. I think we have a very good trust model right now with SBDC, but our holy grail for it is absolutely figuring out how can you keep it in your wallet, in your keys, without, you know, in your wallet and with your keys, but still participate in the economic system, right? Or at least, you know, only have to trust one good actor instead of having to trust a lot of good actors on it. I think that's... At a technical level, a lot of those problems are gonna have to get solved. um But also part of what's just gonna do this is like, if people really do view Bitcoin as like the safe asset, it's also just gonna take time as it transitions and becomes more and more part of the core financial system before people view it in that same way and don't wanna sell it, wanna leverage against it instead. Yeah. Well, Alex, is there anything else that you want to talk about that we haven't yet? No, I think that covers it pretty well. I would say a lot of good questions, think probing at like what kind of what we think about and how we do there. It's, main thing I'd say is like, if this is something that sounds interesting to people, I'm Alex L. Miller on Twitter. Feel free to drop me a note whenever. Check out Stacks at Stacks.co. Don't come to StacksLabs.com. As you said, it's a one page site. Go to Stacks.co to kind of learn more. ah If you've got Bitcoin, come dual stake your Bitcoin with us. And if you're a builder, I'd love to hear from you about what is it that you want from building on Bitcoin. Awesome. Well, Alex Miller from Stacks Labs. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me Peter.