AUGUST 13, 2021
Celebrating Stacks Chapters Across the World
by Louise Ivan on February 17, 2022
TL;DR Stacks Chapters were introduced in 2021. We have 7 chapters total, all of which have helped promote Stacks in their respective communities. This blog post breaks down the accomplishments of each chapter and introduces three new chapters to the ecosystem.

  • Stacks Korea brought long-lasting ecosystem partnerships
  • Stacks Turkey increased STX access with various local exchange listings
  • Stacks China increased awareness through various publications
  • Stacks Pakistan brought in new smart contract developers
  • New Chapters sprouted in Japan, Russia, and India

It's been almost a year since we introduced the launch of Stacks Chapters, where life-long community members become leaders to accelerate the Stacks ecosystem’s local community growth and development efforts. Since the launch, seven chapters have launched across the globe in countries including Korea, Turkey, China, Pakistan, Japan, Russia, and India. Our official Chapters effectively mobilized their local communities around the Stacks north star metric and helped increase STX access worldwide. To celebrate, we compiled a few of the most interesting highlights to recap the remarkable year.

We've said this before and will say this again, excitement in the Stacks Korean community is at an all-time high. This is in thanks to Stacks Korea and its continuous efforts of providing new ways to learn and share the promise of Stacks in extending Bitcoin's technology within the local community. Since its inception, Korea has grown its community to nearly 6,000 dedicated Stackers.
Stacks Korea 2021 Highlights

Result

Stacks Korea paved the way for the Popular South Korean wallet provider, D'CENT, to add support for Stacks (STX).
Shortly after integrating with Stacks, D’CENT announced that the D’CENT Wallet also added support for Stacks-based native tokens including $DIKO, $ALEX, $SWST and more.
Orbit Chain integrated the Stacks blockchain to bridge assets across other top chains including Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Klaytn, ICON, and Ripple.
Stacks Korea helped bring Stacks’ technology to Paycoin’s payment system, allowing more than 1 million users and 70,000 merchants to have access to STX and Stacking. This made STX one of the primary payment options for use with well-established Paycoin merchants in Korea including 7-Eleven, KFC, Domino’s Pizza, BBQ Chicken and more.
In 2021, STX was listed on the Upbit KRW market, a top digital asset exchange in Korea.
Continous Ecosystem Support
The Chapter held more than 10 events including AMAs, and community giveaways to introduce Stacks within its local community. They are working closely with ALEX, Arkadiko, StackSwap, and Blocksurvey in building their community through local education.
Stacks Korea worked with Xangle, the key crypto-asset disclosure platform in the country, to create a report of the Stacks ecosystem. Xangle rated Stacks as an excellent and reliable blockchain project with strong capabilities. The report noted that Stacks is poised to become an industry leader in the cryptocurrency market as a result of major milestones including the Stacks 2.0 Mainnet launch in 2021.
The team manages Korean translations of important content and news for its community and has educated Korean investors on STX by creating more than 100 pieces of content. This resulted in an overall trading volume of 60-70%.
Onboard local evangelists
The Chapter also onboarded a total 6 Stacks evangelists to help build the local developer community, one of whom became the lead for Stacks Japan.
Establish at-least 1 distribution channel to increase Stacks awareness
Stacks Korea partnered with local KOLs for various news announcements that resulted in continuous PR for major and minor ecosystem events and updates.
Stacks Turkey has proven itself as the leading exchange partnership community in the ecosystem through its coordinated efforts that led to two successful local exchange listings with Bitexen and BTCTurk Pro. Currently, Stacks Turkey is one the biggest crypto communities in the region along with AVAX and LINK.
Stacks Turkey 2021 Highlights

Result

Blockchain club of Bilkent University will partipicate in the Stacks Hackathon and learn more about Clarity.
Stacks Turkey was able to secure 2 local exchange listings with 7 on-ramp market pairs for STX.
Bitexen, a local Turkish Exchange just listed STX with 5 new market pairs.
BTCTurk Pro, one of the biggest exchanges listed STX with 2 new market pairs
Maintain a healthy network investors
  • The team held more than 7 Community-based events last year from local town halls to competitions. More than $1,000 was to the awarded to the local community.
  • Stacks has become the most traded cryptocurrency in Turkey during October 2021. The 24-hour trading volume reached more than $100M.
  • Stacks Turkey partnered with Binance Turkey, the biggest cryptocurrency community in Turkey, and hosted the Chapter Leads in an AMA event, introducing Stacks to the Binance Turkey community.
Create evergreen content to increase Stacks awareness
Continuous Ecosystem Support
  • Stacks Turkey worked with ALEX and Moonray in building their Turkish communities through local events such as AMAs.
  • Stacks Turkey helped create Stacking Calculator.
Building a Sustainable Stacks Chapter
  • Development of NFT Crowdfunding Campaign
  • The Chapter also held a meeting with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality CIO to discuss the possibility of IstanbulCoin and potential partnerships between Istanbul and Stacks.
  • Development of local Stacking Pool
Continous Ecosystem Support
The Chapter held more than 10 events including AMAs, and community giveaways to introduce Stacks within its local community. They are working closely with ALEX, Arkadiko, StackSwap, and Blocksurvey in building their community through local education.
This year Stacks China laid down Stacks fundamentals in the region by translating Stacks documentation and media into Mandarin and making key appearances on major Chinese forums and publications.
Stacks China 2021 Highlights

Result

Established partnerships to increase local awareness for Stacks
Stacks China established a partnership with Bukon to accelerate Stacks adoption in the region. The chapter also partnered with theranosshares.com, Huoxing.com, Bihu, BlockBeats, and PANews all of which are major local crypto media outlets and social media platforms.

Bihu x Stacks China
Blockbeats x Stacks China
PANews x Stacks China
Representation at large-scale blockchain event
Local ambassadors attended Shanghai Blockchain Wiki Expo wearing Stacks China tshirts and distributed Stacks China flyers.
Create and continuously update comprehensive Chinese website, blog and news channel
Earlier this year Stacks China created Stackchina.com as a local portal for its community to provide daily updates on what's happening in the STX ecosystem. All published content is amplified to third party media channels such as Bihu, Biba, Telegram, Discord and WeChat.
Establish Influencer partnerships
Established partnerships with influencers AlphaBo, 行走, 区块链奋斗狂人, 崛起币。Articles were picked up with numerous other outlets and influencers.

Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4
Article 5
Building a Sustainable Stacks Chapter and sustainability contributions
Launched STX Pandas as Stacks China's official NFT collection. This campaign was a key strategy for making Stacks China sustainable over the course of 12 months. In addition, China may work with other entities on its market as another sustainability model.
Community education and interactions through live online events
Organized and hosted live AMAs with Daemon Technologies and Secret Key Labs (Xverse) on Bihu. Hosted another AMA between Stacks China Lead and influencers on Wechat. Hosted an AMA between CityCoins and BlockBeats on Wechat.

AMA 1
AMA 2
AMA 3
Publish in-depth research paper for high net worth traders and professional funds
Worked with Toudengcang to publish an in depth research paper on Stacks.
As the developer talent portal in the ecosystem, Stacks Pakistan proved to be an influential community in rallying a pool of new Clarity developers. For the past few months, Stacks Pakistan has gathered 400 dedicated community members and secured jobs for more than ten developers for various entities in the ecosystem such as Tontine Trust.
Stacks Pakistan 2021 Highlights

Result

Increase developer awareness of Stacks through content localization
Established nationwide partnerships to advocate crypto and its regulation in Pakistan
  • Onboarded 24 Universities across Pakistan to amplify Stacks and its ecosystem updaters in their outlets.
  • Currently working with 56 local institute ambassadors to continously amplify Stacks within their communities
  • Partnered with 15+ organizations from banking to the finance sector to steadily advocate for crypto regulation within the region
  • Stacks Pakistan’s first Round Table Conference was attended by 40 KOLs from the local industry. It was aimed to spread awareness about Blockchain, Stacks and Bitcoin.
Increase the number of Clarity Smart Contract Developers
  • Trained 50 Clarity developers through locally organized Clarity Bootcamps.
  • 45 Developers graduated from the Stacks Summer School and later joined the Clarity Universe to learn the Smart Contract language in-depth.
  • Built a community called Stacks Developer Guild (SDG) which has over 200 members and is regularly updated about Stacks.
  • 8 SDG leads were onboarded to present in various cities of the country facilitating ambassadors to spread the word of Stacks in their respective institutes.
  • 38 community sessions were held to discuss Stacks ecosystem development and Clarity language
  • Developed a talent pool of Clarity Developers through the local Clarity Bootcamp they designed to teach the new language to high end developers. Introduced Stacks Summer School, a short course designed to teach blockchain basics and Clarity to Stacks Ambassadors during their summer vacations.
  • Provided a talent pool of Clarity Developers to the Stacks ecosystem by onboarding 10 developers to Stacks based Companies

Held two hackathons that received a total of 1000 applications.
Here are the stats:
  • 34 Cities
  • 154 Teams
  • Participation from 13 universities
  • Training sessions on Blockchain
  • 20 facilitators
  • 13 local and international speakers
  • 30 Finalist teams

Speaker Session by Jude Nelson #Hack4Impact 1.0
Opening Ceremony Stacks #Hack4Impact 2.0
Closing Ceremony Stacks #Hack4Impact 2.0
Increase the number of Clarity Smart Contracts
Building a Sustainable Stacks Chapter and sustainability contributions
Launched STX Pandas as Stacks China's official NFT collection. This campaign was a key strategy for making Stacks China sustainable over the course of 12 months. In addition, China may work with other entities on its market as another sustainability model.
Community education and interactions through live online events
Organized and hosted live AMAs with Daemon Technologies and Secret Key Labs (Xverse) on Bihu. Hosted another AMA between Stacks China Lead and influencers on Wechat. Hosted an AMA between CityCoins and BlockBeats on Wechat.

AMA 1
AMA 2
AMA 3
Publish in-depth research paper for high net worth traders and professional funds
Worked with Toudengcang to publish an in depth research paper on Stacks.

Emerging Chapters

Coming into 2022, we have three new chapters joining that we are proud to introduce: Stacks Japan, Stacks Russia, and Stacks India. Each of these chapters are committed to finding new ways to make the full utility of Bitcoin available and accessible in their local community and we are excited to introduce you to some of the new chapter leaders in each region.
D is a crypto enthusiast and DeFi fan who took on the initiative to lead Stacks Japan at the beginning of October 2021. While the community is still a new frontier for Stacks, t has quickly amassed a strong and dedicated community. The chapter seeks to localize the Stacks ecosystem with the help of its growing community. By tailoring content to various ecosystem stakeholders such as investors, developers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and artists, D believes the chapter can create a self-sustainable community with the ultimate goal of becoming a DAO.

D, Stacks Japan Chapter Lead

D comes from a financial background as an investment banker and has developed strong interests in the future of finance and the adoption of blockchain technology. As an investor, researcher, promoter, and advisor, he has expanded his activity scope in the world of crypto by closely interacting with various projects where he sees true potential and value.
Long-time community members Aleksei and MadAdm join the Chapter program as the new leads of Stacks Russia. The chapter has already managed to start the organic growth of its local investor community by holding several AMAs with famous crypto exchanges including Gate.io and OKEX.com. They encouraged new community members to get involved in order to work towards the project's collective success.

MadAdm, Stacks Russia Chapter Lead

MadAdm has a long history of building communities for various crypto protocols. He bridges the gap between the team and local community members by amplifying ecosystem and technical roadmap updates as well as being a constant support for the teams.

Aleksei, Stacks Russia Chapter Lead

Aleksei is a firm believer of Bitcoin and decentralization. Having business connections in various fields, Aleksei is planning to involve various verticals into the Stacks ecosystem. Currently, Aleksei is running his own b2b manufacturing company producing equipment for the oil and gas sector.
India chapter leads, Saurabh and Abhijoy started their journey as passionate community members. Abhijoy was an avid Stacks follower since 2017 after watching Muneeb’s TEDx talk “Welcome to the New Internet.” He later introduced his good friend Saurabh to the community in 2020. After the Stacks mainnet launch last February, both took the initiative to build the local Chapter being ardent believers of a user-owned internet. Together they are driving the localization of Stacks in the region.

The Stacks India Chapter is focused on nurturing developers and creating a collaborative atmosphere for its community members. They have already engaged influencers, developers, entrepreneurs, exchanges, and investors with deep-dive discussions about Stacks. They frequently push Hindi updates through their local channels and as a result, their investor channel has started to see organic growth and their first-ever AMA gathered many participants.

Saurabh Hasija, Stacks India Lead

Saurabh is an electronics engineer and a MBA from IIM Ranchi. He has a rich corporate experience of working with companies like Nokia and Reliance in senior management roles. He is currently running his own consultancy and is also in charge of a few non-profits looking after the less fortunate. In the crypto space, Saurabh has been involved in the marketing and community-building efforts of several projects and is a published writer with Hackernoon. He is a strong believer in the vision of DeFi on Bitcoin and considers Stacks to be one of the biggest rails of hyper-bitcoinization.

Abhijoy Sarkar, Stacks India Lead

Abhijoy is an electrical engineer and a MBA from IIM Ranchi. In his corporate life, he has worked with Infosys, JP Morgan, and Yes Bank. He left his corporate banking career to become an entrepreneur and he now runs his own B2B SaaS startups. In the crypto space, Abhijoy moderates communities for multiple projects. He is on the advisory board of a project. As a published author on Hackernoon, Abhijoy has sizable community of followers on Publish0x. Abhijoy’s bullish case for Stacks India is the growing popularity of smart contracts on Bitcoin and the rising number of desi smart contract developers.
Interested in building a Chapter in your local region? Get in touch with the community that's building a user-owned internet on Bitcoin at [email protected].

Louise Ivan leads growth efforts at the Foundation, with particular focuses on increasing worldwide token access and empowering regional communities.