 Hello everyone, welcome to Market Talks on Coin Telegraph, I'm your host Giovanni. Here we discuss the latest news moving the markets as well as valuable insights from industry leaders, traders and influencers. We have a special guest today, his name is Munib Ali. So Munib is the co-founder of Stacks, a Bitcoin layer for smart contracts and the CEO of Trust Machines, which is building the largest ecosystem for applications for Bitcoin and their underlying technologies. So Munib has been working on internet protocols and distributed system for 15 years and received his PhD in computer science from Princeton University, where he occasionally gives guest lectures as well. So now we're going to play a short video with Munib so that you can understand better his biography. Hey Munib. Hey everyone, how's it going? How are you? I'm great. It's a pleasure to have you on our show. So yeah, I think that we can get straight into the question that I prepared for you. So just to get started, for people that don't know, for the viewers that don't know, can you explain what it means to build on Bitcoin? So we know that a lot of protocols, a lot of apps are being built on Ethereum and other blockchains, but a few know that this is possible also on Bitcoin. So can you explain how it works? Yeah. So I think most people think of Bitcoin as a store of value or as money, but the Bitcoin protocol actually has limited programming functionality right at the Bitcoin base layer. So that functionality is fairly limited. Like the developers can do certain things, but not the type of full execution environments or fully expressive smart contracts that you see on newer chains like Ethereum and others. And I think that that's actually by design. Like this is how Bitcoin was designed on purpose. The base layer of Bitcoin is supposed to be simple, supposed to be durable, supposed to be very hard to change. And Bitcoin is basically trying to do one thing, right? And one thing really well, which is being kind of like the store of value that everyone can use and benefit from. And then you can build new features around Bitcoin in Bitcoin layers, which are to think of that as new types of layers that are built on top of Bitcoin. I think Lightning is a great example of that, where it is a layer for fast, cheap payments. And people are kind of like, you know, moving their Bitcoin from the Bitcoin base layer. They kind of lock it there, use it in the Lightning channel, and then settle back on the Bitcoin base layer. So that's the basic concept of layers that instead of trying to change the Bitcoin main protocol at the base layer, you introduce new types of functionality as separate layers. And this goes really well with, you know, introducing more experimental features or more complicated things. Like with the stacks layer, you have the ability, developers have the ability to program fully expressive smart contracts, meaning that it has a full execution environment. Anything people can build on Ethereum or some of the newer chains like Solana and Evalanche, they can implement that in a Bitcoin layer. And because stacks is a Bitcoin layer, it is settling all of the transactions on Bitcoin as well. And there are very interesting ways where your transaction on the Bitcoin base layer can actually interact with the smart contracts that are running in the stacks Bitcoin layer. Okay, that's fascinating, because of course, Bitcoin can provide the maximum security because it's the most decentralized cryptocurrency on earth. But at the same time, the possibility to build on top of it, it's incredibly fascinating. And I'm really curious to see how it's going to play out. So what is the current state of that? How much is being built on Bitcoin at the moment? Yes, I think this is one of the things where a lot of people, just like you said, you know, instantly get the potential opportunities here. That this could be huge if the true value of Bitcoin can be unlocked. Like even in the bear market, Bitcoin remains the largest asset class. It is around like $400 billion of capital that's mostly just sitting there. And this is pristine capital. Like Bitcoin is the most trusted asset in the crypto industry. And right now, it doesn't really get deployed as productive capital. Like Bitcoin gets traded on centralized exchanges like Binance or Coinbase. But Bitcoin is not trading on decentralized exchanges. Bitcoin is not getting deployed into lending protocols. Bitcoin is not getting deployed into all sorts of like these new applications that are being built. Like for example, NFT marketplaces. NFTs are not trading against Bitcoin these days. So that's the opportunity. And I think people instantly get it when you tell them that hit all these different applications can be enabled in a decentralized way through Bitcoin layers on top of Bitcoin. The devil is always in the details. Like when you double click, when you go into the security properties of these layers, how easy it is to move your Bitcoin from the main chain into a layer and then back out. And so I would say that in general, there are I would say four main Bitcoin layers. Lightning is probably the one that most people know about. There's RSK and Stax. Both of them have full execution environments, meaning full smart contracts. And there's Liquid, which is a federated network that right now has only sports for new assets, but they're working on smart contract languages as well. I would say, even if you combine all the kind of like four major Bitcoin layers and compare it to the rest of the crypto industry, like Ethereum smart contracts or other newer chains, I would say the Bitcoin layers are relatively small right now. And they are at various stages of maturity. Many developers are discovering them. They're kind of like fixing the developer tools and infrastructure. And they're growing slowly. But I think they're reaching a point of maturity, especially last year, I would say, where there's like enough there, enough capital, enough really bright teams that are building applications, that it's reaching a certain point of maturity. As far as I'm concerned, I think for me, the two of the biggest things that are ongoing, especially for the Stax there, is one is a trustless Bitcoin peg, meaning that the ability to very easily move your BTC from the main chain into the Stax layer and then out without trusting any custodian, without trusting any Federation type of setups and so on. So I think that could be a major, major unlock in terms of a lot of users who already have Bitcoin being able to easily move it into a Bitcoin layer and then back and then deploying it into applications that way. Yeah, that's super cool. Also, I was talking about that with the hedge fund manager, Mark Huesco, not long ago. He was making the same point that according to him, it's a bit of a waste to keep Bitcoin just sitting in your hard wallet and not do anything with just hoarding it, just waiting for the price to go up. Of course, a lot of people, the majority, I guess, use it as a store of value. But still, if you can use it and deploy it in some sort of financial stack, so using it for real finance, a real finance kind of landing it out and for all these functions, that would make Bitcoin much more useful and productive as far as I can see. So you were mentioning the current market conditions. So what is your overall view of the current market conditions? Yeah, so I think I got involved with Bitcoin in like 2013. So I've seen a couple of these cycles before. And obviously, nobody knows how the future is going to turn out, but at least if you look at how the industry has been maturing, there are these rough four-year cycles. So 2022 to me feels very similar to like 2018, where the bear markets were just starting. Obviously, these market conditions last for a while. And that was partially why stacks is a protocol that's open source, decentralized, and many people can contribute to it. We recently raised capital in a company called Trust Machines. We raised $150 million around to basically build out the largest ecosystem of Bitcoin applications. And one of the reasons to raise a large round is because of the market cycles. Like they tend to last between three to four years, and you want to have enough capital to be able to build your applications or any infrastructure that needs to be built out over long periods of time. So I think in that sense, I think crypto is a little bit different, where the markets are cyclic, and we are almost like at the start of a bear market right now, in my view. You said that we are at the start. Did I understand correctly? Yes, I think we are at the start. This might last for a couple of years. Okay, that's interesting because there are different opinions in the space. Some people say that next year we're going to see already an upward move in the Bitcoin price in anticipation of what will be the halving of early 2024. Usually in the months anticipating the halving, we always see some upward movement. So I guess you disagree with that? I think it's possible, but in terms of kind of like getting back into a bull market, it's usually, at least historically, typically the halving of Bitcoin is a triggering event, but the bull markets tend to start some time after that. So it might be a little further along. Again, I'm a computer scientist. I am not a trader. I'm only speaking from observing the previous cycles. Yeah, we'll see how it plays out. Of course, the macroeconomic conditions at the moment are not very favorable for crypto assets in general. And so yeah, it's difficult to envision a bull market in the present conditions, but maybe some short-term movements driven by the anticipation of the halving, that's something possible. But we'll see, we'll see, we'll see how it goes. So now we are in a boring market. We've been trading sideways for a while. What is your opinion? Is it a good environment for what you do at Stacks for building on top of Bitcoin? What do you think? Yeah, I think bear markets historically always been the best time to build. Like just the level of noise goes down, there are less distractions. And also the type of people who stick around, they're really mission driven. Right? So when you're hiring engineers and other folks, during a bull market, it's hard to tell if somebody is driven only because they think there's quick money to be made or versus do they really believe in these technologies and they're doing it because they're intellectually interested in doing that. In times like these, you're actually only going to be surrounded by people who are mostly mission driven, right? And they're willing to work on challenging things because they think that this is going to make an impact on society down the road. So I think this is basically the best time to build. It's easier said than done because a lot of startups around you are kind of like running out of capital or people are kind of giving up on their ideas and moving on and so on. But it's the folks who survive these times and who actually are able to build really useful things during the bear market. Those are the ones who typically stand out during a bull run, right? Because they're ready. They have actually built out the right products. They've tested out their infrastructure and they're kind of ready when more attention from developers and investors and users kind of starts to come on their products. And I think going back to something you were saying earlier, in terms of like a lot of Bitcoin that is just sitting there, that's one of the largest opportunities in my view that exists in the market. Because if you look at a lot of people who hold Bitcoin, they're long-term believers and they don't want to sell their Bitcoin. But at the same time, they would like to get access to some liquidity. Like for example if they could lock their Bitcoin in a contract and draw some sort of a stablecoin loan against that. That was sort of like the first applications that started taking off on Ethereum as well. People would deploy ETH into a smart contract, get some access to liquidity without selling their ETH. And I think on the Bitcoin side, that's probably even a larger market, not just because Bitcoin has more capital, because the community is diehard, right? Like they really don't want to sell their Bitcoin, but they might be willing to lock it if the contracts are secure enough. And I think that's where building the right technologies through Bitcoin there is very important. Because Bitcoin has a different culture of how careful people are, what is the standard of quality and security of some product that can be used. And we saw in the recent crash that when these defaults started happening on lending, it was mostly the centralized players that went bankrupt. The DeFi protocols actually functioned pretty well. And the reason for that is that these smart contracts actually have more transparency in the system. More people can assess the risk in a smart contract than in a black box centralized company. So if you bring those types of applications to Bitcoin, as Bitcoin there's, meaning that people can independently see the code, see how secure or unsecured it is, can actually look at the more transparent system and make a better assessment of like, is this contract worth putting my capital into for either with a drawing like some stablecoin or lending out your VDC to earn a yield on it. And I think that's the sort of thing that maybe goes better with the Bitcoin community, given their belief in decentralization and open systems, versus trying to use centralized parties where you have no visibility into how they're doing risk management and then suddenly the company goes and goes bankrupt. That's interesting because I was talking to a chain analysis specialist a few days ago and we were discussing the fact that in 2022 it was actually DeFi protocols that were subjected to the most exploits and security problems. So the biggest amount of crypto stolen in 2022 was stolen exactly from DeFi protocols. So you were saying that you would still prefer this system to work on decentralized open source code than on centralized entities, but still how can you then comment on these numbers? We see that still these open protocols have an issue regarding security. Yeah, so I think that's a great point, right? So the way to think about any interest that you get or yield that you get on your Bitcoin is that you're getting the yield because of some risk that you're taking. So in the centralized company path, the risk is that the company is going bankrupt and you have no visibility into how they're managing their books. What they're doing internally is kind of like a black box. So you're trusting a centralized party. In the decentralized way or in DeFi, the risk is different. The risk is actually smart contract risk or the risk of a bug in the code that some hacker can exploit. It's a different type of a risk. The system is actually more transparent. It's open source typically. So the risk profile looks very different. So in terms of the hacks that have happened, I think a lot of the hacks recently actually have been on bridges and obviously DeFi smart contracts also get hacked. But if you look at the blue chip DeFi protocols like Maker or Alway, the things that have been around for a while, they have been heavily tested, audited, and they've slowly kind of increased the amount of capital that is actually sitting on those contracts. Over time, these contracts become more and more secure because any amount of money that's sitting in a smart contract is an open bug body. So let's say you launch a new contract and there's like $2 million sitting in it. That's a $2 million potential bug body that anyone can come in and try to hack the system. And over the years, if it's been a long time and so many people have tried and so much audits have gone on, the system actually tends toward becoming more secure. So yes, obviously if there's a new protocol launches, they mess something up, funds can get hacked from there. But it's the trend line. Like where are you trending towards? Over time, are you becoming more and more secure? And stable. And I think the open source code and these contracts, they actually trend towards that. And then finally, I would bring up that a huge part of that is also the programming languages. So on Ethereum, solidity is typically used, which is a Turing complete language. And I don't want to get into the details, but at a high level, it becomes very hard to write very secure code in a language like that. Worse is if you use something which is called the decidable language, which is clarity used in the stacks layer, you can actually know in advance all the possible things that the program can actually do. You can have mathematical formal verifications of what this contract can and cannot do. That's the type of code that is used on airplanes. Because you cannot take the risk that some software bug is going to cause a plane to crash. So I think these contracts are more like airplanes where once they go live, you absolutely have to make sure that there isn't a software bug that can cause certain things. And there are things like former verification that you can do that can help a lot. You cannot do that with a centralized company. Like the risk of a centralized company will always remain that it's a black box and you don't know what's going on inside it. Yeah, that's a great point. That's a great point. I think that as long as soon as we can get the code right, then decentralized systems are undoubtedly much better than centralized ones because they are trustless. So I just wanted to touch upon something that you said. You compared Bitcoin with Ethereum in terms of smart contracts. So can you tell us why is Bitcoin... Why has Bitcoin the potential to sort of compete with Ethereum in the field of decentralized finance and smart contracts? Yeah, I think the way I think about this is Bitcoin is better designed for being money. It's very, very simple at the base layer. And this is something that even kind of like Metallic admits. I think there was a blog post by Metallic some months ago where he's talking about that Ethereum community at some point would have to make this decision that do you want to be more simple and less experimental and be more like money, like Bitcoin? Or do you want to be more complex, more experimental to support the smart contract functionality? And I think the Ethereum project is basically in some ways trying to do both. Like they have this narrative of like ultrasound money and but they're really a smart contract platform with all the complexity that it has. And then they have to make the decision. Like the both things don't go hand in hand. Like the simplicity and durability of Bitcoin is really well suited for being money. And at the same time, the downside is that you don't have fully expressive smart contracts. And it's an explicit design choice. Like Bitcoin is saying, we are not trying to optimize for being a smart contract platform. But that doesn't mean that you can't have Bitcoin layers that are smart contract platforms and they can use Bitcoin as money. So that's like the architecture that's emerging on the Bitcoin side. And interestingly, even on Ethereum, because of scalability, you are seeing these Ethereum layers that are emerging. They could be, you know, roll-off based or other types of fraud proof systems like arbitram or other layers. But in different ways, people are building Ethereum layers to have like other types of features or better scalability and so on. So in the end, Ethereum might look like, in the future, this system where most of the execution is actually happening in Ethereum layers, right? So that begs the question, then why make the Ethereum base layer so complicated? Why can't it be more simple like Bitcoin if most of the action and most of the applications are in the end going to be built in layers anyway, right? So I think that's obviously I'm in the school of thought that your base layer should be very, very simple. Whereas Ethereum is in the school of thought where the base layer is a lot more complex. And I think that's where the difference is. And I think we should recognize the market conditions that right now a lot more developers are in the Ethereum ecosystem. And they put up with these problems like your programming language is not that secure or other types of issues that they're having because the opportunity space is so large that they're very excited about it. But on the Bitcoin side, I don't think we have fully solved the core infrastructure and developer tooling stuff. I think we're getting there, but we haven't fully unlocked it. So the developers haven't experienced what building really successful Bitcoin applications really feels like. But I think we're getting pretty close to that. So do you think that Bitcoin has a chance to overcome Ethereum in terms of the leader in smart contracts? I think that's our thesis, right? We call it the Bitcoin thesis. And the thesis is very simple. The first part of the thesis is just using the Bitcoin capital, which just makes intuitive sense, right? Like Bitcoin is still the largest capital pool. So if let's say you are building a stablecoin and you want to back it by a crypto asset, a decentralized crypto asset. So a Bitcoin backed stablecoin can reach a much higher market cap than a Ethereum backed stablecoin or a Solana backed stablecoin. That's just market dynamics. Bitcoin capital, there's much more Bitcoin capital out in the world than anything else. So if you solve the smart contract infrastructure issues, a Bitcoin backed stablecoin would likely be much larger and much more successful, right? So that's one part of the thesis. The other part of the thesis is that Bitcoin is the best settlement layer, meaning that Bitcoin is the most censorship resistant, immutable, durable ledger. So if you're making settlements, like imagine how lightning works. When you close a channel, you're making a settlement on the Bitcoin chain and you know that after it gets enough confirmations, the probability that someone can come in and actually try to reverse that settlement is very, very, very, though almost impossible, right? And that functionality of settlements can actually be used by decentralized applications as well. Let's say I'm registering muniv.btc as my username. Once it's settled and registered on the Bitcoin main chain, I know that people can't just go and change that anymore, right? Worse than imagine registering a similar thing on a much smaller blockchain that is using some other consensus mechanism and something fails and people can actually change the history of what happened. So your Bitcoin as a settlement layer is heavily underutilized right now. And I think as developers start seeing these modular architectures where one layer is just performing a very, very basic function, they will start to value Bitcoin's settlement properties a lot more because that settlement is very, very strong and you can have the rest of the functionality, even like execution could be in a different layer on top of Bitcoin. And I think from that lens, like this market could potentially be much, much bigger and obviously that's kind of like our thesis, we call it the Bitcoin thesis, which basically says that successful experiments in the rest of the crypto industry would eventually gravitate towards Bitcoin and they would use Bitcoin capital and they would use Bitcoin settlement because that's a larger market. Those were very convincing kind of thesis. So you basically would say that the success of Ethereum as the most successful settlement layer for smart... I mean, the success of Ethereum in terms of smart contracts so far is just due to the fact that it has the first mover advantage over Bitcoin but it's just a matter of time that Bitcoin can disclose its full potential in that respect. Yeah, I think there's a very interesting dynamic there. So I think there's certain things that Ethereum did really well. I think they really embraced the culture of experimentation and focusing on developers. Like if you go to Ethereum, like ETH, Denver or something like that, you would see the developer culture a lot of builders are showing up. They're trying to play around with things. There's a general culture of just supporting experimentation. Like, hey, do whatever you want to do. Like, great, if this experiment fails, they're still being encouraging. That's a little bit of a early Silicon Valley culture where young startups would always support each other and encourage each other to build stuff and actually focus on code and developing things more than anything else. If you notice the Bitcoin culture, because not a lot of things were getting built around Bitcoin, I think the culture actually became more about ideas around economics or other types of cultural things. If you go to a Bitcoin event, the ratio of the number of developers versus the number of non-technical people is sort of off. Not enough developers actually show up. So I think that's one thing which we are hoping to change and it's already changing, that we are seeing more and more technical people, engineers and builders, who are getting interested in the Bitcoin ecosystem and they're coming in and they're solving those technical challenges. I think that's critical. If somehow I think Bitcoin would fail here and not achieve its potential, I think one of the biggest reasons is going to be the failure to attract engineers and developers and just intellectually curious people who want to come in and actually build things. Even newer chains, like when newer chains like Avalon, Solana, they launch, I think they understand how important developers are and the company is behind those ecosystems. They go out of their way to try and attract developers through hackathons, through trying to fund startups and so on. I think Bitcoin has a more organic community and I do think that this lack of focus on a builder's culture is something that needs attention and we are doing a lot of work to help that and there are other Bitcoin companies that are very interested in that as well. So I'm very confident that in the coming years we'll actually see more developer-focused conferences or events and people who are building Bitcoin applications and really celebrating the Bitcoin builder's culture. Yeah, that's an awesome idea. I think that the perception that I have is that the Bitcoin community is a little bit conservative in terms of how they look at Bitcoin. They think that Bitcoin is perfect as it is and so there is not so much stimulus to make it improved, to implement some improvements. So I think that that's a bit of a limitation so far that probably could be bypassed as you are trying to do. And so hopefully we'll see something new going on. Yeah, I think the analogy that I would give there is if you view Bitcoin as TCPIP, TCPIP didn't change that much. So the people who believe that TCPIP shouldn't change were right. So similarly, the folks in the Bitcoin community who are like, they reject change or they want to be very careful, I think they're right when that thing is applied to the base layer. The thing that they might get wrong is that you should allow experimentation on top of the base layer because it's not going to impact the base layer. If I experiment on top, let's say there's an experimental layer, built on top of Bitcoin, which fails, doesn't matter. Bitcoin is still Bitcoin and it's doing what it's doing. So the other part to realize is that when HTTP was built on top of TCPIP, that's the thing that actually made the internet economy work. So when there is a successful Bitcoin layer that has these applications where Bitcoin becomes productive in a secure way, where builders are coming and building lots of businesses, that HTTP layer on top of Bitcoin is the thing that's going to make Bitcoin really, really valuable because that's going to expand the total economy of Bitcoin. Back in the days, people used to talk about building a circular Bitcoin economy. We don't hear of those talks that much because again, a normal Bitcoin user can't do much with their Bitcoin wallet today. They can either transfer Bitcoin or just hold it. And I think in the future, I almost envision Bitcoin wallets where there is a lot more functionality through Bitcoin layers. Let's say your wallet is connected to Lightning or Stacks or some other new Bitcoin layer and you're swapping to a stablecoin directly from your wallet. If you want to play around with NFTs, you can do that directly from your Bitcoin wallet or new types of functionality. Let's say you want to crowdfund some cause that you care about. You're putting money in some sort of a DAO, like a Bitcoin DAO, and you can do that from your Bitcoin wallet. I think that would actually make Bitcoin more valuable because now there are more things that can be done with BTC. So I think that's the entire argument. Okay, great. So I think that my final question for you, Munibia, would be a lot of this is about how to build a new financial system. So the purpose of crypto, of Bitcoin, of Ethereum as well is building the financial system of the future. And so a lot of people are always discussing how this financial system will eventually look like if there is going to be one chain dominating them all or a multi-chain world with different chains interacting with each other. So if you can just shortly give us your vision of how that financial system will look like. Yeah, so I think that my idea of the future is that I think there is going to be a dominant money asset, which I think is going to be Bitcoin. Bitcoin is the furthest along for being money. I think it is right now not being used as money for online cases, like trading against NFTs or using decentralized exchanges, but that can change. But in the real world, I think Bitcoin is the closest to being used as money versus any other asset out there. And then I think Bitcoin would get used in Bitcoin layers, but also on other chains. Like you can bridge Bitcoin over to other chains is already happening in different ways. And I think the different other chains would try to specialize in what they're doing, right? So maybe there's a system that sacrifices decentralization more for speed. So if people want really fast speeds, they're kind of giving up on some decentralization properties, but they're getting those really fast speeds from that chain. Or maybe there's some ecosystem that specializes more on a specific use case, like maybe gaming. Let's say gaming really takes off on some other chain, or maybe gaming takes off on a Bitcoin layer. I think one thing that's a little bit unclear to me is that if Bitcoin layers really take off, does that mean there is less interest in separate chains? Because now you can just plug into the largest capital pool. You can benefit from the largest security layer, but you can build your own independent chain almost, like which looks like a Bitcoin layer, right? So that's an open question in my mind. Obviously, we're at a very early stage to even think that, because first Bitcoin layers need to grow a lot more before, you know, young entrepreneurs, before we reach a place where young entrepreneurs are thinking, hey, it doesn't make sense for me to start a separate chain anymore, right? Like I would much rather start a Bitcoin layer instead of trying to build an independent island somewhere else. But with that said, right now, I don't see a world where all these other chains kind of like just disappear and there's only Bitcoin, right? I think I view them as more as Bitcoin would be kind of like the largest hub with the most amount of capital, the most amount of activity and connections to some other places, right? And these other places might specialize into kind of like their own use cases and these chains are kind of like interconnected with each other, but Bitcoin is sort of like the center of gravity. Okay, I like your vision. It's not like a maximalist vision, which usually I don't appreciate too much because it's a little bit too narrow-minded, like maximalists. I prefer this inclusive vision that you just laid out. So before we wrap up the discussion, I just want to ask you one last question from the audience. So Ralph Hofaker is asking if Stax is EVM compatible? Yes, so Stax is not EVM compatible and it's almost by design because it's mostly because of the programming language used by EVM and that is Solidity. It's a Turing complete language. We wanted to avoid Turing complete languages for security reasons and we ended up using a decidable language, Clarity, where just think of this way that it gives developers better tools for safety, right? So safety comes before anything else in smart contract languages, I think, right? So Clarity language is heavily optimized for safety and people can know even before running a contract that what this contract can and it cannot do. So that was the reason to actually not be EVM compatible. With that said, I think there are some upcoming proposals in the ecosystem that are there ways to allow some sort of EVM compatibility as a different subnet. Like imagine not on the main layer but in a subsystem so that people who already have code that they've written that is EVM compatible, they can maybe deploy it and then migrate over to Clarity. If that makes sense to them. Okay, I think that we have a follow-up question here. So this tax domain name, maybe you can tell us about that as well. Yeah, so I think maybe the question is about BNS which is the Bitcoin name system. That has a very interesting history. Like in a way it actually predates stacks, the existing system, because it was started on the Bitcoin name chain back in 2015 or so, right? So in a way it's actually predates ENS as well, the Ethereum name system and the reason why it migrated over to this tax layer when the mainnet launch happened is that there isn't a lot of functionality on the base layer and then the transaction fees are also pretty expensive or used to be expensive back on Bitcoin. So if you're trying to register millions of names at some point, you don't want to pay Bitcoin transaction fees at the base layer. You probably want to pay cheaper fees in a Bitcoin layer and then those transactions are just settling on Bitcoin. So I think one of those, one of the sort of these namespaces or TLDs is .btc and that's the one that's actually getting more attention these days. I think they just got listed on OpenSea as well and they're driving a bunch of interest. But I think there's a very interesting history here that BNS predates the Ethereum name system which actually started on the Bitcoin main chain and for scalability reasons migrated over to the Stax Bitcoin layer when the mainnet launch happened last year. Okay, great. Yeah, I think this is a good note to wrap up the discussion on. So I'm really looking forward to see what Stax is going to be up to in the next months and years and how Bitcoin is going to evolve and add some new functionalities on it. So Munib, thanks a lot for joining us to our show. It was a great conversation. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, and thanks to our audience for asking interesting questions and watching us. As always, don't forget to tune in to the show, the Market Talks every Thursday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time. I'm Giovanni Host and see you next time.