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Source: Coindesk; Compilation: 0xjs@Bitchain Vision
On January 2, Muneeb Ali, the leading Bitcoin L2 Stacks co-founder and CEO, updated his X profile from the simple “Founder @Stacks” to “Fighter @Stacks in Wartime.”This change shows Ali recognizes that after a major technology upgrade in 2024, 2025 is a year for Stacks to turn to focus on entering the market and expanding its user base.These upgrades include the long-awaited Nakamoto upgrade, which greatly improves the speed of the project and achieves 100% certainty in all transactions in Bitcoin.
Ali said that Stacks’ new positioning is more appropriate given that cryptocurrencies are currently in a bull market, driven by Donald Trump’s election and the environment for cryptocurrencies to develop is expected to be more favorable.
“Bio change sends a signal to the community, ‘Hey, we know this era is different, you need to act faster and more aggressively’,” Ali said in an interview with CoinDesk.“It’s not that there will be no product upgrades in 2025, but I want to say that the product is no longer the focus of the work.”
In the interview, Ali discussed what different changes he would make about the Nakamoto upgrade if he could, his candid view of the slow progress of Lightning Network in realizing Bitcoin payments, he expects the price of Bitcoin to rise in 2025, heThe ultimate goal is to get 1 billion people to join the blockchain through Stacks.Ali will speak at the Hong Kong Consensus Conference in February.
For clarity, we compressed and edited slightly for this interview.
How is Satoshi Nakamoto’s upgrade progressing now?
Muneeb Ali:I still think Bitcoin needs a very, very good L2.One reason is that the user experience of Bitcoin won’t change at the L1 level; you will never make fast, cheap transactions on L1.This is why many people are interested in Lightning Network.It has been around for a while and it has been adopted, but not a lot.Let us look at it truthfully.
So, I think there is still a need for extremely fast, excellent user experience Bitcoin transactions.I would say that even Solana does a better job in this regard than Lightning Network or anything else.So one of the things we want to do is have a bitcoin L2 similar to Solana where you can transfer any amount of money at an extremely fast pace and have a great user experience.I think this is a goal we achieved with the Nakamoto upgrade.
If possible, would you do something different about the launch of Satoshi Nakamoto’s upgrade?
Therefore, the release of Satoshi Nakamoto’s upgrade is divided into multiple stages.First, core consensus capital is transferred in April.Then we launched fast blocks, but more complex transactions couldn’t benefit from it.Then we made another release where more complex transactions could benefit from it.But looking back, it was like a trickle release.So people have high expectations for every step and then they say, “Oh, it’s not here yet, it’s not here yet.” So frankly, when it’s fully launched, I think it takes it away.Some excitement.
Do you think that by 2025, people’s interest will continue to turn to building and programming on Bitcoin, rather than building and programming on Ethereum and other chains?
I think so.Bitcoin is like one of those things that are somehow self-contained; it will never go away.Even if you think about what’s going on in the open market and how many public companies are building Bitcoin treasury right now, Bitcoin is far ahead of anything else in terms of adoption.So people were more excited about Bitcoin L2 about a year ago, but it seemed to have cooled down a little bit.But I think Bitcoin is so important that people will return to Bitcoin L2.
How do you think Trump will affect the trend of Bitcoin?
Very big.Look at the people he picked, such as David Sachs as a leader in cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence.He is a large LP of Multicoin Capital and knows everything about cryptocurrencies and Solana, so I think that will have a big impact.The same goes for some of the other advisers Trump has selected.The U.S. government and regulators have actually been against us for the past four years.Now I think they will actually actively support and encourage it, and that’s a huge shift.This is very helpful.
Furthermore, if the Bitcoin reserve program is implemented, it will send a huge signal to the world.Even if these plans are implemented only at the state level, such as Texas or Wyoming, it will send a huge signal to the world.
What is your prediction of the price of Bitcoin at the end of the year?
I still believe in the four-year cycle and I think the current cycle will end in the fourth quarter of 2025.Although there are some reasons to believe that the cycle may not be that intense, I personally believe it.I would be surprised if we didn’t see $150,000 by the end of the year, but I do think we can see $200,000.This would be my highest expectations.
When will we see fast and efficient payments through Bitcoin?
We are working to achieve this.I think the Lightning Network is worthy of praise – there are a lot of loyal fans using it.But the technology is complex and not easy to integrate, and the Bitcoin community actually supports only one project.I think the way to do this is to do dozens of experiments to see which ones get people’s attention.The thing I like about Bitcoin L2s is that there are so many different projects being launched and we finally see multiple experiments happening.If Lightning Network is too difficult to integrate, let other projects give it a try.
If you attend a Bitcoin conference or listen to some top people, such as Michael Saylor, founder of MicroStrategy, you will find that they have an attitude that the Lightning Network is the solution and the only solution.They won’t talk about any other L2s, and I think it has something to do with some of these L2s having their own tokens.The Bitcoin community doesn’t like this.But I think they are at least slowly opening up right now.
You are in Hong KongConsensus Conference“What are you excited about discussing?
How do we bring Bitcoin to billions of people?This excited me and drove some of the technical decisions we made.If that’s your goal, you’ll almost immediately start looking for L2 because on L1, a billion people can’t even have UTXO.I don’t know if many bitcoin users realize that a billion people can’t have on-chain UTXOs on Bitcoin alone.
This is perhaps something that people rarely talk about in our industry.People have accepted the introduction of Bitcoin through Coinbase and Binance, and perhaps even through ETFs.But this is not what Bitcoin really means.The essence of Bitcoin is decentralization, self-custody and direct control.We cannot forget this mission.
