Recap: Q2 2021 Board Meeting and OKR Report
by Mitchell Cuevas on July 7, 2021
Stackers, in our ongoing efforts to remain transparent and open, I’m excited to share a recap of the most recent Stacks Foundation Board Meeting and the communication right before and after it. Because of various scheduling considerations, we hosted the most recent meeting on May 25th instead of at the normal end of a quarter.
Jump to:
→ Highlights from the Stacks Foundation
→ Pre-Meeting Summary
→ The Board Deck
→ Post Meeting Summary
→ Performance (OKR Report)
We’ve saved this post until now so we could include a complete reflection on our Q2 goals along with the board meeting summary. Going forward, board meetings will happen in the weeks following the end of a quarter, starting at the end of Q3, and include a breakdown of how we performed against our OKRs. We also plan to start including a preview of the OKRs for the quarter upcoming in each of these posts.
As a reminder, the purpose of the board is to support the Stacks Foundation team in navigating priorities and challenges as we strive to best serve the ecosystem and community. For the most recent edition of the meeting, we were honored to have a new Community Board Observer, long-time community leader Juliet Oberding, join us in addition to the formal board of:

  • Brittany Laughlin - Executive Director of the Stacks Foundation
  • Rodolfo Gonzalez - Partner at Foundation Capital
  • Zavain Dar - Partner at Lux Capital
  • Meltem Demirors - Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares

Jenny Mith (Ecosystem Development Lead) and Jude Nelson (Research Scientist) were also in attendance from the Stacks Foundation team and I (Mitchell Cuevas, Head of Growth) led the meeting and preparation of materials.
Related Reading:
Q2 Stacks Ecosystem Updates
Stacks Town Hall Recording
Q4/Q1 Board Recap
Pre-Meeting Summary for Stacks Foundation Board
The following was sent to the board leading up to the meeting via email.

Asks
  • Encourage another major exchange to list STX, with a priority on US/China
  • Help with hiring for Head of Content, talent-related resources for accelerator and grants teams
  • Brainstorm on activating more STX investors and their holdings

Ecosystem Overview
  • Stacking is showing signs of traction, having crossed $300M in TVL
  • Stacking providers and pools have increased from 2 to 8 in the past 3 months, with several more on the way
  • The first cohort of Stacks Accelerator is over-subscribed and includes many promising teams
  • There have been several new exchange and market pair listings
  • The Stacks Chapter program, which runs via Stacks Grants, is pushing international community growth and awareness forward

STX Ecosystem Maturity
Now that the technology, economics, and trading are open, the key focus is making STX accessible and useful. We're working to make sure it's easy to buy, trade, and earn with STX and to increase the ways people can experience Stacking.

We are still waiting on a major US listing, rapid growth in crypto has everyone's development teams extremely backed up. [Specific information related to exchanges redacted to be courteous of these organizations]

Through Grants and the Accelerator, we have prioritized applications that highlight the unique aspects of the Stacks blockchain and its connection to Bitcoin. We tended slightly toward DeFi related applications where possible (due to Stacking and current trends) and put a DEX and Oracle at the top of our list to tackle through funding and partnerships. Traction in other application types/industries has also grown rapidly in the past month with the Accelerator online, picking up teams working in the music, privacy, environmental sustainability, point-of-sale solution, NFTs, and more.

Stacks Foundation
In Q1, we focused on expanding the grants program to include projects larger than $5k, specifically scaling talent recruitment for new grants, growing the communications arm of the Foundation, supporting the Stacks 2.0 launch, facilitating governance through the Stacks Improvement Proposals (SIPs), and making STX usable and accessible. Since then, we've made several larger grants and have been building up the ways we can support developers and teams.

In Q2/Q3 we've set out to:
  • Increase talent pool and open-source development contributions by creating a robust and delightful developer onboarding and education experience (Education)
  • Support more STX listings and support the integration of more Stacking providers (Partnerships, exchanges)
  • Play a larger role in creating a shared Stacks roadmap and driving Stacks brand and narrative clarification efforts (Marketing, awareness)
  • Continue supporting efforts to enable the community to be autonomous, self-replicating, and self-sustainable (Chapters, governance)

[Top of mind discussion notes were here, now viewable in the deck]
Financials
We're in a strong position. By funding operating expenses through Stacking profits, we currently earn more than we burn. Even with STX fluctuation in price, we have solid runway for at least 2+ years (even if STX and BTC prices drop dramatically).

  1. We'll default to funding grants in STX (vs. USD), which will come from the 80M+ treasury
  2. Market Maker loans used to provide liquidity will likely be returned in USD, with an estimated $2.2M being returned.
  3. ~30M of our treasury is used in Stacking currently, which provides plenty of BTC yield to fund operations and beyond. Once Coinbase Custody finishes the Stacks integration, we can put in another 50M to work, which will put us in an even stronger position to add more to the team and cover our burn without liquidating STX.
The Board Deck
Below you’ll find the deck as it was presented to the board with only a few redacted pieces related to standing NDAs and some finances. We’ve been advised against sharing unaudited financials, but plan to make these available to the community when we complete audits this year. The summary above provides insight into the financials of the Stacks Foundation at a high level.
  • Community Update to Stacks Foundation Board
    Look over what Community Board Observer, Juliet Oberding, reported to the Stacks Foundation Board. → Community Update
Post-meeting summary
The following was sent to the board immediately following the meeting
Thanks for the time today everyone! I wanted to quickly get this recap out to you while it was still fresh. Apologies we had to cut the discussion a bit short, in reality, we ended up talking about those things throughout. I am glad it was conversational and very much appreciate your insights and feedback. I left feeling really good about our alignment on key issues and areas of focus.

And, while these meetings naturally focus on where we want to improve, I'm happy we also got to share some of the big wins and progress the team is making - it's an exciting time to be involved in Stacks.

Thanks again and I look forward to keeping these conversations going on a more regular basis, we really appreciate the willingness to get your hands dirty with us!

Talk to you soon,
Mitchell

---

Trends/Takeaways:
  • The Foundation is working hard to increase resources and talent in the ecosystem, both for its own team and to the benefit of builders
  • Stacking is working and we want to continue to prioritize efforts to increase access to it and STX in general
  • Educational resources for multiple levels need more attention, this is something the Foundation has firmly decided to take on and lead for the ecosystem going forward - this would include development resources for Clarity, Stacks.js, and more
  • On a more meta-level, we're continuing to step up and take on things that the ecosystem needs by resourcing for them or finding suitable homes

[Asks and action items for individuals following the meeting were here, removed for focus]
Performance Against Objectives and Key Results - Q2
If you’re not familiar, the Stacks Foundation works off the OKR model (Objectives and Key Results). These are meant to be ambitious and difficult to achieve in the time allotted, completing ~50% of the total work is considered successful in this model.
⚡ Accelerate innovation on Stacks by ensuring people have the tools to create user-owned businesses

Result

The Stack blockchain is reliable - no deep forks or chain crashes
Achieved. You can use stacks-dump or status.sh to inspect the chain history to see for yourself that there were no periods of inactivity or periods of competing deep forks.
Stacks 2.1 SIP (s) move to ‘Recommended’ w/code on testnet by July 1
Rollover. Stacks 2.1 issue board is here if you want to follow along
Free usernames are once again available through a subdomain registrar
Partial rollover. Code is available here for anyone who wants to deploy it themselves, Foundation still has plans to host or resource an easy subdomain registrar.
Successfully launch a Stacks accelerator
The Stacks Accelerator officially launched on April 13th, with the first cohort having kicked off on May 24th.
⚡ Accelerate innovation on Stacks by ensuring people have the tools to create user-owned businesses
The Stack blockchain is reliable - no deep forks or chain crashes

Achieved. You can use stacks-dump or status.sh to inspect the chain history to see for yourself that there were no periods of inactivity or periods of competing deep forks.

Stacks 2.1 SIP (s) move to ‘Recommended’ w/code on testnet by July 1

Rollover. Stacks 2.1 issue board is here if you want to follow along

Free usernames are once again available through a subdomain registrar

Partial rollover. Code is available here for anyone who wants to deploy it themselves, Foundation still has plans to host or resource an easy subdomain registrar.

Successfully launch a Stacks accelerator

The Stacks Accelerator officially launched on April 13th, with the first cohort having kicked off on May 24th.

⛓ Accelerate development of the Stacks infrastructure

Result

20 new high-quality teams building on Stacks
Since the start of Q2, at least 30 new teams have begun building on Stacks, with 25 going through the Accelerator and several others working on grants.
Grants are payable in STX
Check out the new Stacks Grants App.
20 new individuals contribute to the Stacks codebase
We saw 40 new contributors per repository over core Stacks repositories. These are: stacks-blockchain, stacks-blockchain-api, stacks/connect, stacks-wallet, stacks-wallet-web, stacks.js, docs, explorer, gaia, clarity-repl, clarinet.
Community launched DEX
Great progress by several teams, we expect a full-featured DEX to launch in Q3!
Oracle solution deployed on mainnet
An early solution is now available thanks to Pascal and work to integrate Chainlink began in earnest.
Program content & structure outlined for Stacks developer training
Content and new tools have already been created for Clarity and are being tested by a group of students in Hong Kong and by invited technology partners.
Fund at least 5 key dev tools via grants
Grant issues #52, #61, #121, #139, and #167 are just some of the dev tools that were either funded or worked on this past quarter.
Hire Full Stack Engineer to lead integrations, support education
We’re thrilled to have longtime community member, Marvin Janssen, join the team!
⛓ Accelerate development of the Stacks infrastructure
20 new high-quality teams building on Stacks

Since the start of Q2, at least 30 new teams have begun building on Stacks, with 25 going through the Accelerator and several others working on grants.

Grants are payable in STX

Check out the new Stacks Grants App.

20 new individuals contribute to the Stacks codebase

We saw 40 new contributors per repository over core Stacks repositories. These are: stacks-blockchain, stacks-blockchain-api, stacks/connect, stacks-wallet, stacks-wallet-web, stacks.js, docs, explorer, gaia, clarity-repl, clarinet.

Community launched DEX

Great progress by several teams, we expect a full-featured DEX to launch in Q3!

Oracle solution deployed on mainnet

An early solution is now available thanks to Pascal and work to integrate Chainlink began in earnest.

Program content & structure outlined for Stacks developer training

Content and new tools have already been created for Clarity and are being tested by a group of students in Hong Kong and by invited technology partners.

Fund at least 5 key dev tools via grants

Grant issues #52, #61, #121, #139, and #167 are just some of the dev tools that were either funded or worked on this past quarter.

Hire Full Stack Engineer to lead integrations, support education

We’re thrilled to have longtime community member, Marvin Janssen, join the team!

⭐ Accelerate broader adoption of Stacks

Result

Stacking: Grow total amount locked in Stacking to 600m STX
Rollover. TVL currently sits at $385M, we’ll continue to make Stacking more accessible through key integrations, partnerships, and support of builders.
Stacking: Secure 5 new Stacking options for ‘retail’ users
4 added in Q2. InfStones, OKEx, PlanBetter, XVerse
Stacking: Ensure 2 experiments that integrate Stacking into core business model
South Korean e-commerce protocol, Paycoin is enabling STX payments at major retailers and music experience collective, Brownies & Lemonade is working on a Stacking-based membership model for their community.
Stacking: 3 pieces of high-profile (>10M UVM/month) content out that mentions Stacking
Support exchanges adding at least 5 new markets with priority toward regions with strong community demand
Done. New pairs this quarter include: 
  • Upbit: STX/KRW 
  • Okcoin: STX/USDT
  • Bitexen: STX/TRY
  • Bitexen: STX/USDT
  • Bitexen: STX/BUSD
  • Bitexen: STX/ETH 
  • Bitexen: STX/BTC 
  • FTX: STX/PERP
  • StealthEX: STX/350 crypto assets
  • Coinmerce: STX/EUR
Identify (and support integration of) at least one lending platform to offer STX
Rollover. There is progress here and we may broaden the KR in Q3 slightly to securing a deal for STX to appear in a mainstream app, but this or similar is still a goal. 
Increase the # of STX holders to 450,000 (Current: 330,000)
Rollover. 354,222 STX holders - may adjust metric over time to ‘active’ wallets or similar.
Double STX mention reach on Telegram (875k → 1,7m)
1,162,624 - A 30% increase from Q12021. This is the overall reach of STX mentions on Telegram. 
Consistent STX Galaxy Score on LunarCRUSH at 50
Stacks average score is now 61. 
Publish 3 pieces of evergreen content that demonstrate the technical, financial, and community merits of building on Stacks
Rollover. We’ll be publishing deep-dive case studies on both the Stacks Grants Program and Stacks Accelerator Program this quarter, as well as end-to-end material covering the advantages of Clarity.
⭐ Accelerate broader adoption of Stacks
Stacking: Grow total amount locked in Stacking to 600m STX

Rollover. TVL currently sits at $385M, we’ll continue to make Stacking more accessible through key integrations, partnerships, and support of builders.

Stacking: Secure 5 new Stacking options for ‘retail’ users

4 added in Q2. InfStones, OKEx, PlanBetter, XVerse

Stacking: Ensure 2 experiments that integrate Stacking into core business model

South Korean e-commerce protocol, Paycoin is enabling STX payments at major retailers and music experience collective, Brownies & Lemonade is working on a Stacking-based membership model for their community.

Stacking: 3 pieces of high-profile (>10M UVM/month) content out that mentions Stacking
Support exchanges adding at least 5 new markets with priority toward regions with strong community demand
Done. New pairs this quarter include:
  • Upbit: STX/KRW
  • Okcoin: STX/USDT
  • Bitexen: STX/TRY
  • Bitexen: STX/USDT
  • Bitexen: STX/BUSD
  • Bitexen: STX/ETH
  • Bitexen: STX/BTC
  • FTX: STX/PERP
  • StealthEX: STX/350 crypto assets
  • Coinmerce: STX/EUR
Identify (and support integration of) at least one lending platform to offer STX

Rollover. There is progress here and we may broaden the KR in Q3 slightly to securing a deal for STX to appear in a mainstream app, but this or similar is still a goal.

Increase the # of STX holders to 450,000 (Current: 330,000)

Rollover. 354,222 STX holders - may adjust metric over time to ‘active’ wallets or similar.

Double STX mention reach on Telegram (875k → 1,7m)

1,162,624 - A 30% increase from Q12021. This is the overall reach of STX mentions on Telegram.

Consistent STX Galaxy Score on LunarCRUSH at 50

Stacks average score is now 61.

Publish 3 pieces of evergreen content that demonstrate the technical, financial, and community merits of building on Stacks

Rollover. We’ll be publishing deep-dive case studies on both the Stacks Grants Program and Stacks Accelerator Program this quarter, as well as end-to-end material covering the advantages of Clarity.

❤️ Empower the global community to operate autonomously

Result

Evolve at-least 4 current communities to become Stacks Official Chapters
This quarter, we officially welcomed Stacks Korea, Stacks China, and Stacks Turkey.
Ensure that all chapters have a plan for financial sustainability (mining pools, stacking pools, other)
Two chapters have deployed their own Stacking pools so far. The remaining Chapters are brainstorming new solutions in light of more complicated regulations in their regions. 
Automate community Stacking rewards via an awards distribution smart contract
Stacks Advocates will be getting their first payout by July 11th!
Increase Stacking APY by increasing average BTC committed to mining per cycle to 60 BTC (currently 30)
The Stacking APY is the result of many variables - we decided to deprioritize this effort after seeing mining was healthy. Going forward, we'll primarily focus on increasing smart contract usage on the network as a way to boost Stacking rewards.
SIP for community decision-making (non-blockchain decisions) / updated governance proposal for 2.1 and beyond
Much foundational work has been laid through work by Hozz and Harold on integrating tools like SourceCred and PolicyKit to help community members come to a fair and equitable consensus on group decisions.
Soft-fork on-chain voting protocol described in SIP 011 is deployed to mainnet
Rollover. The high-level design discussion is here, but the implementation is still in progress.
Confirm a representative and process for the Community Board Seat
Longtime community leader, Juliet Oberding, attended the most recent board meeting and reported her observations to the community at the last Stacks Town Hall. We are now collaborating to flesh out a more structured process for ratifying the Community Board Seat and will share a draft with the community in Q3. Also see Juliet’s work on a community Code of Conduct.
Get SIP working groups officially recognized as Consideration Advisory Boards
Several community representatives have volunteered to lead Consideration Advisory working groups and will be kicking off their first public meetings soon.
❤️ Empower the global community to operate autonomously
Evolve at-least 4 current communities to become Stacks Official Chapters

This quarter, we officially welcomed Stacks Korea, Stacks China, and Stacks Turkey.

Ensure that all chapters have a plan for financial sustainability (mining pools, stacking pools, other)

Two chapters have deployed their own Stacking pools so far. The remaining Chapters are brainstorming new solutions in light of more complicated regulations in their regions.

Automate community Stacking rewards via an awards distribution smart contract

Stacks Advocates will be getting their first payout by July 11th!

Increase Stacking APY by increasing average BTC committed to mining per cycle to 60 BTC (currently 30)

The Stacking APY is the result of many variables - we decided to deprioritize this effort after seeing mining was healthy. Going forward, we'll primarily focus on increasing smart contract usage on the network as a way to boost Stacking rewards.

SIP for community decision-making (non-blockchain decisions) / updated governance proposal for 2.1 and beyond

Much foundational work has been laid through work by Hozz and Harold on integrating tools like SourceCred and PolicyKit to help community members come to a fair and equitable consensus on group decisions.

Soft-fork on-chain voting protocol described in SIP 011 is deployed to mainnet

Rollover. The high-level design discussion is here, but the implementation is still in progress.

Confirm a representative and process for the Community Board Seat

Longtime community leader, Juliet Oberding, attended the most recent board meeting and reported her observations to the community at the last Stacks Town Hall. We are now collaborating to flesh out a more structured process for ratifying the Community Board Seat and will share a draft with the community in Q3. Also see Juliet’s work on a community Code of Conduct.

Get SIP working groups officially recognized as Consideration Advisory Boards

Several community representatives have volunteered to lead Consideration Advisory working groups and will be kicking off their first public meetings soon.

Thank you
From all of us at the Stacks Foundation, thank you for your efforts in helping push these and so many other priorities forward, we’re looking forward to continuing our efforts together for years to come.

Further Reading:
Q2 Stacks Ecosystem Updates
What The Stacks Foundation Focuses On And Why


Mitchell Cuevas leads growth and marketing efforts at Stacks Foundation. He's spent the last decade working in community-driven high-growth startups.