Update: Thank you to everyone that was part of this experiment! This version of Stacking Alerts will end on May 5th, but look forward to better solutions coming very soon! Learn more

Over the past 2 months, Stacking has paid out almost $4M last cycle in BTC as Stacking rewards. There’s been clear demand for Stacking from the broader market, driving new user adoption for Stacking providers like OKCoin, the creation of new pooling and delegation options like Staked and Friedger’s Pool, and an increase in the amount Stacked in each successive cycle. In just a few cycles, Stacking would already be ranked among the Top 20 DeFi protocols indexed at defipulse.com with over $320M locked up.

All very exciting, but everyone Stacking knows you really feel the magic when that BTC starts to hit. Right now, that happens somewhat silently so several of us thought some simple alerts would not only fun, but useful in helping to remind you about an upcoming cycle, the start of rewards, and of course, the immediate gratification every time you're paid!

If you want Stacking alerts as well, read on.

We've set up a basic test system where you can submit your email and/or phone number and begin receiving basic Stacking updates. All you need to do is head over to stacks.org/stacking and click the widget in the bottom right corner.

1. From there, just choose how you want to receive your alerts (Email, SMS, or both)
2. Select if you want General Stacking Updates and Reward Alerts or General Stacking Updates only. You cannot currently receive only Reward Alerts.
3. Enter your details. You only need to put in the information for the type of alert you want to receive, i.e. if you only want SMS, only enter your phone number. If you only want general updates, you don't need to enter a Reward Address.
4. Last, enter the reward address you want to receive alerts for

You will receive a confirmation immediately, but your alerts won't be live until the data is reviewed. We're usually pretty fast, but please allow 24-48 hours before you expect to begin receiving updates.

Pro tip: There are numerous sites that provide a free email address or phone number with which to receive messages. You can then only use it with these alerts if you'd like to avoid connecting your reward address with any personally identifiable information.

While we do not share your data, you may be concerned about connecting a reward address with a phone number or email as mentioned above. If that's the case, no problem, we totally understand! This system is not currently sophisticated enough to offer you a truly privacy-friendly way of receiving these alerts, but building your own can be very simple.

In this example, we'll use Zapier, but you could really use any similar tool or call your own services manually if you're technical like that.

I'm going to make this one really easy for you and just give you the Zap ⚡. Kudos need to be given here to Alex Grabe over at Hiro as well who shared a version of this with me and helped finesse the API call.

You'll need access to premium Zaps for this implementation as we are using the Webhook from Zapier.

The basic flow of the Zap is as follows:

1. A webhook waits for entries to https://stacks-node-api.mainnet.stacks.co/extended/v1/burnchain/rewards/{YOUR-REWARD-ADDRESS-HERE]. When a reward is paid, it'll pick up the new entry and fire the rest of the steps...
2. A series of formatting steps and data fetching occur to collect and transform the data from the API into a format we can use in our messages. This includes gathering the current price of BTC from CoinGecko's API with which to estimate the dollar amount of your reward.
3. An SMS or Email message is sent according to your preferences.

To get setup:

1. Open the Zap template I created here and copy the zap
2. Replace the reward address in Step 1 of the Zap ('1. Retrieve Poll') with your own address, leaving the rest of the URL alone
3. Update the Phone number in Step 7 (you may have to setup a 'SMS from Zapier' account at this step, but it's free and very simple). You will also get a verification via SMS so they can message you.
4. Update the email in Step 8.
5. Optionally the email or phone step if you don't want one or the other
6. Turn the Zap on

Of course, you are also free to adjust any of the wording, the calculations (say you want info in Euros, etc.). The above will get you off and running though, with no need to adjust other details if you don't want to.

Note with this method, you will not receive Stacking cycle updates, just rewards updates related to your address. We are currently sending those cycle updates manually so if we don't have your information, we can't include you.

If Zapier isn't for you, the nice thing is, this URL (https://stacks-node-api.mainnet.stacks.co/extended/v1/burnchain/rewards/{YOUR-REWARD-ADDRESS-HERE]) will allow you to grab the information you need for basic alerts, so you can always query that from whichever codebase or platform you want to work in and setup your own unique system.

For now, this is just a fun side project I built to scratch my own itch. I have some assumptions about how we might grow Stacking and understanding some of these interactions better will provide me useful information to apply in other areas. So, thanks for being willing to test, don't get too mad if things break (or if the alerts are wrong), and if you have ideas for improvements, please share as I'll be tracking them for a better version of this should it prove valuable.

To tease some ideas I have for where this can go:

• Integration with some kind of referral program that would make it easy for alert receivers to share the magic of Stacking with others and be paid for it
• Stack attack! In theory, we could Stack on behalf of anyone as a growth hack (say a celebrity or well-known person or group) and use these notifications to let them know they're receiving Bitcoin
• Twitter bot that is constantly chirping while rewards are paid so the world can get a taste of the magic too
• Rewards sharing, maybe there's a world in which you can easily share a portion of your reward with a friend, charity, etc.
• Connective tissue for portfolio trackers such as Blockfolio or Delta where you can post your tranactions there easily to make sure your Stacking BTC rewards are auto-logged with your other crypto.
• Plenty more, so we'll see!

PS: Big shout-outs to @agraebe, @aulneau_, and @heynky. Alex helped with this concept a bunch and Hank and Thomas built the amazing stacking.club which originally inspired this and is insanely useful. I've even linked to folks' full reward screens on stacking.club in the alerts because they are just so beautiful and helpful. Thanks guys!

Hey there, if you're receiving this, I just wanted to let you know that I am ending the Stacking Alerts experiment. Before I get into why, I just wanted to say thank you for being part of it!

Why shut down the alerts?
Ultimately, I am not able to provide the experience I'd like to with the low-tech solution I have in place. I originally only set out to prove whether or not these notifications would be desirable and we did that, so thank you!

What now?
If you are receiving alerts, they will stop after this cycle. For others, it's likely that you haven't been receiving them anyway, in part because of the manual process and difficulties in getting complete information from folks. If you are Stacking on your own (not via a pool), you can can continue getting alerts by following the instructions to use my template Zap here: https://stacks.org/stacking-alerts

Last but not least, I am happy to report that Stacking alerts are something the team at stacking.club hope to add in future releases and they just received a grant to work on the platform.

Thanks again for helping me with this experiment!
Mitchell