Priorities from the 2022 Ecosystem Offsite
by Foundation Team on October 12, 2022

On September 19, 2022 we held the first Stacks Offsite with builders from the ecosystem to talk through technical priorities, share opportunities, and discuss the known challenges within the roadmap. The goal was to bring together a diverse group of builders to outline common priorities, and build working groups and a public roadmap to share with the community.

Separately, we conducted a far-ranging survey from over 50 companies building on Stacks to guide the discussions that took place at this year’s offsite. This survey addressed technical improvements, ideas, and growing the overall ecosystem. We’ll be sharing more information about these results and, as always, invite you to be a part of upcoming feedback sessions.
Why it matters
The discussion was organized for both in-person and remote contributors to surface and sort the highest priorities in a decentralized manner and produce actionable recommendations (not steps) for the community.
The big picture
Stacks is a decentralized ecosystem that relies on various contributors to make improvements and upgrades. The best way to move large, ambitious upgrades forward is by creating cross-community working groups to lead large scale initiatives and creating public accountability to the community. The largest priorities are spelled out below and have clear plans of action.
As a community, we identified three priorities:
  • Speed and Scalability Improvements
  • Bitcoin Write
  • Bitcoin NFTs
Five working groups were established to focus on these decentralized priorities.
  • Faster L1 Working Group

    Working on design scope and working on a proposal to improve speed and hit target confirmation times in the next 3-6 months. Design work prioritized second to Stacks 2.1 upgrade work. Scoped plan and SIP will be presented to the community when complete.


  • Non Custodial BTC on Stacks

    The lack of a stateful smart contract system on Bitcoin necessitates the construction of systems in which a representation of locked Bitcoin is traded within a separate smart-contract-powered blockchain. This working group aims to design (and potentially implement) a trustless and reliable 2-way peg between Bitcoin and Stacks.


  • Bitcoin NFTs

    Determining market demand for minting, claiming, and transferring of NFTs with Bitcoin. In parallel, working on technical requirements for additional BTC NFT functionality.


  • GTM Non Custodial Bitcoin

    Scoping customer interest, market competition, and requirements. Focus on potential partnerships that enable more applications built on new bitcoin write capabilities.


  • Marketing & Comms
    Folks in the community are looking for a roadmap and how to understand future of Stacks. Focus on creation of and delivery of key communications materials for broader narrative as well as new initiatives.

    • Brittany Laughlin, Stacks Foundation
    • Claire Topalian, Stacks Foundation
    • Public Group Link
Going deeper
To read more about the key objectives for our top 3 priorities, click into each below.
Fun fact
There were other topics surfaced relating to the top three priorities, or had working fixes in progress including Miner incentives, increased liquidity, evm compatibility, SIP-10 infrastructure, and a general ask for more resources for builders. Each has an existing team working on the topic or an open SIP proposal in progress. If not, the remaining topics were tabled for later prioritization, providing an opportunity for the broader community to contribute feedback or consider submitting an open SIP proposal.
The bottom line
What lies ahead for Stacks and the Stacks Roadmap is up to the community. The technical ideas that will ultimately get implemented go through the Stacks Improvement Proposals (SIPs) process. The SIP process relies on community contributions, feedback, and voting to accept new ideas into the technical roadmap. The ideas shared above will be published for community review so everyone has the space to add more ideas, further refine the scope, and understand the proposals together.
What's next?
Given the strong attendance in September and interest in future offsites, we aim to support at least two offsites next year. The working groups, focused on the three priorities, will provide the closest opportunity to work toward solving these challenges.
Final thoughts
There’s high value placed on working in public so the discussion items, action items, and priorities are showcased within this update, including ways everyone in the community can contribute to these shared goals. We’re grateful to the 25+ attendees who represented 14 companies in the ecosystem, including participants from Gamma, Stacks Ventures, Trust Machines, Mechanism, Hiro Systems, Xverse, CityCoins, ALEX, Arkadiko and Stacks Foundation.
Get involved
Stay up-to-date on the blockchain upgrades by attending the weekly Blockchain calls here. Please add updates related to your work on Stacks and you can contribute to the ongoing roadmap below.
Stacks Roadmap
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