AUSTIN, Texas – Bitcoin ecosystem company Trust Machines said it saw “explosive growth in Bitcoin (BTC) use cases” in the first quarter of 2023, according to new research from the company.
The report identified non-fungible bitcoin tokens (NFT), bitcoin name services (BNS), and recent developments on the Stacks blockchain — a smart contract platform for bitcoin that powers much of the Trust Machines ecosystem — as the most important Use cases driving new growth and adoption.
While Web3 development based on other blockchains like Ethereum has grown exponentially, Bitcoin development is lagging behind. However, this is likely to change as new use cases and technologies emerge, said Muneeb Ali, CEO of Trust Machines and co-founder of Stacks, during a panel on Friday at Consensus 2023 titled “Building on Top of Bitcoin (for Real). “
“I think it’s the revitalization of the developer culture that I’m looking forward to by far the most. It’s like bitcoin is fun again because there is a place to build again and I think that’s the best thing that could have happened,” Ali said.
The Bitcoin blockchain has historically been limited to payments. Even Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto, rejected non-financial uses for the dominant blockchain. However, new technologies are emerging that have begun to use Bitcoin as the Layer 1 foundation for the network’s evolution to Web3.
Bitcoin NFTs made a splash earlier this year with the launch of the Ordinals protocol in January. The protocol uses “inscriptions” or arbitrary content such as text or images that can be added to sequentially numbered satoshis or “sats” – the smallest units in bitcoin – to create unique “digital artifacts” that are preserved and transmitted via bitcoin can network, like all other sats.
According to Trust Machines research, over a million inscriptions have been minted.
The company’s research also shows a 400% increase in BNS registrations since 2022 on its sister platform BTC.us. The platform allows users to register human-readable “.btc” domain names, which can then be used to host a website or even send and receive bitcoin. Trust Machines credits this increase to both ordinal numbers and the launch of Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social media protocol Nostr.
The Stacks blockchain — founded by Muneeb Ali and Princeton University computer science professor JP Singh — currently powers most of the applications in the Trust Machines ecosystem. Research by crypto data analysis firm Messari shows that Stacks’ average daily active users and addresses “increased 76% and 42%, respectively, in the fourth quarter [2022].”
Stacks released a white paper late last year showing how a new digital asset called Stacks Bitcoin (sBTC) can be used to make Bitcoin fully programmable.
“While we have seen a resurgence in Bitcoin NFTs over the past few months, more needs to be developed to unlock Bitcoin [decentralized finance] Use cases complete,” according to the study, adding that one of the biggest efforts to unlock this is sBTC.
Stacks has now launched an sBTC testnet and is targeting a mainnet launch later this year.
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