AUGUST 15TH, 2022
Orbit Bridge Calling for Stacks Validators
by Caitlin Eckvahl on August 15th, 2022
Building bridges between Stacks and other chains has been an important effort in making STX and Bitcoin-secured assets accessible to other networks and communities. Ahead of the Orbit bridge launch following the Stacks 2.1 upgrade later this year, the time has come to onboard Validators to help process and record transactions generated by the Stacks chain.

Not only the existing Orbit Bridge validators, The Stacks Foundation alongside Hiro, DeSpread, Arkadiko, and ALEX are joining as validators, and Orbit Bridge is seeking to onboard additional validators - could that be you?

What is a Validator?
The Orbit Bridge system has Governance groups comprised of the roles: Operator and Validator. While the Operator sends data, the Validator works with the Operator to efficiently and quickly process transactions. Validators verify each transaction generated by the Stacks chain and record verification in the chain to reach consensus.

What do Validators get?
To encourage teams and increase the number of nodes in Orbit's Bridge Validator Alliance, participating organizations will receive a basic reward of 100K ORC per year (Orbit Chain’s native token) for validating Stacks ecosystem transactions. Teams also get an additional 20,000 ORC per year for validating transactions from other ecosystems. Lastly, the top three validators will earn an extra reward of 1500 ORC each quarter that will be evaluated by the total validated transactions.

How do you become a Validator?
To participate in Orbit Bridge governance for the Stacks chain, check out Orbit’s Validator Guide and check the hardware specifications needed to participate.

The ability to bridge MATIC (native) / MESH (erc-20), STX, and KLAY has been opened in testnet and is available for testing here. The Orbit Bridge will officially go live with other assets(typically stable coins) at the end of October 2022.


A big unlock for Stacks
The Stacks-supported Orbit Bridge will open the gateway to building more sophisticated products on Stacks that will be composable with apps across other ecosystems. With Orbit supporting several well-known projects, including Ethereum, Avalanche, Fantom, Celo, BNB, Polygon, Orbit, Klaytn, HECO, Icon, OEC, and xDAI, Validators will play an important part in delivering Bitcoin’s value to a multichain ecosystem.



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