Despite the challenges of building in a bear market, the Stacks ecosystem has continued to grow — our tech is headed for the 2.1 upgrade, the ecosystem has welcomed new community leaders and developers, and companies built on Stacks continue to emerge and grow.

Below we’ve outlined our performance against our Q3 Objective and Key Results (OKRs). You can read a bit more about the planning and prioritization process for these OKRs here. The short answer is that all Objectives stem from our higher-level 1-year vision stated above with the overall mission to unleash Bitcoin and careful consideration of feedback from stakeholders across the ecosystem.

This post is broken into 2 main sections:

We made a push for builders to register their applications on stacks.co so everyone can now use it as a directory and a proxy for ‘real projects’ built on Stacks. Moderators have done a great job filtering this list, excluding gambling apps or apps with really poor user experiences. Using this as the gauge, there were 92 projects listed on stacks.co at the end of quarter, meaning we were 30 short of our goal, putting us behind pace for 300 next year. This was the first quarter with goal which coincided with a bear market, so we will take our learnings to build better systems in the future and right-size the work given market conditions.

After implementing the Orbit software/model, we ended up having more developers active in the ecosystem at the beginning of the quarter than we thought at 277, nearly reaching our 300 Q3 goal. By the end of the quarter, we had a total of 392 developers, meaning we increased our total active developers by roughly 30%, blasting past our 300 goal. This was accomplished through a combination of efforts including Clarity Camp, events, chapter work, and external tutorial content. Next quarter we will capture these developers into the hiring portal based on their qualifications as well as raising our growth goal based on what we’ve learned. We also built a Clarity Skills Assessment that will launch next quarter, which will provide an indicator of the number of educated developers in the ecosystem.

One important new element this quarter is our use of the Orbits model and software to help us identify and measure different types of contributors, developers, and members of the community. It’s a fantastic model for community growth that has allowed us to better understand movement through the ecosystem and through programs using only public data, no special trackers.

For the purposes of this OKR report, the important idea is that there are 4 Orbits, 1 being the closest in a community - these are the people leading the way and putting in the most meaningful time. In general, success is moving folks into closer Orbit with the project.

We have different OKRs that target different Orbit levels. These are levers for building a well-rounded community and we use the Orbit software to help us report on where we stand per some of these OKRs. The software works by tracking publicly available activity from Discord, Github, Twitter, the forum, etc., as well as activities we can log such as attending an event or going to Clarity Camp. All the activities are assigned a point value and their overall activity level determines their Orbit.

While it's easy to feel down in an uncertain market, looking at these numbers, completed projects, and the work in progress should give Stackers something to smile about. There’s a lot that is working well and a growing community working together. Thank you for being part of it!

We’re already full steam ahead on work in 2022 and preparing for a big 2023. You can find our Q4 objectives in this post to see what’s coming next. Even better, all of those projects are informed directly by feedback from the community, the ecosystem offsite, regular ecosystem calls, work done in Q3, and guidance from our board. So let’s get back to building.