Yusuf Idi Maina tells how sCrypt won the Bitcoin Olympics

There are BSV developers worldwide, and this week’s guest on the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream was Yusuf Idi Maina from Nigeria. Maina, a sCrypt developer, told Kurt Wuckert Jr. about what the team has been up to and how they recently won the Bitcoin Olympics (Litecoin Track).

Prayers for Zachary Weiner

Wuckert opens the live stream with a request for prayers for his friend and fellow BSV entrepreneur Zachary Weiner. Sadly, Weiner experienced a sudden and shocking health issue that left him fighting for his life. He’s not out of the woods yet, and very few survive the problem he is dealing with. Whatever you believe in and pray to, please pray for a much-respected figure in BSV and CoinGeek Weekly Discussions co-host, Wuckert requests.

Introducing Yusuf Idi Maina

Maina is a software developer for sCrypt who specializes in Javascript. However, he’s also proficient in Python and is helping to develop the BSV libraries for it.

A relative newcomer to BSV, Maina found out about the original Bitcoin in 2022 when he took a BSV Academy course. He was previously a web developer, but seeing the potential of BSV, he switched careers and became a blockchain developer.

Maina tells us the sCrypt team is growing. There are already eight developers across Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. They support and develop for all UTXO-based blockchains and, as he’ll soon reveal, are already making a name for themselves.

sCrypt won the Bitcoin Olympics (Litecoin Track)

Recently, the sCrypt team showed just how far ahead of the curve it is when it won the Bitcoin Olympics (Litecoin Track).

Utilizing simplified payment verification (SPV) and OP_CAT, the team made a valid purchase of an Ordinal on BTC Signet with Litecoin. Maina says they have the potential for cross-chain transactions and successfully demonstrated how they can work in a trustless manner. The Litecoin team was impressed with this, and sCrypt got lots of good press.

Wuckert underscores just how important this is. He has always believed there will be one chain in the end, but there will be many competing ones in the meantime. When Ordinals first became a thing, he predicted there would be nomadic developers who weren’t dedicated to one chain. Demonstrations like this cross-chain transaction bolster this conviction.

Maina says that OP_CAT is already live on a layer two network above the BTC blockchain but would be successful if BTC embraced it, too. It makes BSV even more scalable and can foster interoperability between networks.

What would Maina do if he was in charge?

Wuckert often asks guests what they would do if they had a magic wand and a billion dollars. Maina says he would pour resources into education to teach people about Bitcoin and its potential.

What would he specifically want to teach people? How BSV is so scalable and how apps built on it can be safer and more reliable than Web 2.0 apps. He’d fundamentally answer, “What is Bitcoin?” so everyone could better understand its potential.

Maina is hosting regular meetups in Nigeria to teach people what he has learned. Wuckert encourages him to keep doing so, saying how one of BSV’s most talented developers, David Case, came to a meetup he hosted in 2018 and found his home. These meetups are essential for like-minded people to find each other and form connections.

In closing, Maina encourages every developer to learn BSV. It’s “the blockchain of the future,” and nothing else can scale like it.

Watch: sCrypt Hackathon 2024