Dear Investors,
I hope this update finds you well! It has been an eventful month at DLC.Link, as always.
We’ve seen an uptick in inbound interest and word-of-mouth referrals, especially relating to cross-chain ordinal trading and finance.
DLCs enable Bitcoin to be composable with other blockchains, which opens up a lot of new possibilities.
In fact, I maintain a running catalog of all of our use cases here:
For example, let me share an interesting use case with you around Mina Protocol.
Mina Protocol is a blockchain that implements zero-knowledge (ZK) proofs. According to their website, their chain state fits into 22 KB (vs. over 300 GB for most chains).
This makes it possible to store the chain on smartphones.
O1 Labs, a team that does engineering for Mina, reached out to me. They are working with a client who is interested in building a multichain solution for controlling ordinals using ZK proofs, using Mina’s SDK.
This use case is reminiscent of the "Bitcoin-backed NFT" application we developed with Arcade.xyz.
However, instead of representing the locked Bitcoin as an NFT, the Bitcoin locked in a DLC could be represented as a ZK proof. How interesting! This is a net-new use case that’s never been explored before.
Our collaborative partner model, combined with the composability of DLCs, moves us into new areas and pushes the boundaries of what can be achieved.
Overview
We’ve continued adding prospects to our pipeline, often from inbound and word-of-mouth.
O1 Labs/Mina Protocol, Azima Finance and Sovryn DLC are examples of opportunities that came inbound this past month
We are simplifying our infrastructure and removing technical debt. Security audits with CoinFabrik are scheduled to begin on July 25
We plan to be in production in September. When we launch, we’ll support Bitcoin-based DLCs via Xverse and Hiro
We’ve also begun scoping work to enable ordinals in DLCs and other satoshi-based assets.
This will require 2-3 additional months of work, but depending on the extent of it, we may be able to support these in Sept/Oct as well
Sales and Business Development
As of today, our sales pipeline includes 44 DeFi deals and 21 CeFi deals. Of this, 14 deals are currently in the scoping phase and 7 are in the proposal phase
We’ve been seeing strong interest from multichain protocols who are looking to trade or borrow against ordinals and other sat-based assets
We are in testnet with Xverse wallet, and we’ve almost finished our integration into Hiro wallet. Between these two wallets, DLC.Link will be able to serve an audience of over 170,000 users
We are soon kicking off a project to help decentralize Emblem Vault, a top 3 ordinals vault provider. Integrating dlcBTC will automate Emblem’s transactions, which currently have to be done manually after each trade
Marketing and PR
We’ve launched a new Media section on our website! It contains blog posts, case studies, videos and a newsroom where we highlight PR content.
Check it out here: https://www.dlcbtc.com/media
One of our most helpful pieces of sales collateral has been our article covering the difference between our DLC Attestation Layer and a typical bridge.
Unlike bridges, Bitcoin locked in a DLC cannot be stolen by a hacker.
Read more here: https://www.dlc.link/blog/the-difference-between-a-dlc-layer-and-a-decentralized-consensus-network
We’ve been designing various liquidation flows, and have updated our documentation around it.
We invite all investors to join our Telegram community at English: https://t.me/dlcbtc
For native Mandarin speakers, you can join our Chinese community at https://t.me/dlcbtc_cn
Follow us on Twitter at https://x.com/dlcBTC
Testimonials
A few recent quotes from our fans:
"Bitcoin is highly-liquid, with over 10 years of historical data. dlcBTC lets us service lenders who want to earn a yield on passively-held Bitcoin" – Costas, Arcade.xyz
"An elegant solution that reduces counterparty risk and expands lending and settlement options" – Patrick McLaughlin, Founder, Brane
"dlcBTC is making Bitcoin more composable & usable in DeFi" – Oliver Birch, Global Head, Chainlink BUILD Program
"You're sovereign Bitcoin for everything else” – Leading Bitcoin Investment Fund
Product
We recently migrated from a C library to a Rust library, which has significantly simplified our codebase
We’ve had another breakthrough that allows our “listener” (the component that listens to events on other blockchains) to be merged into the attestor.
This further simplifies our codebase and improves the utility of our Attestation Layer service offering
We’re soon kicking off security audits! CoinFabrik has scheduled us for a July 25th start. We’re also considering engaging a second audit firm (potentially Verichains)
We’ve begun migrating our centralized attestor network to a third-party node operator. At the moment, we’re working with NodeFleet and Allnodes
Our Hiro wallet integration is nearly complete
Finance and Fundraising
We’ve raised $1Mn to date. We were seeded by grants from Chainlink and Stacks, and have since raised from 6 VC funds, a Sequoia Scout and a Bitcoin whale
On June 6th, I participated in a Twitter Space with Tyler Evans, founder of a new VC fund called BTC Inc.
Tyler also founded Bitcoin Magazine and Bitcoin Conference. Great news – Tyler is now considering leading our round! We’ll share more on that as it develops
Our fundraising target remains at $750k. Previously, our check size target was $25k-250k. We are now speaking to several funds who are looking to invest $500k
How You Can Help
We’d love to meet with prospective angels and early-stage funds that look to deploy $25k-$500k checks.
Also, we always appreciate referrals to DeFi and CeFi protocols that are looking to utilize or expand into Bitcoin, ordinals or other satoshi-based assets.
Best,
Aki
PS – Missed any of our previous Investor Updates? Read the entire collection here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ZfXwo-YRDbyfjlcuD-1HZsH4ub4XsgHk
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