The Stacks currency STX will soon be replaced by Bitcoin as the native currency on Gamma

When computer engineer Jamil Dhanani first heard about programmable Bitcoin, it piqued his interest and led him to switch from building DApps on Ethereum to building on Stacks, the Bitcoin smart contracts Layer 2. Now the founder of Gamma, the leading Bitcoin NFT marketplace on Stacks, he shares his story with DeCential Media. 

DeCential: Can you please share what Gamma is?

Jamil Dhanani: The simplest way to put it for those that are at least somewhat familiar with NFTs is that Gamma is like the OpenSea for Bitcoin NFTs. It’s a place where you can buy, sell, trade your NFTs that are secured by Bitcoin. You can also create your own NFTs or create your own NFT collections, just like you might on a different blockchain or on a different marketplace. And for those that are less familiar with NFTs, basically what we say is, it's a place to create and trade digital collectibles. And this can be art, software subscriptions, basically anything you can think of that you can own in the digital world. We specifically focus on Bitcoin, because we think that Bitcoin is the most secure and most decentralized blockchain and has the strongest provenance, the strongest future of all the blockchains. 

DC: I was not aware you could build on the Bitcoin blockchain. 

JD: Over the past decade, we've seen the advent of two incredibly powerful technologies enabled by the blockchain. The first is the development of what you can think of as sound money. This was the first application of the blockchain, which was Bitcoin. For the first time, you had this idea that you can own something digitally, that no trusted third party has control over. So if I wanted to send you money, I can do that in a way that nobody can stop me from sending you money. It's censorship resistant, nobody can control it, nobody can freeze my assets. And that was incredibly, incredibly powerful and enabled this whole plethora of use cases and brought millions to be able to use money and trade for the first time without fear of censorship. So that's Bitcoin. 

And NFT for sale on Gamma

The second was this idea of the world computer from Ethereum. And suddenly, we all have this idea of a shared global state that all computers can agree upon, not just about money, but about anything else. If we want to save a number  to the blockchain, or some text or a poem or whatever, there's nobody that can say this never happened, or this never existed, or nobody can erase that. It's a state of the world that all computers agree upon. This idea of the world computer is super powerful.

And so, with Stacks, the goal is to merge the principal goals of security and decentralization of Bitcoin’s currency, with that power of the general world computer of Ethereum. So for the first time, you're able to use Bitcoin in generalizable smart contracts, without any trusted third party controlling either the money or the smart contracts. So for example, one thing that is coming soon is you'll be able to peg in Bitcoin straight from the main chain on Bitcoin, and allows you to interact with decentralized finance, with digital assets and more. So that really opens up a world of possibilities that didn't exist before. 

DC: So why wasn't this how it evolved originally because it was always Bitcoin as purely peer-to-peer currency transactions. And the belief that the layer 2s arrived with Ethereum? Did no one at Bitcoin think, ‘oh, we could do this with Bitcoin’?

JD: Bitcoin has always had, and it's honestly for the better, a very conservative approach to developing the protocol. With rapid innovation, there are also risks. I feel a lot of Bitcoiners are somewhat resistant to innovation, not only on the main layer, but on top as well. I think both should happen. You should have a very strong, immutable base layer, but a lot of innovation built on top.

DC: So what's your personal journey with Bitcoin? When did you first get exposed to it? And what's this journey that's led you up to today from that point?

JD: My background has been mostly in software engineering and in machine learning. I spent about four years as a machine learning engineer at Apple and my background was in computer engineering. I made my first Bitcoin purchase in around 2013-14. It wasn't super early, but it was early enough to see the space change quite considerably. And see, you know, the advent of Ethereum, and the boom and bust cycles of crypto. I think this is a pretty common thread of people in tech who dabbled in crypto or Bitcoin and then dived in deep at certain points in their life. For me, I started writing Solidity smart contracts, and building DApps on Ethereum. One that I built after the 2020 election was actually the Associated Press published their race calls to the blockchain. Not a lot of people even know that they did that. But I thought it was pretty cool.

Read more: Bored Ape Yacht Club Lawsuit Faces Hurdles, Law Professor Says

And so I just built a simple website where you could visualize like the map of the U.S. and it would pull in the data straight from the blockchain in a censorship-resistant way. So you can see these vote totals from each of the states and when the races were called. And I think it was just such a cool use case for the blockchain that was outside of these, you know, purely financialized or hype cycles.

Then I discovered the programmable Bitcoin ecosystem and Stacks. And that caught my attention. I had spent a while in crypto, but had never heard of Bitcoin layers or programmable Bitcoin. And so it piqued my interest. And I started to dive a bit more deeply in there. And one of the things that appealed to me was the idea of asset ownership built on Bitcoin, because people trust Bitcoin as a store of value for their fungible assets, like their money. And I think that there's a strong potential for people to trust Bitcoin as a store of value for their non-fungible assets as well, which are the vast majority of assets that you have. So we developed the platform and built the team from there. 

DC: Where does your approach to building technology come from?

JD: I think one of the great things about technology is that no matter who you are, you can basically find a way to channel your passion and your interests. Whether it's code, design, writing or communication, it really opens up so many possibilities for you. My other interests have always been with politics, governance and literature. So I have always been interested, not in just technology for technology's sake, but what it can enable. And what it can allow people to do. And I think that's one of the great appealing things about crypto as well. It’s not just technology for technology's sake. It has strong principles of decentralization, of helping others and enabling a censorship resistant and open way of communication and finance.

DC: Do you think that the Bitcoin community will now embrace Layer 2 as a business model and support founders to achieve greater mass adoption of Bitcoin?

JD: Often when people hear the term ‘Bitcoin community’ they think of this small group of maximalists that only see Bitcoin as an asset and don't necessarily want anything to do with Ether or others. But the truth is, a vast majority of people who hold Bitcoin, also hold ETH and maybe Solana. I don't think the Bitcoin community are the loudest voices on Twitter. And that's not our goal. What we're trying to do is build useful things that people can use their Bitcoin to pay with. And we think that by doing that, it doesn't matter what people say, or if we can convince people one way or another, you just have to build things that are useful and get people to use them. And then the rest will come.  If Ethereum took the approach that they have to convince everybody in crypto right now that what they’re doing is good, they would have never succeeded. And so they built something that was useful. That grew the community and the number of people that were introduced to the blockchain using crypto, and that's what we want to do as well. So I don't think it's about trying to convince people, it's just about trying to build something that's useful and bringing that to the world.

We want to see Bitcoin be the currency that you use to buy things, sell things, trade with and use it as a financial instrument. I'm really excited for an increased focus on Bitcoin adoption, not solely as an asset, but as a useful and productive instrument as well.

DC: What is coming in 2023 for Gamma that you are excited about?

JD: So the main thing is that right now, if you go to Gamma, you will see the price is denominated in Stacks (STX), the currency for the ecosystem. That is going to be changing within the next six months and we want to be able to use Bitcoin as a native asset for almost everything on Gamma. And so that means when an artist creates a collection and sells it, they'll be getting Bitcoin and and when someone sells an NFT they'll be getting Bitcoin and when you want to buy an NFT, you'll be spending Bitcoin. It opens up a world of possibilities that suddenly didn't exist before. It starts to make this dream of an entire Bitcoin economy a reality. Bitcoin won't be just something sitting in your wallet, it becomes a truly economically-productive asset and a flourishing extensive ecosystem of applications.

DC: Is that a decision that's come from Stacks or that's a decision you've made in your company?

JD: This is something that is going to happen at the protocol level at Stacks. We tried to do this for a while as well, even without the protocol. We had lightning mints for NFTs on our website. We use wrapped Bitcoin, where you can mint NFTs with wrapped Bitcoin. So we've always wanted to do this since our inception, to have native Bitcoin mints. And we've done it in several different ways, but not really at a core protocol level. So as this comes from the protocol level with Stacks, we're really excited to just go all in and say to the market, ‘look, this is going to be a Bitcoin-first and Bitcoin-central experience for both the creator and the collector.’