Magic Eden coders gathered in an Airbnb in San Jose, California, to hack in preparation for the so-called bitcoin halving.
Amil Husain
In the East Foothills of San Jose, California, 17 coders working for the popular ordinals marketplace maker, Magic Eden, piled into a 4-bedroom, 3,875 square-foot house rented on Airbnb. Their goal was to spend a week hacking to prepare for the so-called bitcoin halving — an event that is baked into the chain’s code and helps to stave off inflation through programmatic monetary policy.
A lot of the talk surrounding the halving, which happens roughly every four years, has been pegged to the fact that new issuance of the world’s largest virtual coin would be cut in half. But the block that locked in the halving also coincided with a couple other major launches on the blockchain, including cutting-edge programming innovations that are expected to draw both a lot more coders and a lot more venture capital dollars into the bitcoin ecosystem.
Also unlike past halving events, the world’s largest cryptocurrency touched a new all-time high above $73,000 in March as record flows entered the bitcoin ecosystem via the newly-launched spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the U.S.
“Bitcoin has never been healthier – what was missing previously was a vibrant developer ecosystem on top,” said Magic Eden’s co-founder and chief operating officer, Zedd Yin.
Some of Magic Eden’s coders took breaks from hacking to play arcade games.
Amil Husain
Arcade games and hard liquor
Magic Eden’s pop-up hacker house was modest but had a few bells and whistles that carried the skeleton crew through the week.
Those perks included Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Street Fighter themed arcade-style machine games in the living room — plus a DIY open bar on a collapsible, plastic table in the dining room.
Engineers also went into the hackathon with the distinct advantage of knowing what they wanted to build. In the days leading up to the halving, Yin, 33, convened his team under the same roof in Northern California with one clear goal in mind: To code and launch the definitive marketplace for a new wave of digital products coming to bitcoin’s blockchain. On Monday morning, Magic Eden’s Runes Platform went live, helping to cement its place as the go-to forum to deal in these novel bitcoin offerings.
For years, rival chains like ethereum and solana have competed with bitcoin on functionality, because both have smart contracts — that is, programmable pieces of code — natively built into the base chain. That has been one of the chief reasons why developers around the world have flocked to these blockchains to build applications.
Magic Eden’s pop-up hacker house included arcade games and a ping pong table with a full bar.
Amil Husain
Enter Casey Rodarmor.
The popular bitcoin coder totally disrupted this dynamic last year when he introduced bitcoin’s version of non-fungible tokens known as ordinals, which developers ended up using as a base for bitcoin-issued coins called BRC-20 tokens. The launch was quiet, at first, but ultimately landed him tremendous acclaim.
Late Friday night, at the exact moment that the bitcoin halving initialized, Rodarmor unveiled his latest creation, runes, which is basically just a better and more efficient version of BRC-20 tokens.
“People really respect Casey and think that he sort of captured lightning in a bottle,” said Nic Carter of Castle Island Ventures. “And so there’s very high expectations for runes as well.”
Technically speaking, runes just enables asset issuance of fungible tokens on bitcoin’s base chain. That could be stablecoins, memecoins, or any variety of fungible token.
The reason this is significant to developers is because of its efficiency relative to existing BRC-20 tokens, bitcoin’s widely-used fungible token standard that has already received a ton of traction. Having a universally accepted token standard like this is seen as key to helping unlock scale of decentralized finance on bitcoin. Decentralized finance, or DeFi, is a parallel banking system that cuts out middlemen like lawyers and banks and relies upon code for enforcement.
“Fungible tokens are a significant part of every meaningful ecosystem like solana and ethereum, so runes is an important step in the evolution of bitcoin,” said Yin, who previously helped lead product for all institutional trading products at Coinbase.
Bill Barhydt, who runs Abra, a company that supports miners with a mix of services, including auto liquidations, and has access to macro data across the sector, said bitcoin simply cannot scale 100% on-chain via its own layer one. The problem has to do with the fact that bitcoin’s blockchain lacks the built-in smart contract capabilities necessary to reproduce the banking stack of a chain like ethereum or solana.
“BRC-20 tokens and ordinals, its successor runes, sidechains such as stacks, and DeFi on bitcoin are all showing strong promise in user adoption which stands to dramatically increase the demand for bitcoin block space and adoption, which I believe will create a positive feedback loop further driving bitcoin price gains in the coming years,” Barhydt said. “It’s truly remarkable the level of new development work happening around bitcoin,” he added.
Venture investors agree.
“I’ve never seen deal pacing move this aggressively in the bitcoin space in my entire career,” Carter tells CNBC.
For a week, the Magic Eden team gathered in an Airbnb in San Jose to work on the code for a new digital asset marketplace that would go live at the bitcoin halving block.
Amil Husain
Bitcoin ‘layer two’ interest spikes
Indeed, the VC appetite for these layer two bitcoin projects has been picking up in the last few months.
PitchBook says that the fourth quarter of 2023 was the first time in almost two years that deal value in the crypto sector had increased, reaching $1.9 billion — up 2.5% from the previous quarter. While still well off the 2021 high of $31 billion, funds are building back interest, and trust, in the space.
“There’s definitely been an awakening of capital interest in the bitcoin layer two space,” said Muneeb Ali, who co-founded Stacks — an open-source blockchain network that brings smart contracts to bitcoin.
Stacks is a separate chain to bitcoin but the two are able to work together. The project launched its own upgrade at the time of the halving block, as well, which reduced transaction time to five seconds, compared to the 10 to 30 minute block times tied to bitcoin’s base chain.
“Having so much VC interest just cements that the bitcoin ecosystem is primed to grow,” Ali said, who noted that the pace of projects launching on bitcoin has also picked up momentum in the last six months, from a half dozen projects going live to more than 50.
A new report released by Austin-based venture fund Trammell Venture Partners found that the bitcoin startup sector had a breakout year at the pre-seed stage, noting a 360% year-over-year increase in transaction count.
“Founders really want to be building on bitcoin specifically,” Christopher Calicott, the fund’s managing director and founding partner, said of the study’s findings.
The report also noted that early-stage, bitcoin-native startups raised just under $1 billion from 2021 through 2023.
Take Alpen Labs. The layer two project, which is bringing cutting-edge scaling technology known as zero-knowledge proofs to bitcoin, just emerged from stealth mode with Ribbit Capital leading a $10.6 million round. Another popular layer two solution dubbed “Build on Bitcoin,” or BOB, has raised $10 million in seed funding.
“Ordinals, BRC-20s and other innovations that came about in 2023 really helped build momentum ahead of the halving,” Ali said. “They made bitcoin fun again for developers and showed that users will favor NFTs, assets, and apps on bitcoin if given the opportunity.”
In the East Foothills of San Jose, California, 17 coders working for the popular Ordinals marketplace maker, Magic Eden, piled into a 4-bedroom, 3,875 square-foot house rented on Airbnb.
Amil Husain
DeFi on bitcoin rails
For years, developers have been trying to bake additional functionality into bitcoin’s base chain. Barhydt tells CNBC that demand for DeFi — specifically yield and lending — is a key driver of crypto adoption.
Sidechains like stacks, for example, have been working to bring the speed and competitive transaction costs of solana-type rails to the bitcoin ecosystem, in order to decongest the main chain and allow the overall bitcoin economy to scale.
With runes, these existing projects have a new tool they can use to grow, since it enables them to potentially plug into a native, lightweight token system on the main bitcoin chain rather than having to generate their own independent token environment.
“Runes presents an efficient system for creating and managing fungible tokens directly on bitcoin in a way that reduces blockchain bloat and improves scalability compared to other token standards,” said Hong Fang, president of crypto exchange OKX. “This has major implications for layer two solutions and sidechains that are working to scale bitcoin,” added Fang, who previously spent nearly a decade workingat Goldman Sachs.
Stacks’s Ali has dubbed the post-halving environment “bitcoin season two.”
“Season two is all about the return of builders to bitcoin. Users are finally separating bitcoin the asset from Bitcoin, as the rails,” he said.
As for Yin and his team — one other big takeaway of the runes hackathon was the need for a bit more due diligence on Airbnb properties.
The team had an outdoor gas fireplace that wasn’t working so there was a constant smell of a gas leak the entire week, the rental’s WiFi was down for the entire first day — and a handful of folks got Covid.
Over the next two years, homebuilder Lennar is outfitting more than 1,500 new Colorado homes with Dandelion Energy’s geothermal systems in one of the largest residential geothermal rollouts in the US.
The big draw for homeowners is lower energy bills and cleaner heating and cooling. Dandelion claims Lennar homeowners with geothermal systems will collectively save around $30 million over the next 20 years compared to using air-source heat pumps. Geothermal heat pumps don’t need outdoor AC units or conventional heating systems, either.
Geothermal systems use the sustained temperature of the ground to heat or cool a home. A ground loop system absorbs heat energy (BTUs) from the earth so that it can be transferred to a heat pump and efficiently converted into warmth for a home. Dandelion says its ground loop systems are built to last for over 50 years and should require no maintenance.
Dandelion’s geothermal system uses a vertical ground closed-loop system that is installed using well-boring equipment and trenched back into the house to connect to a heat pump. The pipes circulate a mixture of water and propylene glycol, a food-grade antifreeze, that absorbs the ground’s temperature. A ground source heat pump circulates the liquid through the ground loops and it exchanges its heat energy in the heat pump with liquid refrigerant. The refrigerant is converted to vapor, compressed to increase its temperature, then passed through a heat exchanger to transfer heat to the air, which is circulated through a home’s HVAC ductwork.
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Daniel Yates, Dandelion Energy’s CEO, called the partnership with Lennar a “new benchmark for affordable, energy-efficient, and high-quality home heating and cooling.” By streamlining its installation process, Dandelion is making geothermal systems simpler and cheaper for homebuilders and homeowners to adopt.
This collaboration is happening at a time when Colorado is pushing hard to meet its clean energy targets. Governor Jared Polis is excited about the move, calling it a win for Coloradans’ wallets, air quality, and the state’s leadership on geothermal energy. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office, said that “ensuring affordable access to geothermal heating and cooling is essential to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, and we’re excited to be part of such a huge effort to bring this technology to so many new Colorado homes.”
And it’s not just about cutting emissions – geothermal heat pumps help reduce peak electric demand. Analysis from the Department of Energy found that widespread adoption of these systems could save the US from needing 24,500 miles of new transmission lines. That’s like crossing the continental US eight times.
Colorado is making this transition a lot more attractive through state tax credits and Xcel Energy’s rebate programs. These incentives slash upfront costs for builders like Lennar, making geothermal installations more financially viable. The utility’s Clean Heat Plan and electrification strategy are working to keep energy bills low while meeting climate goals.
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Polestar has removed the Polestar 2 from its US website header in an early sign of how new tariffs will restrict choice and competition for American consumers, thus increasing prices.
The Polestar 2 is Polestar’s first full EV – the original Polestar 1 was a limited-edition plug-in hybrid.
It started production in 2020 in Luqiao, Zhejiang, China, where Polestar and Volvo’s parent corporation, Geely, was founded.
Unfortunately, that interacts with some news that has been getting a lot of play lately: tariffs.
The US has been gradually getting stupider and stupider on the issue of tariffs, apparently determined to increase prices for Americans and decrease the competitiveness of American manufacturing in a time of change for the auto industry.
It is widely acknowledged (by anyone who has given it a few seconds of thought) that tariffs increase prices and that trade barriers tend to reduce competition, leading to less innovation.
It started with 25% tariffs on various products from China, implemented in the 2018-2020 timeframe. Then, in 2024, President Biden implemented a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, effectively stopping their sale in the US. These tariffs included some exceptions and credits based on Volvo’s other US manufacturing, which Polestar had used to keep the most expensive versions of the 2 on sale in the US, while restricting the lower-priced versions from sale. Nevertheless, they were a bad idea.
Now, in yet another step to make America less competitive and inflate the prices of goods more for Americans, we got more tariff announcements today from a senile ex-reality TV host who wandered into the White House rose garden (which he does not belong in). These tariffs do not include the same exceptions as the previously-announced Biden tariffs.
Apparently this has all been enough for Polestar, as even in advance of today’s tariff announcements, the company suddenly removed its Polestar 2 from its website header today.
The change can be seen at polestar.com/us, where only the Polestar 3 and 4 are listed in the header area. On other sites, like the company’s Norwegian website or British website, the car is still there. The Polestar 2 page is still up on the US website, but it isn’t linked to elsewhere on the site (we’ll see how long it stays up).
We reached out to Polestar for comment, but didn’t hear anything back before publication. We’ll update if we do.
It makes sense that the Polestar 2 would still be for sale elsewhere, as it only started production in 2020. Most car models are available for at least 7 years, so this is an earlier exit than expected.
So it’s likely that all of the tariff news is what had an effect in killing the Polestar 2.
Then again, this is also just the second day of a new fiscal quarter. Perhaps the timing offers Polestar an opportunity to make a clean break – especially now that the lower-priced version of its Polestar 3 is available.
Despite the lower $67.5k base price of the new Polestar 3 variant, that represents a big increase in price for the brand, which had sold the base model Polestar 2 for around $50k originally, before all of these tariffs.
Update: Polestar got back to us with comment, but understandably, it doesn’t say much:
Polestar is a three-car company and Polestar 2 is available for customers now. There are a select number of Polestar 2s in stock at retailers that can be found on Polestar.com, but Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 will be the priority in the North American market.
Volvo decided to build the car in Belgium and export it to the US, but now that new tariffs apply to the EU as well, maybe that low-priced, awesome, fast, small EV will instead stay in Europe instead of being shipped overseas.
This shows how mercurial tariff fiats from an ignoramus are bad for manufacturing, as they mean that companies can’t make plans – and if they can’t make plans, eventually, they’ll probably just write the country making the random decisions out of their plans so they don’t have to deal with the nonsense.
And we’ve heard this from every businessperson or manufacturer representative we’ve talked to at any level of the automotive industry. Nobody thinks any of this is a good idea, because it objectively is not. All it does is make business harder, make the US less trustworthy, make things more expensive, and overall just harm America.
Yet another way that Americans are getting screwed by this stupid nonsense. 49% of you voted for inflation, and 100% of Americans are now getting it. Happy Inflation Day, everyone.
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Lucid Motors (LCID) has now had six straight quarters with higher deliveries. The delivery record comes just as Lucid prepares to begin delivering its first electric SUV, the Gravity, to customers by the end of this month.
Lucid sets sixth straight delivery record in Q1 2025
Lucid delivered 3,109 vehicles in the first quarter, up 58% from last year and topping its previous record of 3,099 set in Q4 2024.
The company also produced 2,213 vehicles at its Casa Grande, Arizona, plant in the first three months of 2025, an increase of 28% from last year. Another 600 vehicles were in transit to Saudi Arabia, where they will be assembled at its new AMP-2 plant, Lucid’s first international manufacturing facility.
At this pace, Lucid will easily top the roughly 10,200 vehicles it delivered last year in 2025 at around 12,500. Lucid will likely see even more growth this year, with customer deliveries of its first electric SUV starting soon.
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During the Gravity SUV’s “celestial arrival” last week in NYC, Lucid’s interim CEO Marc Winterhoff said the EV maker is “nearly finished building all the vehicles that we wanted to build to put them into our studio and for test drives.”
Q4 2022
Q1 2023
Q2 2023
Q3 2023
Q4 2023
Full-year 2023
Q1 2024
Q2 2024
Q3 2024
Q4 2024
Full-year 2024
Q1 2025
Lucid EV deliveries by quarter
1,932
1,406
1,404
1,457
1,734
6,001
1,967
2,394
2,781
3,099
10,241
3,109
Lucid (LCID) EV deliveries by quarter 2023 to Q1 2025
Winterhoff added, “by the end of April, we will resume customer deliveries of the Gravity.” Lucid delivered the first models in December, but they were for employees, friends, and family.
Lucid calls the Gravity a “no compromise” SUV with a range of up to 450 miles, 120 cubic feet of interior space, advanced technology, and sports car-like performance. The Gravity Grand Touring starts at $94,900, while the Touring model will arrive later this year at $79,900.
Lucid Gravity Grand Touring in Aurora Green (Source: Lucid)
The new delivery record comes after Winterhoff told Fox Business last week that Lucid has seen a “dramatic uptick over the past two months” in orders from former Tesla drivers.
Currently, “50% of all the orders we have are from former Tesla owners,” Lucid’s CEO said. Winterhoff added that many are “looking for an option to not continue having a Tesla.”
Will we see the trend continue? Tesla announced earlier today that it delivered 336,681 vehicles in the first quarter, far less than the 390,000 Wall Street analysts expected.
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