While some view bringing stablecoins and other assets onto Bitcoin as an impediment to its progress, others see them as key stepping stones on the way to hyperbitcoinization.
With the total market cap of stablecoins exceeding $150B and with many users in emerging markets considering them a crucial lifeline, it’s hard to argue that they’re going away any time soon.
Proponents argue that supporting additional assets will bring more users onto the Bitcoin network who have historically needed to rely on other blockchains.
Since early 2023, we have seen the rise of metaprotocols such as Ordinals and, more recently, Runes which have provided a way to create new assets on Bitcoin.
However, critics of these metaprotocols argue that they’re inefficient and create backlogs of transactions that spike on-chain fees and crowd out blockspace for monetary transactions.
The Taproot Assets protocol, originally introduced as “Taro” by Lightning Labs in 2022, may address these shortcomings.
Relying on client-side validation, Taproot Assets launched on mainnet supporting on-chain usage in October 2023. It promised to “make Bitcoin a multi-asset network, but in a scalable manner that upholds Bitcoin’s core values.”
In a recent “Built on Bitcoin” interview, Joltz CTO Linden Stark said:
“The point is… have as small of an on-chain footprint as possible… They’ve seen what BRC-20s are doing and thought to themselves, ‘How can we do this in a way that does not hurt people who are operating nodes, using Bitcoin normally?’”
By storing metadata off-chain, Taproot Assets optimizes the use of Bitcoin’s timechain, paving the way for smoother asset transfers. Following its mainnet launch, however, the Taproot Assets protocol typically required the use of the command line.
Joltz has changed that by launching the world’s first non-custodial wallet supporting Taproot Assets with an easy-to-use interface and an accompanying SDK that makes it easy for developers to add support for Taproot Assets to their applications.
And stablecoins aren’t the only potential use case.
In a recent conversation on “Business Bitcoinization” Joltz Co-CEO Ian Major noted that Joltz was beginning to receive in-bound interest from non-Bitcoin companies who wanted to explore user incentives and rewards.
He highlighted that these businesses were reaching out because of the attractiveness of having a solution ‘built-on-Bitcoin’. However, jumping straight to bitcoin rewards proved too big a leap for some businesses.
Taproot Assets would allow for the creation of bitcoin-backed or even stablecoin-backed loyalty points that would be more accessible for pre-coiners and that would pave an easier path for people to accumulate sats.
Major also announced that Joltz had signed their first enterprise client, Kilo Club, a gym wanting to provide a membership-specific collectible and a branded loyalty token that is backed by, and convertible into sats.
The gym plans to offer this as a benefit to members, who could choose whether or not to opt-in.
Another key differentiator for Taproot Assets is its compatibility with the Lightning Network, allowing scalable, low cost transactions that benefit from an existing network effect.
Lightning Labs CTO Olaoluwa Osuntokun recently announced the very first mainnet asset payment on Lightning with additional Lightning-related support coming soon.
Joltz plans to integrate Lightning support into its wallet and SDK as soon as possible, estimating having support by the middle of this year. In the meantime, users can try the on-chain web wallet today, which will have a mobile and desktop version coming soon.
