Bitcoin Unleashed: Q3 2021 In The Stacks Ecosystem

October 22, 2021

“Dreams make good stories, but everything important happens when we’re awake.”

Duncan Idaho, Dune

A better internet on Bitcoin has long been the shared dream of the Stacks community. This quarter, though, saw its manifestations truly awaken.

As if you can't tell by the quote, I'm pretty excited for Dune. In some ways, Dune's spice is a good comparison for Bitcoin. Beyond its obvious use as a currency, it is a scarce resource that requires great effort to mine. Attempts to replace or replicate it are never satisfactory, it enables both thought and function not possible without it, and it is something still not yet fully understood, but which clearly influences the world around it in a major way.

And yes, it even enables space travel (way beyond the moon, too).

Herein lies the lesson from Dune: They embraced spice. They found ways to enhance and unleash it to serve everything from their health to their technology. This is what the Stacks community has been doing for Bitcoin since Stacks 2.0 launched.

In a little over 9 months, we've seen things done that have never been done on Bitcoin before. From NFTs that earn a BTC yield, to decentralized loans that repay themselves, Stacks and its builders have begun to unleash the full potential of Bitcoin.

Stackers, we're not just welcoming this evolution but driving it. Thank you for everything you've done and continue to do. For the rest of you, don't worry, we'll be here when you wake up.

Stay spicy,

Mitchell Cuevas and the Stacks Foundation Team

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Below you'll find highlighted news and content from the past quarter sorted by theme. Contains heavy doses of the following:

🚀 Bitcoin DeFi blooms as Bitcoin moons

💸 Stacking strides through $1 Billion TVL

🦄 Bitcoin NFTs arrive and thrive

🔥 STX is storming up social and market charts

⭐ Stacks Accelerator teams star for Stacks

➕ Much more

You can also browse the archive for more detailed updates from previous bi-weekly editions published throughout the quarter.

Join next week's Stacks Town Hall for a recap of Q3 + what to look forward to in Q4. We'll also be giving away special edition NFTs to a few town hall attendees. ➡ Register now

🚀 Bitcoin DeFi

Meltem Demirors shared her excitement for the Arkadiko mainnet launch, which leverages the unique relationship between Stacks and Bitcoin to enable unique self-paying loans.

Miami Coin Marches Toward $20M

Continued excitement and mining, along with the recent surge in Stacks price has the Miami wallet stuffed with funds ready for the city to put to good use.

The ALEX team launched their testnet on Oct 10th and has since completed tests with nearly 600 people. ALEX’s core product is essentially a zero-coupon bond (in conventional finance) powered by Stacks. A key benefit of this product is reduced uncertainty about a loan’s interest rate, resulting in better financial planning.

Despite Ethereum being the blockchain of choice for smart-contract capabilities, there has been a push to bring decentralized finance to the Bitcoin network.

The sponsorship is the first of its kind, being paid directly with the bitcoin yield generated via Stacking on the Stacks blockchain.

Earn BTC While Shopping With GoSats

💸 Stacking strides through $1 Billion TVL

🦄 Bitcoin NFTs

NFTs on Bitcoin are exploding thanks to Stacks creators. Check out this edition dedicated to Bitcoin NFTs from throughout the Stacks ecosystem.

Hint: The answer is yes. NFTs are launching on Bitcoin. It’s being done through Stacks, which settles its transactions to the leading crypto’s blockchain. And, be sure not to miss your fellow Stacker, Alla from Layer, being quoted in Benzinga’s breakdown of NFTs this week.

The popular “Punk” NFT craze has hit the Stacks community! Stacks Punks have amassed nearly $500,000 in transactions so far, with some Punks selling for upwards of 10,000 STX.

Stacks Accelerator team Rare Sense’s NFT platform, Superfandom connects creators, celebrities, and influencers to their fans through NFTs. Superfandom enables creators to easily launch NFTs that allow exclusive experiences, such as social media collabs or in-person interactions.

Boom

The Boom team launched Boomboxes, a novel type of NFT that offers rewards via Stacking. Boomboxes are transferable and allow owners to redeem a percentage of Stacking rewards at any time. In just a quarter, they crossed over $1M Stacked all-time.

⭐Stacks Accelerator Stars

Missed the first-ever Stacks Accelerator Demo Day? You’re in luck, both sessions are now available. These teams showed us what’s coming to Bitcoin soon and it’s an exciting glimpse into a future not far away. The impact of these teams will reverberate through the Stacks Ecosystem sooner rather than later.

💸 DeFi and Fintech → Watch Now

🌅 NFTs & Web 3.0 → Watch Now

First Patent for Tracking Genetic Material via Blockchain

Eggschain, a healthcare technology company that combines genetics and blockchain to track genetic material, announced its pioneering, patented solution for tracking and tracing the storage and transfer of blood, genome, tissues, organs, DNA, RNA, sperm, eggs, embryos, and other biospecimens. Eggschain is proudly built on Stacks.

Blocksurvey

Combining the power of Stacks with AI, the Blocksurvey team continues to innovate on the world of privacy-first forms. GPT-3 surveys enable users to generate relevant survey questions fast.

The Sigle team will soon be launching a stacking monetization model for their decentralized blogging platform. Readers will be able to lock up STX in support of writers who can, in turn, earn the BTC yield generated through stacking.

💰 STX Cryptocurrency

One project aiming to combine the features of DeFi with the security of the Bitcoin network is Stacks (STX), a layer-one blockchain protocol designed to bring smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) to the Bitcoin network.

Coinbase Custody Adds STX Support

Brittany Laughlin on Coindesk TV To Chat Coinbase Prime

Developers in the Stacks ecosystem recently demonstrated that Bitcoin DeFi is possible today. Longtime Stacks community members Friedger Müffke, Asteria, and Jude Nelson in collaboration with other Stacks community developers, deployed working Bitcoin swaps with NFTs and other crypto-assets.

Stack your MiamiCoin (MIA) and earn rewards with Okcoin. Earn up to 430% APY* rewards. The minimum stacking amount is super low and Earn charges no fees, so get ready to start earning.

India’s Largest Exchange Lists STX

Binance USD (BUSD) is a 1:1 USD-backed stablecoin issued by Binance (in partnership with Paxos). Approved and regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS), The BUSD Monthly Audit Report can be viewed from the official website.

Coming soon this fall, Stacks users around the world will be able to use native Wrapped Bitcoin across the Stacks network, aka xBTC. Stacks developers will also have access to programmable xBTC with the help of Hiro System’s developer tools.

📊 New Stacks Data Portals

Daemon Technologies has released an updated design of the STX Mining Monitor. This newest release provides an overview of recent mining activity in the STX mining market and gives all users a snapshot of on-chain activity on both the Stacks and Bitcoin blockchains.

Discover the latest on-chain data from Stacks 2.0 including transactions per day and growth of unique addresses over time. The Sigle team plans to add more here, so let them know what you want to see!

Stacks holder distribution, smart contracts, mempool, wallets, pools, prices, and more can be browsed and navigated in this robust new data portal indexing the Stacks chain.

Stacking.club: New Stacking Overview Page

⛓️ Stacks Technology

As congestion has been an issue during hot NFT launches, Stacks Core Developers are hard at work on several methods to give builders the speed, security, and scalability options they need to thrive.

Check out Stacks Founder Muneeb Ali’s latest forum post addressing questions around Stacks scalability and potential optimizations that can be made to network capacity. The scalability properties of Stacks and its design tradeoffs are unique and it’s worth understanding them.

Stacks 2.1 is a proposed network upgrade to the current Stacks 2.0 mainnet released in January. The upgrade will not happen automatically, so we’ve compiled information about the origin, status, voting plans, and included upgrades to help educate ecosystem stakeholders on what comes next and how to get involved.

Released earlier this year in time for the launch of Stacks 2.0, the wallet extension has matured enough that it is now recommended for regular production usage, including interacting with web apps and managing STX and other Stacks-based assets.

Clarity Universe graduated its first cohort, helping 100 new developers get started on their smart contracts for Bitcoin journey. Clarity Universe offers a 6-week course, starter contracts, and a talent portal.

Daemon Technologies partnered with faculty at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) to bring students a 6-week pilot course on Clarity.

Clarinet is our new go-to tool for local Clarity smart contract development. It is designed to facilitate rapid smart contract development, testing, and deployment. It consists of a Clarity REPL and a testing harness.

The JavaScript packages under the stacks.js umbrella continue to improve, with a major upgrade to version 2 on the way. This blog details breaking changes, how to use new TypeScript features, info about the new wallet SDK, and more.

Bug Fixes

  • docs: ensure naming convention is followed (ff7f9d3)

  • rosetta account/balance speed (c49a4d4)

  • socket.io incorrect microblock and mempool updates (95d4108)

Features

  • add broadcast/confirmed tx logs (26e50fd)

  • set api version in openapi schema automatically (1b9126e)

Syvita has created an open source Clarity library for executing various bitcoin-related operations in smart contracts on Stacks. The library currently enables cross-chain transaction verification for both Catamaran swaps and Sypool and is available for all developers to integrate now.

This software update is a point-release to change the transaction selection logic in the default miner to prioritize by fee instead of nonce sequence. This release’s chainstate directory is compatible with chainstate directories from 2.0.11.2.0.

🤝 Stacks Integrations and Partnerships

Blockchain.com continued its support for Stacks by listing the asset on their Exchange. The listing is now live and the initial listing includes STX-USDT, STX-USDC and STX-USD pairs.

The Orbit Chain team will integrate the Stacks blockchain and turn their attention to creating bridges between Stacks’s Bitcoin-connected blockchain and Orbit Chain’s growing ecosystem of public blockchains.

‘Acorns for Crypto': Round up into BTC, Stacking

Round up your spare change with RoundlyX to build a Stacks position. With Okcoin and RoundlyX, you can easily dollar cost average into Stacks and then earn BTC rewards on your holdings!

The Stacks Korea Chapter was pleased to share that popular South Korean wallet provider, D'CENT, has added support for Stacks (STX).

❤️ Community & Ecosystem Expansion

The Stacks Chapters Program, supported by grants from the Stacks Foundation, works with community leaders around the world to grow and educate the global Stacks community. This piece shines a light on the incredible progress and impact that Chapter Leads in Pakistan, the MENA region, Turkey, China, and Korea have made over the last 2 quarters.

The Stacks Pakistan team recently hosted XPLORE, one of the largest blockchain conferences in the region. The event featured talks by numerous tech industry leads and the final round of Stacks Pakistan’s nationwide blockchain hackathon.

Stacks Map illustrates a rapidly growing ecosystem

📝 Can't Miss Content

Jolocom, a Stacks Grant recipient, launched their new GDPR-compliant and Stacks supported blockchain identity management app, SmartWallet 2.0. By using blockchain to provide identity management, users can store their identity documents on their device, control who can see their documents, and understand how their identity is used.

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez discusses the launch of ‘MiamiCoin’ (which is built on Stacks) & the evolution of the city’s “tech ecosystem”. Suarez says the city is focused on “differentiating its economy” by “creating the new wave of technological products”.

Stacker Chats: Talking Bitcoin DeFi and @jack

On the latest edition of ‘Stacker Chats’ Gina & Muneeb talk cross-chain Bitcoin transactions on Stacks and Jack Dorsey’s new Bitcoin DeFi project.

In this Stacker Chats episode, Gina of Hiro Systems sat down with Philip De Smedt, CEO and co-founder of Arkadiko, the first stablecoin on Stacks that uniquely enables your collateral to earn a yield.

A small note about these updates: Every quarter the team and I greatly enjoy compiling these, yet each quarter the attempts to be comprehensive become more futile. We've opted to simplify and highlight, but if we've left out something important to you, please reply and we can add it.

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Disclaimer: The information shared in this email is strictly for informational purposes. You should not take its content, opinions, and/or descriptions provided as technical advice, legal advice, financial advice, or investment advice. See full disclaimer at stacks.org/terms.