UX can sometimes be an ambiguous buzzword, especially in blockchain! But the UserX team at Hiro literally only has a goal: improving the experience of Stacks users. They’ve been laser focused on designing, restructuring, improving, and incorporating feedback into the suite of Hiro products that developers use to make Web 3 magic happen. 🧙

This July, they certainly didn’t kick their feet up by a swimming pool. Instead, they kicked it into high gear! They held an internal hackathon that drastically increased test coverage, implemented microblocks into the explorer and wallets, prepared Ledger wallet updates, and reimagined onboarding flow.

We’re beginning to see the Stacks dapp ecosystem explode, and products like the web wallet or explorer giver users and devs alike the power to interact with the blockchain in fun and exciting ways. The UserX Team at Hiro is dedicated to streamlining how users join our community and explore Stacks.

You can learn all about the crazy cool projects the UserX team is working on in their latest July recap!
https://www.hiro.so/blog/hiro-ux-team-july-2021-recap?utm_source=telegram

Eggschain, a Stacks Accelerator team, enables patients to track genetic material using the blockchain. Learn more about Eggschain here: https://cointelegraph.com/magazine/2021/08/05/the-revolution-is-coming-tracking-sperm-on-bitcoin-with-eggschain

Mining for MiamiCoin ($MIA) has been activated. ⛏ $MIA is the first CityCoin to launch and will enable people to support the city of Miami while earning $BTC and $STX.

Check out the latest coverage of $MIA from FoxBusinessNews👇
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/mayor-suarez-on-miamicoin-launch-says-city-is-focused-on-differentiating-our-economy

Diwaker Gupta (VP of Tech, Hiro) will be presenting at Chainlink's Smart Contract Summit followed by a technical demo with Marvin Janssen (Technical Lead, Stacks Foundation) this Saturday, August 7th.

The talks will start at 3:25pm and run until 4:10pm est.
Register here: https://hopin.com/events/smart-contract-summit-1?ref=9612bdfe2e85

Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Stacks, will participate in the 'Upbit Developer Conference 2021' hosted on September 1st through 2nd and will be presenting in the smart contract session.

UDC 2021: https://udc.upbit.com

Happy Tuesday, Stacks World! 👋

I’ve got an exciting announcement for all the developers out there in our community. Stacks.js Version 2.0 is hot on the scene and ready for you to use! 🆕

Stacks.js is a Github repo that is home to the Stacks.js libraries which provide everything you could need to work with the Stacks blockchain. Authentication, storage, constructing transactions, encryption, you name it! This upgrade to version two brings loads of improvements and feature additions that we know devs are gonna love. There’s new typescript magic to help deserialize Clarity Values, as well as a super useful library to build Stacks wallets.

⚠️ One important note, there are two breaking changes included in this update that devs should be aware of. broadcastTransaction now returns a more consistent response whether it succeeds or fails, and there is no more default anchormode. Included in the blog post are code snippets that show exactly what needs to be modified on the developer’s end.

We’re thrilled about getting this update in front of the community, and know that Stacks.js will be a critical tool for juggling all the components needed to build a fully-fledged, decentralized app. Take a look at the changelog to see details pertaining to the update.

https://www.hiro.so/blog/stack-js-version-2-what-you-should-know?utm_source=telegram

We’re going on a trip to the Web 3 galaxy, and Hiro has a rocket ship we made just for you 🚀

The Hiro Web Wallet for Stacks is the best way to manage STX and sign into decentralized apps, and we’re thrilled to share that it is now officially available in both the Chrome and Firefox stores.

The User Experience team at Hiro has been hard at work the last few months squashing bugs, implementing new features, incorporating valuable community feedback, and beautifying our browser-based crypto wallet. We think that the web wallet is going to catalyze a vibrant dapp economy built on Stacks, and will be useful to end users and hardcore developers alike.

No more time to waste! Now go out there and start your NFT collection, use DeFi apps like Arkadiko, or register a blockchain-based domain name with BTC.US. The possibilities are endless, and the Hiro Web Wallet is your wizard wand to perform crypto magic. Take a look at the announcement blog post from today to learn all the details around the updated wallet! ⤵️
https://www.hiro.so/blog/hiro-wallet-officially-available-in-chrome-and-firefox-stores?utm_source=telegram

⛏Mining Update: Daemon Technologies just released a version of the STX Mining Monitor. Now, we can see all recent in depth activity in the STX Mining market. This give both STX Miners and non-miners a valuable, quick snapshot of recent on-chain activity. In addition to showing activity on the Stacks chain, it also shows data from the Bitcoin chain, such as hashrate.

https://daemontechnologies.co/mining-monitor

Hi Everybody and Happy Thursday! ✌️

We’ve got a showstopping new post on the Hiro Blog this week with Muneeb authoring his first piece, and it highlights exciting happenings in native Bitcoin swaps. He discusses why it’s so significant, but more importantly highlights the engineers that recently built an implementation. Longtime Stacks community members Friedger Müffke, Asteria, and Jude Nelson, in collaboration with other Stacks community devs, successfully deployed working Bitcoin swaps with NFTs and other crypto-assets. 🪙🔄 🖼

It’s been no secret that Bitcoin and Stacks are a match made in heaven. The novel proof of transfer consensus mechanism leverages Bitcoin’s security and dominance, and Clarity unlocks all the dynamic decentralized DeFi & dApp use cases that blockchainers want. However, these types of native BTC swaps are a step above above just extending Bitcoin’s security. The new nautical “Catamaran Swaps” utilize Clarity smart contracts’ unique visibility to main Bitcoin chain and demonstrate true Bitcoin DeFi.

Have a read, and deep dive on the Clarity code that does the heavy lifting. A mere 70 lines of code is enabling trust-less BTC swaps to stablecoins, derivatives, perpetuals, and other any other crypto assets you all dream up and build on Stacks. I sound like a broken record sometimes, but once again a round of applause to the dedicated community members that spend their time hungering for knowledge, hacking through the big problems, and making Stacks a home for developers that want to code the future.
https://www.hiro.so/blog/bitcoin-defi-is-here-a-deep-dive-into-trust-less-swaps?utm_source=telegram

The Chapters Program takes our global mission local. It gives Chapter Leads the tools and resources they need to build and empower their local community. It's time to check on each Chapter's goals and evaluate their progress on each.

https://stacks.org/stacks-chapters-collective-impact

GoSats, a Stacks accelerator team commemorates India's Independence Day with the launch of a new Bitcoin rewards card. Users will be able to earn yield paid in BTC on all the rewards they’ve accumulated through the app.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/gosats-launches-bitcoin-cashback-rewards-card-in-india

🔥 Don't miss these two local Stacks AMAs today and the coming weekend.

🇮🇳 India: August 20 - 1st Stacks Deep Dive Session
🇹🇷 Turkey: August 22 - Binance Turkey AMA

See you all there!

🇹🇷 STX is getting listed on BTCTurk, one of the biggest exchanges in Turkey and the first Turkish lira-based cryptocurrency trading platform in the country. Trading will go live this August 23 at 15:00PM CET

https://twitter.com/Stacks/status/1428725044050546689

JUST IN: HireVibes users can now earn $STX for referring talent and getting hired. Check the full announcement here: https://www.hirevibes.io/post/stx-rewards-added-to-hirevibes

Trust-less BTC swaps on Stacks, loans that repay themselves, and NFTs that earn rewards? Bitcoin DeFi just keeps getting better and better.

More on Bitcoin DeFi + updates from Stacks builders in the latest Stacks Foundation newsletter: https://newsletter.stacks.org/issues/3x-stacking-rewards-trustless-swaps-and-rounding-up-your-change-into-stx-btc-706357

🔥 Let's meet Philip De Smedt, CEO and co-founder of Arkadiko, how we want to make it easy to get access to liquidity and to borrow against your own assets on the Stacks blockchain.

Official Hiro Blog 👉
https://www.hiro.so/blog/philip-de-smedt-on-loans-that-repay-themselves
Spread the word 👉
https://twitter.com/Gina__Abrams/status/1430591396315021321

Arkadiko: Website | Twitter | Telegram | Github | Discord | Medium

Get ready! Wrapped Bitcoin is Coming to Stacks 🚀

https://twitter.com/WrappedFi/status/1430942401602990084

🌴$MIA went live on OKcoin. $MIA is the 1st-ever city-based token, an open-source public utility offering a new kind of civic engagement for the community.
CityCoins are tokens built on the $STX blockchain and allow people to support their cities.

https://twitter.com/okcoin/status/1430566119455313921?s=21

The Ryder team made it their mission to make crypto accessible and inclusive to everyone by creating a hardware wallet through a human-centered design. They focus on its usability w/ the primary goal of integrating it into our daily lives & connecting our on-chain identity w/ our real-life identity. Their team believe in using design to make a complex product more understandable. If you're curious about how their team and maker community approaches Ryder's Product Design, check out their first product blog post here: https://ryder.id/blog/the-human-centered-design-process-of-ryder/

🇰🇷 Stacks Korea just launched their Ambassadors Program.
If you would like to participate in the program, please send a DM to @gmchung.

https://t.me/BlockstackKoreaUpdate/525

A review from Hiro and the next steps about the mempool congestion. 👇

https://forum.stacks.org/t/mempool-congestion-on-stacks-observations-and-next-steps-from-hiro