At last Friday's ordinals meet up in Hong Kong, I spent some time asking attendees what Bitcoin tech they were excited about and why. Below is a summary of the responses I got and general sentiment (not necessarily my views - I'm just the messenger):
Hot
- Ordinals - it was an ordinals meet up, so this was not surprising.
- Lightning - lots of excitment. Seems to be a focus on big names that everyone likes building in Lightning: Elizabeth Stark, Jack Dorsey, David Marcus
- Taproot assets - interest in how taproot assets can complement ordinals and the potential for faster trading via lightning
- Stacks + sBTC - excitement about upcoming 5 second block times and a trustless peg-in/out for BTC will supercharge Bitcoin defi
- Bitcoin L1/L2 names - ordinals meetup attendees were excited about names as a special case of NFTs
Not
- Rootstock - does this still exist and does anyone use this?
- RGB - Many people saw the Tether CTO's announcement that USDT will not longer be issued on Bitcoin but may be later be issued on RGB in the future. But no one had seen anything working on RGB.
- Drivechain - Everyone had heard of drivechain but everyone seems to write it off because of it requires a bitcoin fork.
- Liquid - everyone had heard of liquid ("oh yeah, that's Blockstream's thing"), but no one had used it.
- Bisq - no one had heard of bisq, which surprised me