On January 2, Muneeb Ali, co-founder and CEO of Bitcoin leader L2 Stacks, updated his X bio from simply “founder @Stacks” to “wartime founder @Stacks.” This change marks Ali’s recognition that 2025 is a year where Stacks needs to focus on marketing and expanding its user base following major technical upgrades in 2024. These upgrades included the long-awaited day from Nakamoto which significantly increased the speed of the project and achieved 100% finality on Bitcoin for all its transactions.
According to Ali, a new direction for Stacks is all the more appropriate given that crypto is now firmly in the grip of a bull market, fueled by the election of Donald Trump and what should be a more favorable environment for crypto development. cryptography.
“Biological change was a signal to the community: ‘Hey, we understand that these times are different and you need to act a lot faster and be a lot more aggressive,’” Ali said in an interview with CoinDesk. “Not that there won’t be product upgrades in 2025, but I would say that the product stops being 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 through Bitcoin, where he sees the prize of Bitcoin increase in 2025 and its ultimate goal of attracting a billion people. channel via 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 Nakamoto’s upgrade now?
I still think Bitcoin needs a really, 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 on L1. And that’s why a lot of people were interested in Lightning. It’s been around for a while, it’s been adopted, but not a ton. Let’s be realistic.
So I think there is still a need for extremely fast and high-quality Bitcoin UX transactions. I’d say even Solana did it a lot better than Lightning or anything else. So one of the things we want to do is have a Solana-like Bitcoin L2, where you can move any amount of capital very quickly, and it’s a great UX experience. And I think that’s one of the goals we’re achieving with Nakamoto.
Is there anything you would have done differently regarding Nakamoto’s deployment if you could?
The launch of Nakamoto therefore took place in several phases. First, the basic consensus capital moved in April. Then we launched fast blocks, but the most complex transactions could not benefit from them. And then we made another version that more complex transactions could also benefit from. But looking back, it’s as if there was a trickle-down release. So people had high expectations at every step, and then they’re like “oh, it’s not there yet, it’s not there yet.” So when it came time to fully launch, I think that took away some of the excitement, frankly.
Do you think we will continue to see interest return to building and programming on Bitcoin rather than Ethereum and other chains in 2025?
I think so. Bitcoin is like one of those things that is sort of in a class of its own; it never goes away. Even when you think about what’s happening in the public markets and how many public companies are now building Bitcoin treasuries, Bitcoin is way ahead of everything else in terms of adoption. So maybe a year ago there was more enthusiasm for Bitcoin L2, and that seemed to have cooled off a bit. But I think Bitcoin is so fundamental that people will come back to it.
How do you think Donald Trump will affect the price of Bitcoin?
A lot. Look at the people he chooses, like David Sachs as crypto and AI czar. He’s a big LP at Multicoin Capital and fully up to date on crypto and Solana, so I think that makes a huge difference. And the same goes for some of the other people Trump chooses as advisers. In the United States, over the past four years, the government and regulators have literally fought against us. Now I think they’re actually going to actively support and encourage things, which is a huge 180. It helps a lot.
Additionally, if one of the Bitcoin Reserve [plans] it will happen, it will be a huge, huge signal throughout the world. Even if they arrive [just] At the state level, like Texas or Wyoming, this will send a huge signal across the world.
Where do you think the price of Bitcoin could be at the end of the year?
I still believe in the four-year cycle, with the current cycle scheduled to end in the fourth quarter of 2025. And while there is reason to believe the cycles may not be that intense, I am personally still a believer. I’ll be surprised if we don’t see $150,000 by the end of the year, and I think we can see $200,000. That would be my high range.
When will we see fast and efficient payments via Bitcoin?
We are trying to achieve this ourselves. And I think Lightning deserves a lot of credit – a lot of die-hard fans use it. But the technology was complex and not very easy to integrate, and the Bitcoin community effectively settled on a single project. And I think the way to do that is to let dozens of experiments play out and see what catches the eye. One of the things I love about Bitcoin L2, with so many different projects starting up, is that we’re finally seeing multiple experiments happening. If Lightning was too difficult to integrate, let other projects try it.
If you attend a Bitcoin conference or hear from personalities such as [MicroStrategy Founder] Michael Saylor, there’s this attitude that Lightning is the solution and the only solution. They wouldn’t talk about any other L2s, and I think part of that is because some of those L2s have their own tokens. The Bitcoin community doesn’t like this. But I think they’re slowly opening up, at least now.
What are you looking forward to discussing at Consensus Hong Kong?
How to bring Bitcoin to a billion people? It’s something I’m passionate about and it drives some of the technology decisions we make. If that’s your goal, you almost immediately start looking for L2s, because on L1 a billion people can’t even own UTXOs. [Unspent Transaction Outputs]. I don’t know if many Bitcoiners even realize that a billion people can’t own a UTXO chain on Bitcoin alone.
It’s something that’s probably not talked about a lot in our industry. People have made peace with integrating Bitcoin through Coinbase and Binance and perhaps through ETFs. But that is not the purpose of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is about decentralization and self-custody and direct control of people. We cannot forget this mission.
