E18: NYC Coin Mining Going Crazy, First Stacks Residents Program Cohort announced , AlexGo Secures Big Funding round, City of Miami Giving out Bitcoin to its citizens, and Megapont continues to crush.

What is up, you beautiful people. It's time for another, This Week in Stacks episode, some of the topics this week include AlexGo scoring a big round of funding, a bunch ofCityCoins news, Muneeb & Patrick on big cable news networks. The new Stacks resident program announces its first cohort and some Megapont news

 If you knew here, I'm your host. Jake, you'll see me around as Jake blockchain. And this is the built on Bitcoin podcast where we're showcasing the apps and founders building on stacks, which is secured by Bitcoin. So let's go. This week we have first off Alex go. Alex's a defy protocol building a full suite of products on Stacks, and they just secured a huge round of funding in the amount of $5.8 million.

The round was led by. White star capital with participation from venture firms, culture, GBI C, and okay. Blockchain, capital. Uh, I'm not familiar with most of those names, but this is big. This is big as there'll be able to execute much faster and bring on more team members,  she had an interview.

Chiente did the cofounder with decrypt. And she said, she said this "at the moment, there's approximately 200 billion locked in DeFI protocols. Nearly all of this is on Ethereum. The market cap of Bitcoin is over 1 trillion and Bitcoin is the original and most secure blockchain network and human history."

And I read that and it just perfectly described the blue ocean that they are tapping into because everything the DeFi space right now is on Ethereum and using alt coins or wrapped assets. All of the native Bitcoin lending is happening through a few small exchanges like Coinbase or block fi and Alex is in this perfect position to dominate.

If they can figure out how to make native BTC productive, which has been a focus for some of the leaders in the community lately. So, I mean, a year from now who knows what's going on. Pretty exciting times. Uh, and they're launching next month. I think I heard it's on the 10th. They just entered phase two on their Testnet.

Uh, you can go play with it now at app.alexgo.io yeah, shoot. So that's exciting. And some other big news around Bitcoin yields is coming from Miami. You probably saw this where the city of Miami voted to accept the city coins, wallet, contributions, and they spoke about spending the money on the homeless issue.

When the, uh, the city first passed, they accepting the treasury. They were going to spend it on the homeless issue because I thought it was great. But they have since changed their mind and now they will be stacking the stacks and getting the Bitcoin yield from that and distributing that money to residents who create a wallet, which at first I was like, okay, that's dope.

You know, people will get, you know, a couple of bucks in Bitcoin, but it's actually genius. The more I think about it because. It's the perfect way to onboard people into crypto in a real hands on way, because most people, if they're skeptical, they're not going to take their hard-earned money, especially for living paycheck to paycheck and put it onto an exchange, especially if it's not Coinbase where, you know, Figure out how this thing works, go onto the browser, download an extension, understand what secret passcode, phrases, all these things.

No, one's doing that. So, but if there's free Bitcoin waiting for you and you've been kind of curious and it's just free and you can do it on your phone, on a mobile app, uh, I think it's going to be huge and it just kind of like what's the whistle to get people peaked of interest. So yeah, I think it's, I think it's.

And, uh, yeah, and other city coins news, New York coin has been going absolutely bananas, uh, mining activated on the 11th of November. And the first mining block started the next day, early on the 11th. And in the first eight days of mining, the wallet currently holds $9.3 million. Worth of stacks, which is insane over a million a day, being sent to the wallet for the city of New York.

Uh, and some of the stats I saw as I was looking through the week, there was as many as a hundred miners at one time at its peak, which I don't think we ever saw that from Miami coin. And I think there's been upwards of 600 unique wallets have sent in bids, which is a good sign. And we've also seen roughly 5,000 stacks committed per block.

So that's $10,000 roughly go into the city every 10 minutes. Uh, yeah, I've said this before and I'm just going to say it until I'm winded, which I'm already getting there, but city coins is a game changer. It's just, it's it's still super early, like stacks. When I joined six months ago. All you could really do was stack like there's a couple apps around the ecosystem, but nothing really productive to do with it.

You just stacked it. And you've got your little bit of Bitcoin, but now we have Arkadiko, we got NFT marketplaces for days. There's more collections that we know what to spend our stacks on. And CityCoins is the exact same way. It's right now, just a way to either sell it or stack it. This is the only city coins and its first form it's going to evolve.

This is a programmable token. So outside of the financial incentives, it can do so much more. And uh, yeah, we're going to see that over time. So super dope. Speaking of city coins and, uh, leaders in the Stacks ecosystem. Patrick and Muneeb had been getting more and more recognition from mainstream media outlets lately

 Muneeb had an interview this past week with Yahoo finance and Patrick had a segment on Fox news. Just depends on the seed. Don't call me crazy, even though it sounds crazy coming out of my lips, but I think Fox news is going to like take a turn culturally and become more popular as crypto grows. And the reason I say that is because although Fox news kind of gets painted as like.

Right wing channel, and it's a bunch of BS and it is largely that the underlying things that they're for is self-sufficiency smaller government and fiscal responsibility, which are all crypto values as well. And some of the more well written articles I've seen on crypto from the mainstream media have come from Fox.

I think we're going to see them. If they jump on board on crypto and crypto supports the fact that they're being supported by them, uh, we could see a sea change in how foxes, uh, kind of like viewed in the broader context it's early. Um, and I could be wrong, but I'm just going to plant that seed because I'm not going to say I told you so anyways.

  Other news, keep it going, keep it going. Gina. And the Hiro team put out two new Stacker Chat videos. One was with two of the female co-founders of layer, uh, Alla Koretsky & Marina Romashko. They deep dive into what layers about, their mission to bring women into tech,

how to cleverly onboard people into crypto using NFTs? Uh, I think the video is worth watching just for that, because it's pretty fricking clever,  what Alla, suggests and, uh, yeah, they talk about how NFTs can really be,  a way for artists system stand themselves in this new business model. So, yeah, super dope.

Did the video is Munib talking about the launch of. New York coin. And he goes into some of how stacks mining works, how profitable it is, similar topics around that. So yeah, if you want to deep dive on those topics, how they recommend almost done two more things left mega punt, which is the NFT collection launched on stacks that has just came out of nowhere.

And they hit another big milestone. They crossed $2 million in secondary sales, which I believe is the highest growing and Ft in volume by far. And, uh, yeah, it's pretty bad ass to see it grow. People really love these apes. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's something that I'm still trying to wrap my head around. How do communities kind of like build from the ground up around.

Pictures. And how do they keep the floor price up the price discovery? Like all there's so many layers to it. It's super interesting. I definitely want to have mark, which is one of the core guys at mega pot on the podcast, in the future. Uh, okay. Last but not least. The stacks foundation announced their first cohort of the resonance program.

And the residency program is this new initiative that they've launched, where they help certain creators bring things to life by giving them a steady flow of funding. So you can not worry about bills and money, and it gives you some of that latitude to build certain things that you want to and bring it to life.

So the first cohort had five groups except. And I'll just cover them briefly, but each of these could be a deep dive. So first one is Jonathan Hammond and he's been brought on as a technical documentation. And his job will be to better organize and separate the docs that are scattered around the ecosystem, as well as working on a system to make it more Wikipedia style where the community can update the ducks as needed.

Second is Dan Trevino and I'm going to mess this name up, but AMR algo go Bari. Which, you know, as the boom team. And as far as I know from the press release, they'll be continuing to work on boom. So happy for us. Third, uh, Thomas Ozmen son and Jasper Jan's, there'll be working on updating stacking.club, which if you haven't been to, it's kind of an all-encompassing site to give you different stats on stacking.

And, uh, they're gonna try. Spend that time making stacking.club into the place for stackers to get information about past cycles, current cycles, et cetera. Fourth is drew forth men and David color, and they are researching and building a platform for managing token communities. The idea is structured around using a discord plus.

To handle all the important tasks around managing FTE community, things like reputation, rewards, airdrops voting mechanisms and governance. Like anything you might need to, uh, you know, make things run smoothly in a cohesive package. They're trying to do that with this plugin for discord, and eventually it in a broader context.

My understanding. Uh, and last one is Muhammad who you might see around us. Ha's a Harold writer and Juliet. They are researching and building out tools for governance around the Stax ecosystem. But everything is so decentralized. It's, there's no wheel bosses, so it's hard. It can get messy at times when something goes awry and you don't know how to fix it, how do we vote on this?

You know, all these different mechanisms. And how do we come together as a unit and be cohesive, but also be fair. Uh, they're kind of at the bleeding edge of trying to figure out how do you build a system that allows governance without having really centralized power? So, yeah, super interesting ideas. Uh, lots of good stuff being built.

Super awesome team. Uh, yeah. And that's it. I am, when did it as usual because talking for like 10 straight minutes is a lot, but yeah, that's it for this week tomorrow. So this is launching on a Thursday on the 18th. Tomorrow. I have my podcast with grace who is a venture partner at the stacks accelerator, and also the artists behind crash punks.

She's on the podcast. We talk about a bunch of stuff and yeah, that's it for now. I love y'all. I'll see y'all in the  📍 next episode and peace.