On January 2, Muneeb Ali, the co-founder and CEO of leading Bitcoin L2 Stacks, updated his X bio from simply “founder @Stacks” to “wartime founder @Stacks.” The change signals Ali’s recognition that 2025 is a year when Stacks should pivot to a focus on going to market and expanding its user base after the major technical upgrades of 2024. The upgrades include that’s the long awaited upgrade Nakamoto update which dramatically increased the speed of the project and achieved 100% finality in Bitcoin for all its transactions.
According to Ali, a new orientation for Stacks is more appropriate as the crypto is now firmly in the throes of a bull market, boosted by the election of Donald Trump and what is expected to be a more favorable environment for -crypto development.
“The bio change is a signal to the community that, ‘hey, we understand that these times are different, and you have to move faster and be more aggressive,'” Ali said in an interview with CoinDesk. “Not that there won’t be product upgrades in 2025, but I would say that the product will stop being the focus of the work.”
Here, Ali discusses what he would do differently in the Nakamoto upgrade if he could, his honest thoughts on Lightning’s slow progress in enabling payments via bitcoin, where he sees the price of bitcoin going to 2025 and his main goal is to get a billion people on- chain through Stacks. Ali will be a speaker at Consensus Hong Kong in February.
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This interview has been shortened and slightly edited for clarity.
So where does the Nakamoto upgrade stand today?
I think Bitcoin still needs a really, really good L2. One reason is that Bitcoin’s UX will not change at the L1 level; you will no longer have fast, cheap L1 transactions. And that’s why a lot of people are interested in Lightning. It’s been around for a while, it’s had a few adoptions, but not a ton. Let’s be real about this.
So I think there is still a need for very fast, efficient UX Bitcoin transactions. I would say even Solana achieved better than Lightning or anything else. So one of the things we want to do is have Bitcoin L2 like Solana, where you can transfer any amount of capital very quickly, and it’s a great UX experience. And I think that’s one goal we’ve achieved with Nakamoto.
Would you have done anything else about Nakamoto’s launch if you could?
So the launch of Nakamoto happened in several stages. First, the core consensus capital was transferred in April. Then we launched fast blocks, but more complex transactions could not benefit from it. And then we made another release where more complex transactions could also benefit. But looking back, it seems like there was a trickle out. So people’s expectations are high at every step, then it’s like ‘oh, nothing, nothing yet.’ So by the time it was fully launched, I think it took away some of the confusion, to be honest.
Do you think we will continue to see interest return to development and programming in Bitcoin versus Ethereum and other chains in 2025?
I think so. Bitcoin is like one of those things that is like a class of its own in a way; it just won’t go away. Even if you think about what is happening in the public markets and how many public companies are now building Bitcoin treasuries, Bitcoin is far ahead of anything else in terms of adoption. So there was more excitement about Bitcoin L2s maybe a year ago, and it seems to have cooled down a bit. But I think Bitcoin is so valuable that people will come back to it.
How do you think Donald Trump will affect the course of Bitcoin?
many. Look at the people he picks, like David Sachs as the crypto and AI czar. He is a big LP at Multicoin Capital and is fully updated on crypto and Solana, so I think it makes a big difference. And the same is true for some of the other people Trump is picking as advisers. In the US for the last four years, the government and the regulatory bodies have literally been fighting us. Now, I think they’re going to actively support and encourage things, which is a big 180. It helps a lot.
Also, if any of the Bitcoin Reserve (plans) happen, that would be a huge, huge signal to the whole world. Even if they happen (only) at the state level, like in Texas or Wyoming, it will send a big signal to the whole world.
What is your prediction on where the price of bitcoin will be at the end of the year?
I still believe in the four-year cycle, with the current cycle I see ending in Q4 2025. And while there are some reasons to believe that maybe the cycles won’t be that extreme, I personally also a believer. I would be surprised if we don’t see $150,000 by the end of the year, and I think we will see $200,000. That would be my high range.
When will we see fast and efficient payments through bitcoin?
We try to do it ourselves. And I think Lightning deserves a lot of credit — a lot of die-hard fans use it. But the technology is complex and not very easy to integrate, and the Bitcoin community is really only behind one project. And I think the way to do it is you let dozens of experiments happen and see what catches the eye. One of the things I like about Bitcoin L2s with so many different startup projects is that we are finally seeing a lot of experimentation happening. If Lightning is too difficult to integrate, let other projects try it.
If you go to a Bitcoin conference or hear from some of the top people like (MicroStrategy Founder) Michael Saylor, there’s this attitude that Lightning is the solution and the only solution. They won’t talk about any other L2, and I think some of that has to do with the fact that some of these L2s have their own tokens. The bitcoin community doesn’t want that. But I think they are slowly opening up at least now.
What are you excited to discuss at Consensus Hong Kong?
How do we bring Bitcoin to a billion people? That’s something that excites me and drives some of the technology decisions we make. If that’s your goal, you almost immediately start looking for L2s, because at L1, a billion people can’t have UTXOs (Unspent Transaction Outputs). I don’t know that many Bitcoiners realize that a billion people can’t have UTXO on-chain with Bitcoin alone.
That’s something that probably isn’t talked about very much in our industry. People have made peace with onboarding people to Bitcoin through Coinbase and Binance and perhaps through ETFs. But that’s not what Bitcoin is about. Bitcoin is about decentralization and self-preservation and people are directly in control. We will never forget that mission.
