Muneeb Ali Thinks Bitcoin Will Hit $150K by the End of the Year, Discusses Nakamoto Upgrade and His Ultimate Goal of Getting 1B People on-Chain via Stacks

Stacks CEO Muneeb Ali is pivoting to a focus on user acquisition and market penetration in 2025, following major technical upgrades to the Bitcoin L2.

Ali, who recently changed his X bio to "war time founder @Stacks," told CoinDesk that the new orientation is necessary given crypto's bull market and the election of Donald Trump, which is expected to create a more favorable environment for crypto development.

“The bio change was a signal to the community that, ‘hey, we understand that these times are different, and you need to move much faster and be much more aggressive,’” Ali said in an interview with CoinDesk. “Not that there won't be product upgrades in 2025, but I would say the product stops being the focus of the work.”

Ali's comments come as Stacks is preparing to launch its long-awaited Nakamoto upgrade, which will dramatically increase the project's speed and achieve 100% finality on Bitcoin for all its transactions.

According to Ali, the upgrade is still rolling out in phases, with the core consensus capital moving in April and the fast blocks launching later. However, he said that the trickled rollout may have dampened some of the excitement for the upgrade.

“People had high expectations at every step, and then they're like ‘oh, it's not here yet, it's not here yet.’ So by the time it fully launched, I think it took away some of the excitement, frankly,” Ali said.

Ali also discussed Lightning's slow progress in enabling fast and efficient payments via bitcoin, saying that he believes multiple experiments should be allowed to happen in this space. He added that he is excited to discuss the topic further at Consensus Hong Kong in February.

“If Lightning was too hard to integrate, let other projects have a go at it,” Ali said. “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 wouldn't talk about any other L2s, and I think some of that has to do with the fact that some of these L2s have their own tokens.”

Ali's ultimate goal is to get one billion people on-chain via Stacks, saying that the goal leads the team to L2s almost immediately.

“If that’s your goal, you almost immediately start looking for L2s, because on L1, a billion people can't even own UTXOs [Unspent Transaction Outputs],” Ali said. “I don't know that a lot of Bitcoiners even realize that a billion people cannot own a UTXO on-chain on Bitcoin alone.”