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Q2 2019 Blockstack Ecosystem Update

It's been a historic quarter for the Blockstack ecosystem:

• The Blockstack token offering became the first in US history to receive SEC qualification. We're proud to lead the industry toward regulatory clarity for crypto assets. The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Fox Business, and Yahoo! Finance shared more of the details.

•  Q2 was one of our strongest quarters of growth. The total number of independent apps/startups built on Blockstack went from 86 to 165. You can see the latest number here.

•  We announced the Asian strategic round, led by Hashkey and SNZ. They are both early crypto investors from Greater China. Fenbushi, Fundamental and others, also joined the round.

• Awareness of Blockstack continued growing rapidly, again increasing by 3x. Our reach went to 132 million from 40 million in Q1 (as measured by Awario).

• The new Blockstack whitepaper V2 is now available in English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, and Japanese.

The SEC-qualified offering is open until Sep 9th by default. We're optimizing for broad distribution. To help achieve that goal, any purchase request larger than $200K has to go through our investor relations team, so we can make sure our community can participate first.

Our Telegram group has seen a lot of activity since the SEC qualification announcement. You can join the group and ask any questions from the Blockstack team and me.

Muneeb Ali
CEO, Blockstack PBC
Twitter: @muneeb

PS: Get your free ‘Can’t Be Evil’ stickers!

Highlights and News:

Stacks Token Sale Is The First SEC-Qualified in US History
On July 10th, we were honored to announce that Blockstack PBC’s token offering was qualified by the SEC under Regulation A+. This is the first time in U.S. history that a crypto token offering has received SEC qualification. We wanted to open our token offering to the general public, without excluding the US so we worked with US regulators to figure out a legal framework for our offering. Now other projects may potentially be able to use our legal framework as an example. We believe this is a huge step forward for decentralized applications, internet security, and privacy.

If you’re considering purchasing Stacks tokens, visit stackstoken.com.

App Growth
Q2 saw overall app growth accelerate, from 86 apps at the beginning of the Quarter to 165 by the end, 76 of which successfully took part in the App Mining program. Many notable apps created came out of the first-ever Can’t Be Evil contest we hosted with Product Hunt, Lightning Network, DevPost, and Dapp.com. Meet the winners here and sign up for Part 2 of the contest here.

Blockstack’s Asian Strategic Round: Driving the Next Era of Computing
We’re excited to announce that the Hashkey Group and SNZ are leading a strategic investment round. They will support Blockstack’s growth across key Asian markets such as Greater China, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. This strategic round is part of our Reg S offering as disclosed in the offering circular. Both Hashkey Group and SNZ were instrumental in the early success of crypto projects like Ethereum, not only in China but broadly in Asia. We are also excited to welcome IOSG Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Fundamental Labs, Spartan Group, and Tembusu Partners as investors and ecosystem building partners. → More

App Mining Plans to Pay Blockstack Developers $1,000,000 in STX per Month
Over App Mining’s 8-month run, the number of apps in the program has increased nearly 10x to over 150 and developers created password managers, productivity tools, content creation platforms, and more. This success drove us to invest further by increasing the monthly payouts which we intend to ultimately increase 10x from today’s amount of $100,000 for a target of $1,000,000 per month in STX in May 2020. → More

Blockstack Technical Whitepaper V2
We published the Blockstack Whitepaper 2.0 which builds on two years of R&D work and peer-reviewed research. The whitepaper lays out technical architecture updates and presents two new components: (a) the design of the Stacks blockchain and consensus mechanism, and (b) a new smart contract language that optimizes for predictability and security.

The Blockstack Whitepaper 2.0 is now available in multiple languages for our global community:

• 블록스택 탈중앙 컴퓨팅 네트워크 (Korean)
• Blockstack技术白皮书 v2.0 中文版 (Chinese)
• ブロックスタック分散コンピューティングネットワーク (Japanese)
• Whitepaper Técnico de Blockstack v 2.0 (Spanish)

Introduction of Clarity, a language for predictable smart contracts
We were excited to introduce the Clarity smart contract language that optimizes for predictability and security. Clarity is currently in developer preview. We’re seeking feedback from our developer community and welcome any bug reports and pull requests. To get started, check out the documentation and the SDK.

Revealed: The Blockstack 2019 Summit in San Francisco
Hear from Neal Stephenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and more, as well as angel investor and entrepreneur, Naval Ravikant as they plunge into the metaverse as featured speakers at the Blockstack 2019 Summit. Join fellow community members to learn what’s new, what’s next, and what others in the Blockstack community are working on. → Register

Stacks Token Economics: Improved Mining Algorithm & Minting Schedule
In the last two years, there has been a lot of progress in the maturing field of token economics. Given the new technical updates in our Blockstack Whitepaper 2.0, we felt it was the appropriate time to take a deep dive on the Stacks token economics model. We sought out relevant experts and performed a full economic audit of our distribution model. The relevant details of the new adaptive mint and burn mechanism, changes to token economics, and community feedback during the comment period is available on the forum here.

Q2 Technical Updates and Developer Success Highlights
There were a number of big updates to Blockstack developer tools and beyond, summarized here. Highlights include: the introduction of the Clarity smart contract language, continued work on the Stacks Blockchain V2, improvements to the blockstack.js codebase and SDKs for Android and iOS, improved platform reliability, introduction of end-to-end test automation for the Blockstack Explorer, an upgraded automation test suite for the Blockstack Browser, Blockstack Explorer performance improvements, release of version 3.0 of the Stacks wallet, and redesigned Blockstack.org and Stackstoken.com.

App Mining Improvements
In Q2, our team focused on solving reviewer and policy challenges while working with our community of App Miners. A full list of program changes is available in the App Mining repo, including these high-impact improvements from Q2:

• Partnered with Awario, the new awareness app reviewer.
• Allowed App Miners to define specific target-users for TryMyUI testing.
• Increased to 10 user testing sessions for the TryMyUI scores.
• Paused voting on the investor community reviewer, Democracy Earth.
• Added an audit period so the community can help verify rankings.

Community events
The Blockstack team met over 3,500 developers this quarter (over 500 more than last quarter) at various events including 26 meetups, 16 conferences, 11 webinars, 2 international AMAs and participated in 30 hackathons. Members of the team spoke at Consensus, Token Summit, Digital Asset Summit, CogX, Fluidity, Internet Identity Workshop in SF, Paris Blockchain Week and attended zCon in Croatia, among many others. We partnered with Major League Hacking for a 23 school hackathon tour and beyond that, we participated in 7 notable hackathons such at Stanford’s Treehacks hackathon and Bitcoin Games. → Full Recap

Important disclaimer
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has qualified the offering statement that we have filed with the SEC. The information in that offering statement is more complete than the information we are providing now, and could differ in important ways. You must read the documents filed with the SEC before investing. The offering is being made only by means of its offering statement. This document shall not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy, nor shall there be any sale of these securities in any state or jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of any such state or jurisdiction.

An indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind. Any person interested in investing in any offering of Stacks Tokens should review our disclosures and the publicly filed offering statement and the final offering circular that is part of that offering statement here. Blockstack is not registered, licensed or supervised as a broker dealer or investment adviser by the SEC, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) or any other financial regulatory authority or licensed to provide any financial advice or services.

Forward-looking statements
This communication contains forward-looking statements that are based on our beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to us. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: “will,” “expect,” “would,” “intend,” “believe,” or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements in this document include, but are not limited to, statements about our plans for developing the platform and future utility for the Stacks Token, our Reg A+ offering and launch of our network, and collaborations and partnerships. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that may cause actual results or performance to be materially different. More information on the factors, risks and uncertainties that could cause or contribute to such differences is included in our filings with the SEC, including in the “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion & Analysis” sections of our offering statement on Form 1-A. We cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.