On January 2, Muneeb Ali, co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin L2 Stacks, updated his X bio from simply “founder @Stacks” to “wartime founder @Stacks.” The change marked Ali’s recognition that 2025 is a year in which Stacks should focus on going to market and expanding its user base after major technical updates in 2024. Those updates included the long-awaited Nakamoto update that dramatically increased the speed of the project and achieved 100% finality in Bitcoin for all its transactions.
According to Ali, a new direction for Stacks is even more appropriate given that cryptocurrencies are now firmly in the midst of a bull market, fueled by the election of Donald Trump and what is expected to be a more favorable environment for the development of cryptocurrencies. cryptocurrencies.
“The biological change was a signal to the community that, ‘Hey, we understand that these times are different and you need to move much faster and be much more aggressive,'” Ali said in an interview with CoinDesk. “It’s not that there won’t be product updates in 2025, but I would say that the product is no longer the focus of the work.”
Here, Ali discusses what he would have done differently with the Nakamoto upgrade if he could, his candid thoughts on Lightning’s slow progress in enabling payments via bitcoin, where he sees the price of bitcoin rising in 2025, and his ultimate goal of achieving that a billion people access. chain through stacks. Ali will be a speaker at Consensus Hong Kong in February.
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This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
So where is the Nakamoto update now?
I still think Bitcoin needs a really good L2. One reason is that the UX of Bitcoin is not going to change at the L1 level; you will never have fast and cheap transactions in the L1. And that’s why a lot of people were interested in Lightning. It’s been around for a while, it’s had some adoption, but not much. Let’s be realistic about it.
So I think there is still a need for extremely fast and excellent Bitcoin transaction UX. I’d say even Solana has done it better than Lightning or anything else. So one of the things we want to do is have a Bitcoin L2 similar to Solana, where you can move any amount of capital super fast and it’s a great UX experience. And I think that’s a goal we’re achieving with Nakamoto.
Is there anything you would have done differently regarding Nakamoto’s release if you could?
So the launch of Nakamoto came in many phases. First, the central consensus capital moved in April. We then launched fast blocks, but more complex transactions were unable to benefit from them. And then we made another version where more complex transactions could also benefit. But looking back, it’s like there was a slow release. So people had high expectations at every step, and then they said, ‘Oh, it’s not here yet, it’s not here yet.’ So when it was fully released, I think, frankly, it took some of the excitement out of it.
Do you think we will continue to see interest return to building and programming on Bitcoin instead of Ethereum and other chains in 2025?
I think so. Bitcoin is like one of those things that, in a way, is in a class of its own; It just never goes away. Even if you think about what’s happening in the public markets and how many public companies are now building Bitcoin treasuries, Bitcoin is miles ahead of anything else in terms of adoption. So, there was more excitement about Bitcoin L2 maybe a year ago, and it seemed to have cooled off a bit. But I think Bitcoin is so fundamental that people will just come back to it.
How do you think Donald Trump will affect the course of Bitcoin?
A lot. Look at the people he’s picking, like David Sachs as cryptocurrency and AI czar. He’s a big LP at Multicoin Capital and is completely up to date on cryptocurrencies and Solana, so I think it makes a big difference. And the same goes for some of the other people Trump chooses as advisers. In the United States, for the last four years, the government and regulators were literally fighting us. Now I think they’re going to actively support and encourage things, which is a big 180 degree turn. It helps a lot.
Furthermore, if any of the Bitcoin Reserve [plans] If this happens, it will be a huge, huge signal around the world. Even if they happen [just] At the state level, like in Texas or Wyoming, it will send a huge signal around the world.
What’s your guess on where the bitcoin price could be at the end of the year?
I still believe in the four-year cycle, and I consider the current cycle to end in the fourth quarter of 2025. And while there are some reasons to believe that perhaps the cycles will not be as intense, I personally remain a believer. I would be surprised if we don’t see $150,000 by the end of the year, and I think we may see $200,000. That would be my high rank.
When will we see fast and efficient payments using bitcoin?
We are trying to make this happen ourselves. And I think Lightning deserves a lot of credit – there are a lot of die-hard fans who use it. But the technology was complex and not very easy to integrate, and the Bitcoin community really only supported one project. And I think the way to do that is to let dozens of experiments run and see what catches your attention. One of the things I like about Bitcoin L2 with so many different projects going on is that we are finally seeing multiple experiments being done. If Lightning was too difficult to integrate, let other projects try it.
If you attend a Bitcoin conference or listen to some of the top people like [MicroStrategy Founder] Michael Saylor, there is an attitude that Lightning is the solution and the only solution. They wouldn’t talk about any other L2, and I think some of that has to do with the fact that some of these L2s have their own tokens. The bitcoin community doesn’t like that. But I think now they are at least slowly opening up.
What are you excited to discuss at Consensus Hong Kong?
How do we bring Bitcoin to a billion people? That’s something that excites me and drives some of the technology decisions we make. If that’s your goal, you almost immediately start looking at L2, because in L1, a billion people can’t even own UTXO. [Unspent Transaction Outputs]. I don’t know if many Bitcoiners realize that a billion people cannot own an on-chain UTXO with Bitcoin alone.
That’s something that probably doesn’t get talked about a lot in our industry. People have made peace with bringing people into Bitcoin through Coinbase and Binance and maybe through ETFs. But Bitcoin is not about that. Bitcoin is about decentralization and self-custody and people having direct control. We cannot forget that mission.
