It was a busy week. Google temporarily scrubbed the Bitcoin dev mailing list, Trammell Venture Partners’ latest report revealed that Bitcoin startups had a banner year in 2024, and Tether’s primary competitor, Circle, filed for an IPO.
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Bitcoindev mailing list suddenly gets taken down by Google before being reinstated
The Bitcoin development mailing list (currently hosted on Google Groups) was taken down by Google without warning on Wednesday, sending developers scrambling and even prompting Jack Dorsey to tag Sundar Pichai on X. By Thursday Google had restored the group saying the “issue is resolved”.
The Bitcoin development mailing list is the primary formal communication channel for Bitcoin developers and dates back to the original Cypherpunk mailing list that Satoshi used to release the Bitcoin whitepaper. – link
OUR TAKE: The mailing list has consistently wandered through the desert trying to find a home. It had been on Sourceforge, Linux Foundation, and OSUOSL, before moving to Google Groups in February 2024. Isn’t it ironic that the leading Bitcoin discussion forum is hosted on Google? Developers ultimately opted for Google Groups because the forum is very easy to manage and broadly accessible. Google Groups mirrors and logs chats in numerous locations for redundancy, but going back through historical discussion is still a slog.
Some have proposed using Nostr to coordinate the mailing list, and I’ve even heard of using Ordinals/Inscriptions themselves to post data to Bitcoin – after all, bloat be damned, why not use Bitcoin itself to host discussion on Bitcoin development?
Ultimately the most important thing is for developers to manage discussion in a productive way. Bitcoin’s meritocratic developer culture means that there have to be ways to conduct basic janitorial work on the core forums. We’re not too worried about the coordination of the mailing list for the time being. If anything, the fact that Google brought it back (and that we now have literal billionaires just straight up tweeting to bring it back) means that Bitcoin’s growing chorus of supporters includes some powerful voices.
Bitcoin startups ballooned in 2024, but total funding was down: Trammell Venture Partners
Bitcoin-focused Trammell Venture Partners released its third annual report yesterday, “The emerging Bitcoin-native venture capital landscape,” which provides a recap of 2024’s Bitcoin-native venture capital activity and compares fundraising stats with 2021, 2022, and 2023. The TLDR: 2024 was the hottest year for Bitcoin startups when accounting for total companies founded, but the total value raised was less than any of the prior three years. – link
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Year-over-year change:
- Total transaction count: +31.8%
- Total companies funded: +27.5%
- Total capital raised by startups: -22.1%
- 2024 pre-seed transactions: +50%
OUR TAKE: It’s never been better to be in the business of Bitcoin, with more venture funds and investors eager to allocate to Bitcoin-focused businesses than ever before. Notice, we say “Bitcoin,” not “crypto.” The sprawling offspring of Bitcoin and its many manifestations (DeFi, Web3, etc, etc) have historically overexcited capital allocation and taken the largest slice of the fundraising pie. But investors are exhausted after multiple altcoin cycles, projects groping blindly for product market fit, and unfulfilled promises – not to mention memecoins, which have obviated the idea that your cryptocoin actually needs to do, well, anything, making naked the raw speculation that propels the wider crypto ecosystem.
But the most interesting nugget from the report is seemingly counterintuitive: deal flow is up, but total value invested is down. A smaller pool of capital is pouring into a bigger bucket of startups, so startups are pulling in less fundraising on average than the previous three years. Trammell Venture Partners Co-founder Christopher Calllicott told Blockspace that “the primary reason is the broader pullback across venture capital as a whole,” and that “2024 also saw fewer Series Bs in the Bitcoin-native sector, which are a big driver of the total dollars number.
“Despite that broader backdrop, Trammell Venture Partners sees that the growing deal count metric in a venture constrained environment is a testament to the breakout growth of Bitcoin-native as a sector. And the building wave of Pre-Seed Bitcoin startups is a strong leading indicator of future Seed, Series A, and later stage rounds as some of these companies find market fit and follow the natural venture progression in coming years,” he continued.
Callicott also mentioned that “new business models” are emerging in Bitcoin “that have historically lived elsewhere in crypto.” As we’ve covered extensively on Blockspace and Bitcoin Season 2 with Bitcoin’s blooming ecosystem of layer 2s and metaprotocols, DeFi applications are being increasingly subsumed by Bitcoin, so VCs are chasing the opportunities.
“What’s happening here is that elements in the Bitcoin protocol stack are becoming more composable, more vertically and laterally interoperable. All this building, in turn, uncovers investable opportunities,” Callicott concluded.
Bitcoin News
Circle files for IPO
Circle Internet Group, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an initial public offering (IPO) on the NYSE under ticker CRCL. The company reported $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income for 2024, with net income from continuing operations of $157 million. Circle had previously attempted to go public via a $9 billion SPAC but terminated that deal in 2022. – link
Satflow introduces inter-mempool ordinals trading
Ordinals & Runes marketplace Satflow rolled out a new feature that allows users to trade assets without having to wait for a Bitcoin block to confirm. Conventional ordinals trading is settled when a block confirms (roughly every 10 minutes) but the mechanism introduced by Satflow allows “0-conf” equivalent trades with Satflow acting as a cosigner to chained “children” transactions. – link
Trump pardons 3 Bitmex cofounders, including Arther Hayes
President Donald Trump has pardoned the three co-founders of cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX—Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed—who had previously pleaded guilty to failing to implement an anti-money laundering program as required by the Bank Secrecy Act. Arthur Hayes took to twitter to give his thanks to the POTUS. – link
Foundry mines emptiest “non-empty” block
Bitcoin transaction activity is at its lowest level in over 2 years, resulting in the largest mining pool, Foundry, mining a notably sparse block. The block only contained 7 transactions, which likely was all the transactions that were waiting in its mempool (it’s also worth noting that Foundry’s block was timestamped only 1 second after the previous block from F2Pool). This is not to be confused with an “empty block,” which is a block that contains no transactions except for the coinbase, often by design when latency prohibits a pool from publishing a full block template once it finds a new block. – link
