On January 2, Muneeb Ali, co-founder and CEO of leading Bitcoin L2 Stacks, updated his X bio from just “founder @Stacks” to “wartime founder @Stacks.” The change signaled Ali’s realization that 2025 is a year for Stacks to pivot to a focus on going to market and expanding its user base after 2024’s major technical upgrades. These upgrades included the long-awaited Nakamoto update that dramatically increased the project’s speed and achieved 100% finality on Bitcoin for all its transactions.

According to Ali, a new orientation for Stacks is even more appropriate given that crypto is now firmly in a bull market, fueled by the election of Donald Trump and what is expected to be 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 have 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 that the product will stop being the focus of the work.”

Here, Ali discusses what he would have done differently with the Nakamoto upgrade if he could, his honest thoughts on Lightning’s slow progress in enabling payments via bitcoin, where he sees bitcoin’s price going in 2025, and his ultimate goal of getting to a billion people on- chain via Stacks. Ali will be a speaker at Consensus Hong Kong in February.

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This interview has been shortened and lightly edited for clarity.

So where does the Nakamoto upgrade stand now?

I still think Bitcoin needs a really, really good L2. One reason is that Bitcoin’s UX is not going to change at the L1 level; you’re never going to have fast, cheap transactions on L1. And that’s why a lot of people were interested in Lightning. It’s been around for a while, it’s been adopted, but not a ton. Let’s be real about it.

So I think there is still a need for extremely fast, great UX Bitcoin transactions. I’d say even Solana has accomplished that way better than Lightning or anything else. So one of the things we want to do is have a Solana-like Bitcoin L2 where you can move any amount of capital super fast and it’s a great UX experience. And I think that’s a goal we’re hitting with Nakamoto.

Is there anything you would have done differently about Nakamoto’s rollout if you could?

So the Nakamoto launch happened in many phases. First, the core consensus capital moved in April. Then we launched the fast blocks, but the more complex transactions couldn’t take advantage of it. And then we made another release where the more complex transactions could also benefit. But looking back, it’s like there was a spill. So people had high expectations at every step and then they’re like ‘oh, it’s not here yet, it’s not here yet’. So when it fully launched, I think it took some of the excitement away, honestly.

Do you think we will continue to see interest return to building and programming on Bitcoin as opposed to 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 never goes away. Even if you think about what’s happening in the public markets and how many public companies are now building Bitcoin Treasuries, Bitcoin is so far ahead of everything else in terms of adoption. So there was more excitement around Bitcoin L2s maybe a year ago and that seems to have cooled off a bit. But I think Bitcoin is so fundamental that people will just come back to it.

How do you think Donald Trump will affect the course of Bitcoin?

A lot. Look at the people he picks, like David Sachs as the crypto and AI czar. He is a big LP at Multicoin Capital and fully up to date on crypto and Solana so I think that makes a huge difference. And the same goes for some of the other people Trump chooses as advisers. In the US for the last four years, the government and the regulatory bodies were literally just fighting us. Now I actually think they will actively support and encourage things, which is a huge 180. It helps a lot.

Also, if any of the Bitcoin Reserve [plans] happens, it will be a big, huge signal all over the world. Even if they happen [just] at the state level, like in Texas or Wyoming, it will send a huge signal around the world.

What’s your take on where bitcoin’s price might be at the end of the year?

I still believe in the four-year cycle, with the current cycle that I see ending in Q4 2025. And while there are some reasons to believe that the cycle might not be as intense, I personally am still a believer. I would be surprised if we don’t see $150,000 by the end of the year, and I think we could see $200,000. That would be my high area.

When will we see fast and efficient payments via bitcoin?

We try to make it happen ourselves. And I think Lightning deserves a lot of credit – there are a lot of die-hard fans who use it. But the technology was complex and not very easy to integrate, and the Bitcoin community was really only behind one project. And I think the way to do this is you let dozens of experiments happen and see what attracts attention. One of the things I like about Bitcoin L2s with so many different projects going on is that we are finally seeing more experimentation happening. If Lightning was too difficult to integrate, let other projects try it.

If you go to a Bitcoin conference or hear from some of the best people like [MicroStrategy Founder] Michael Saylor, there is this attitude that Lightning is the solution and only solution. They wouldn’t talk about other L2s, and I think some of that has to do with some of those L2s having their own tokens. The Bitcoin community doesn’t like that. But I think they are slowly now at least opening up.

What are you excited to discuss at Consensus Hong Kong?

How do we bring Bitcoin to a billion people? It’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 even own UTXOs [Unspent Transaction Outputs]. I don’t know that many Bitcoiners even realize that a billion people cannot own a UTXO on-chain on Bitcoin alone.

It is something that is probably not talked about as much in our industry. People have made peace with onboarding people to Bitcoin through Coinbase and Binance and maybe through ETFs. But that’s not what Bitcoin is about. Bitcoin is about decentralization and self-sufficiency and people having direct control. We cannot forget that mission.