What caught our eye this week

Three ordinals marketplaces roll out sophisticated sniping protections

Ordinals Sniping Part 2: Revenge of the Marketplaces kicked off this week as 3 marketplaces — MagicEden, Satflow, and Mintify — launched mempool sniping countermeasures.

If you aren’t already familiar, Bitcoin power users have been “sniping” ordinal trades on exchanges when transactions are mid-flight and waiting in Bitcoin’s public mempool. To accomplish this, hijack an ordinal sale’s partially signed bitcoin transaction and insert their own payment and address to supplant the original sale. They then resell the ordinals back on the secondary market (see our previous writeup).

But the jig is up this week! Magic Eden is rolling out an ordinals “sniping prevention” scheme, Satflow countersigns transactions from all marketplaces, and newcomer Mintify is launching a private mempool product. Is this where the market finally exacts its revenge?

They each have different strategies to counter sniping

We did an explainer of how these might work in our initial writeup, but here’s more color with some details we learned during the week:

MagicEden uses an innovative Tapscript Tree to track an allowlist of addresses & SIGHASH_ALL partially-signed Bitcoin transactions for the buyer. MagicEden then acts as a transaction finalizer before the transaction is rendered un-snipeable and sent off to the public mempool.

Mintify has cut a deal with a mining pool to hand them transactions directly so that snipers can’t see them. This means the purchases could be pretty slow, but it’s a tradeoff some might prefer if it protects their purchase. It also represents an industry first for out-of-band dealflow between a marketplace and mining pool.

Satflow uses three transactions similar to MagicEden, but likely with a different structure. The platform also mitigates sniping from all other marketplaces when the platform is used to list/purchase.

Overall, it was a big week for the ordinals ecosystem and Bitcoin in general. In our eyes, this week represents a major shift regarding where product-focused technical innovation happens in Bitcoin.

Bitcoin News

AI is launching memecoins, and now $GOAT hits $700m market cap

Language model “truth_terminal” was recently given $50k by a16z’s Marc Andressen and decided to launch a memecoin. Said token, “Goatseus Maximus” has skyrocketed to $700m and driven a wave of AI-related crypto speculation, including one on Bitcoin Runes. If you’re wondering where the AI got the name Goatseus from and you’re tempted to Google it, don’t – seriously, trust us on this one and please, please don’t…

Ordinals & Runes creator will launch first Rune

Casey Rodarmor hasn’t released a single project since the launch of Ordinals. He is now releasing/airdropping a rune, MEMENTO•MORI, in association with his podcast, Hell Money which he produces with Erin Redwing. The Rune is available for mint around Halloween.

Bitcoin Developer Funding Report

Research project 1A1z released its inaugural report covering how Bitcoin Core development is funded. It reviews the history and current state of funding. TL;DR: it’s still only a handful of entities who actively support Bitcoin Core development with a less than $10 million per year budget for the $1.2 trillion Bitcoin network.

River Financial introduces bitcoin interest on cash

Bitcoin financial series company River Financial now pays out bitcoin as interest for cash deposited on the platform. River said that the initial interest rate is 3.8%, which is multiples above the national average savings account.