Magic Eden coders gathered in an Airbnb in San Jose, California, to hack in preparation for the so-called bitcoin halving.
Amil Husain
In the East Foothills of San Jose, California, 17 coders working for the popular ordinals marketplace maker, Magic Eden, piled into a 4-bedroom, 3,875 square-foot house rented on Airbnb. Their goal was to spend a week hacking to prepare for the so-called bitcoin halving — an event that is baked into the chain’s code and helps to stave off inflation through programmatic monetary policy.
A lot of the talk surrounding the halving, which happens roughly every four years, has been pegged to the fact that new issuance of the world’s largest virtual coin would be cut in half. But the block that locked in the halving also coincided with a couple other major launches on the blockchain, including cutting-edge programming innovations that are expected to draw both a lot more coders and a lot more venture capital dollars into the bitcoin ecosystem.
Also unlike past halving events, the world’s largest cryptocurrency touched a new all-time high above $73,000 in March as record flows entered the bitcoin ecosystem via the newly-launched spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the U.S.
“Bitcoin has never been healthier – what was missing previously was a vibrant developer ecosystem on top,” said Magic Eden’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Zedd Yin.
Some of Magic Eden’s coders took breaks from hacking to play arcade games.
Amil Husain
Arcade games and hard liquor
Magic Eden’s pop-up hacker house was modest but had a few bells and whistles that carried the skeleton crew through the week.
Those perks included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Street Fighter themed arcade-style machine games in the living room — plus a DIY open bar on a collapsible, plastic table in the dining room.
Engineers also went into the hackathon with the distinct advantage of knowing what they wanted to build. In the days leading up to the halving, Yin, 33, convened his team under the same roof in Northern California with one clear goal in mind: To code and launch the definitive marketplace for a new wave of digital products coming to bitcoin’s blockchain. On Monday morning, Magic Eden’s Runes Platform went live, helping to cement its place as the go-to forum to deal in these novel bitcoin offerings.
For years, rival chains like ethereum and solana have competed with bitcoin on functionality, because both have smart contracts — that is, programmable pieces of code — natively built into the base chain. That has been one of the chief reasons why developers around the world have flocked to these blockchains to build applications.
Magic Eden’s pop-up hacker house included arcade games and a ping pong table with a full bar.
Amil Husain
Enter Casey Rodarmor.
The popular bitcoin coder totally disrupted this dynamic last year when he introduced bitcoin’s version of non-fungible tokens known as ordinals, which developers ended up using as a base for bitcoin-issued coins called BRC-20 tokens. The launch was quiet, at first, but ultimately landed him tremendous acclaim.
Late Friday night, at the exact moment that the bitcoin halving initialized, Rodarmor unveiled his latest creation, runes, which is basically just a better and more efficient version of BRC-20 tokens.
“People really respect Casey and think that he sort of captured lightning in a bottle,” said Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures. “And so there’s very high expectations for runes as well.”
Technically speaking, runes just enables asset issuance of fungible tokens on bitcoin’s base chain. That could be stablecoins, memecoins, or any variety of fungible token.
The reason this is significant to developers is because of its efficiency relative to existing BRC-20 tokens, bitcoin’s widely-used fungible token standard that has already received a ton of traction. Having a universally accepted token standard like this is seen as key to helping unlock scale of decentralized finance on bitcoin. Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is a parallel banking system that cuts out middlemen like lawyers and banks and relies upon code for enforcement.
“Fungible tokens are a significant part of every meaningful ecosystem like solana and ethereum, so runes is an important step in the evolution of bitcoin,” said Yin, who previously helped lead product for all institutional trading products at Coinbase.
Bill Barhydt, who runs Abra, a company that supports miners with a mix of services, including auto liquidations, and has access to macro data across the sector, said bitcoin simply cannot scale 100% on-chain via its own layer one. The problem has to do with the fact that bitcoin’s blockchain lacks the built-in smart contract capabilities necessary to reproduce the banking stack of a chain like ethereum…
Read More: Inside a Silicon Valley hacker house coding for bitcoin’s new tokens