Ten31 Timestamp 799,084
The Ten31 team spent the week taking part in the Power of Lightning Summit at Nashville’s Bitcoin Park, which is quickly becoming one of the world’s key poles for bitcoin development and community building. Dozens of the best minds in bitcoin and lightning development, including many representatives of Ten31 portfolio companies, came together for two days of panels, workshops, debates, and emergent discussions centered around the lightning network. Founders and operators from Strike, Fedi, Stakwork, River, IBEX, Oshi, and more all presented or participated in panels, many of which were led by Ten31 Partners Matt Odell and Marty Bent. The event was packed with highlights, but a few standout updates from the Ten31 portfolio included the unveiling of the iOS and Android apps for new Ten31 investment Primal – which also announced it would be open-sourcing its product stack – and the opening of Mutiny Wallet’s public beta to all users.
Portfolio Company Spotlight
Ten31 recently completed an investment in Primal, a first of its kind platform for the Nostr protocol that combines a client, caching service, and analytics tools to address several unmet needs in the nascent Nostr ecosystem. Through the combination of its sleek client application and its caching service, Primal seeks to offer an end-user experience as smooth and easy as that of legacy social media applications like Twitter (and eventually many other types of applications as well), unlocking the vast potential of Nostr for the next billion people. You can read more about Primal and Ten31’s investment in the official announcement and a Forbes article covering the raise.
Selected Portfolio News
In addition to the release of its iOS and Android beta apps this week, Primal open sourced its web app under the MIT license, making the whole user-facing Primal stack open to public development and iteration.
Mutiny Wallet opened up its beta to the public, allowing anyone to start using lightning from a browser with a few clicks.
Peach added support for RBF transactions in its latest release.
Media
Unchained Chief Marketing Officer Shimon Lazarov joined the Blockware Intelligence podcast to discuss building bitcoin companies and educating mainstream investors on bitcoin.
Market Updates
June’s CPI print showed the inflation metric up 3% Y/Y, down from the +4% recorded in May for the lowest level since March 2021.
Markets broadly popped on the headline, though data on YTD bankruptcies this week showed first-half filings at their highest level since 2010.
As of last week, the Fed’s return to balance sheet expansion in the wake of SVB’s collapse in March has now been fully unwound.
Several stories hit the wire this week about a new gold-backed currency issued by the BRICS countries, though no country in the group has issued any official word yet.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink took to CNBC to make additional positive comments on bitcoin, while bitcoin coverage in mainstream publications like Forbes appears to have pivoted in a decidedly more positive direction.
Regulatory Update
Senators Cynthia Lummis and Kristin Gillibrand released an updated version of the cryptocurrency regulation bill they introduced last year. Major updates include a proposal to deem tokens that do not entail an explicit debt or equity relationship as something other than securities, as well as a proposal to place most “crypto” assets under the regulatory purview of the CFTC.
A New York district court issued the curious ruling that sales of the Ripple cryptocurrency to institutions constituted unregistered securities issuances, while “programmatic” sales of the altcoin through exchanges (primarily to retail investors) did not.
Former SEC Chairman Jay Clayton suggested institutional and regulatory acceptance of bitcoin is notably increasing.
Alex Mashinsky, CEO of defunct exchange and “yield” platform Celsius, was arrested this week on charges including securities fraud.
Noteworthy
ACINQ, developer of the Eclair lightning implementation and the popular Phoenix lightning wallet, incorporated splicing – a long-awaited feature to improve the UX of managing lighting channel capacity – into Phoenix wallet, making it the first lightning wallet to offer the capability.
Prominent exchange Binance completed its previously announced integration of lightning network deposits and withdrawals.
OpenSats announced a new set of grants for Bitcoin Core developers, as well as 15 bitcoin-focused projects and 16 Nostr projects.
Nostr iOS client Nostur was targeted by Apple this week over in-app “zap” payments, a few weeks after Damus was threatened with app store removal over the same issue. Tools like Zapple Pay and progressive web apps may help mitigate the impact.
Travel
Austin BitDevs, July 20
Nashville Bit Devs and Meetup, August 15-16
BitBlockBoom 2023, August 24-27