Updates covering Q4 2020 and January 2021 Hey Stackers, welcome back to quarterly updates from across the Stacks Ecosystem! This edition officially comes to you from us here at the Stacks Foundation with Hiro now more focused on technical content for developers. You can now find all previous editions of the quarterly updates and subscribe to future ones on our site here: stacks.org/updates
This is a very special edition of the quarterly ecosystem updates as it comes after one of the most monumental stretches in Stacks history: a period that saw the community successfully launch Stacks 2.0 and start a new era of innovation for Bitcoin.
With the Stacks 2.0 public infrastructure now launched and operational, this is the perfect time for app founders to take their decentralized apps to the next level, for developers to tinker with smart contracts, for entrepreneurs to test DeFi products, and for the community to keep pushing the mission forward in a multitude of ways via our grant program.
Before we get into some of the highlights, I want to take a minute to sincerely thank the many of you that made the launch of Stacks 2.0 and the huge leap forward it represents for our mission, possible. This includes the members of the Hiro team, Daemon Technologies and all the independent miners, individual contributors, app developers, OKCoin, Freeholders, apps showcased on the launch event, the Algorand team on Clarity, integration and launch partners, infrastructure providers, and all our friends and family who allowed us the space and supported us to build something so ambitious.
Congratulations to all of you. We are humbled by the level of interest and excitement generated by the Stacks 2.0 launch and look forward to working with you to realize a better internet on Bitcoin.
Mitchell and The Stacks Foundation Team
Highlights
News Q4 2020 + Mainnet Launch 
Stacks 2.0 Launch After 2+ years of development and ~8 months of testing, the Stacks 2.0 mainnet went live on January 14, 2021! During the Stacks 2.0 Mainnet launch, CoinTelegraph published three sponsored articles and several event promotions across CoinTelegraph’s website and newsletter. Special thanks to Wachsman for their ongoing PR Support. Stacks Cryptocurrency No Longer Treated as a US Security Blockstack PBC (now Hiro PBC) released a summary of a legal memorandum supporting plans for the Stacks cryptocurrency (STX) to no longer be considered a security under U.S. law, which was featured in Reuters and was the most read article of the day while being syndicated to MSN, Yahoo Finance, US News, Financial Post, and Investing.com. Since then, PBC filed a form 1-U report with the SEC that summarizes the successful adoption of the Stacks blockchain by independent miners and the board approval of management’s determination to no longer treat STX as a security under U.S. federal securities laws. → Read more
Partnerships OKCoin OKCoin listed STX, giving US-based purchasers secondary-market access to STX for the very first time. The OKCoin team have been long-time supporters of the Stacks ecosystem and we’re extremely happy to have them supporting both the STX listing and BTC rewards via Stacking for users. → Learn More
Foundry Foundry committed to providing STX Mining services with the launch of Stacks 2.0. Foundry, a Digital Currency Group subsidiary, is a leader in the world of Bitcoin mining and will bring expertise and capital to the Stacks ecosystem. → Learn More
Upbit The Stacks Foundation announced that Upbit, the largest digital asset exchange in Korea, listed the STX token in Korea and Indonesia. We’re excited to see more STX token access worldwide, especially in Korea where there is already a very active Stacks community. → Learn More
Staked Staked is an early leader in the staking community and has seen first-hand that there is a desire for earning BTC, which has rallied over 60% in the last two months. Working with Staked expands the scope of where STX holders can safely and easily earn BTC and affirms Staked’s leadership position in the crypto asset fixed income marketplace. → Learn More
Wrapped.com (Tokensoft + Anchorage) Wrapped.com, a collaboration between industry stalwarts Tokensoft and Anchorage, and specialists in wrapped crypto assets, will soon offer wrapped Bitcoin on Stacks, or ‘xBTC’. Wrapped Bitcoin on Stacks is a huge step toward native DeFi on Bitcoin. Because the Stacks 2.0 blockchain settles to Bitcoin in shared consensus already, xBTC will be the first wrapped asset actually backed by Bitcoin. → Learn More
Skynet Hiro PBC and Skynet Labs teamed up to support bridges between the Stacks and Skynet protocols. A bounty will reward the best tutorial educating developers on how to use Skynet to create pointers in Clarity smart contracts to data that is too large to store on-chain. → Learn More
Ankr The Ankr integration provides a streamlined solution for smaller regional exchanges to support staking with world-class user experience and security – empowering holders worldwide to work with their exchange of choice without sacrificing the benefits of being a Stacks 2.0 holder. → Learn More
Blockdaemon The Blockdaemon integration with Stacks provides institutions, corporate entities, and individual developers easy to use but powerful node creation and management services, professional support, APIs, monitoring tools, back-up systems, and more. → Learn More
Decentralization Hiro: For The Builders of A Better Internet on Bitcoin Blockstack PBC is now officially Hiro Systems PBC. The change to Hiro will mark a renewed focus on developer tools for the user-owned internet, while more clearly delineating the company and ecosystem. → Learn More Secret Key Labs: Xverse Launch, a Mobile-First STX Wallet In December, Hong Kong-based entity Secret Key Labs joined the Stacks ecosystem to launch a Stacks mobile wallet, Xverse, which will be available in both English and Chinese. The new entity will be led by Founder and CEO Ken Liao, who joined Blockstack PBC early on as one of the first engineers. In the long term, Secret Key Labs plans to build the user gateway to the Stacks ecosystem, including mobile and desktop apps that enable authentication, transactions, and management of digital assets. → Learn More
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Decentralization Hiro: For The Builders of A Better Internet on Bitcoin Blockstack PBC is now officially Hiro Systems PBC. The change to Hiro will mark a renewed focus on developer tools for the user-owned internet, while more clearly delineating the company and ecosystem. → Learn More Secret Key Labs: Xverse Launch, a Mobile-First STX Wallet In December, Hong Kong-based entity Secret Key Labs joined the Stacks ecosystem to launch a Stacks mobile wallet, Xverse, which will be available in both English and Chinese. The new entity will be led by Founder and CEO Ken Liao, who joined Blockstack PBC early on as one of the first engineers. In the long term, Secret Key Labs plans to build the user gateway to the Stacks ecosystem, including mobile and desktop apps that enable authentication, transactions, and management of digital assets. → Learn More
Featured Press & Interviews
Technical Updates The core theme of engineering related work in Q4 continued to be Stacks 2.0. Stacks 2.0 Whitepaper The Stacks 2.0 whitepaper draft has been released! The paper gives an overview of the Stacks 2.0 blockchain design, connection to Bitcoin, and further technical details. This paper can serve as a helpful go-to resource for anyone in the community, as well as a helpful onramp for those first getting oriented with the Stacks ecosystem. → Read the Whitepaper Docs Week During the first week of November, we began an effort called "Docs Week" to reconfigure, refactor, and create technical content, docs system updates, and illustrations to make it easier for new devs to get started with Stacks 2.0. The result was sensational with 47 Github PRs being opened from 17 contributors. The changes resulted in 90+ updated files (2,500+ code line additions and 3,000+ deletions) and made the docs much more accessible, informational, and beautiful! → Read about Docs Week Stacks.js In October, a number of our developer-focused repositories were reconfigured into a package named Stacks.js. Stacks.js is a reorganization of libraries in the Stacks ecosystem, composed of nine modular libraries all residing inside a single Github repository. With Stacks.js, you get everything you need to build apps on Stacks 2.0 in one place, including functionalities like storage, auth, and Clarity smart contracts. Check out the new package, or the migration guide. → Read the Forum Post The Stacks Blockchain API Now Supports Coinbase’s Rosetta Standard We are excited to share that the Stacks Blockchain API was extended to fully support the Rosetta specification! A few months ago, Coinbase and other industry players came together to release Rosetta – an open industry standard to make blockchain integrations faster & more streamlined. The Stacks ecosystem was one of the first supporters with community contributions beginning to trickle in almost immediately after the announcement.
Community Updates Events The Stacks community participated in 18+ virtual events worldwide, along with 16 AMAs in Q4. Hiro had team members present in front of a cumulative audience of 30k+ viewers!
Soon after ushering in the new year, the Stacks Foundation, Hiro PBC, and the Stacks community celebrated a major milestone: the Stacks 2.0 Mainnet, which successfully launched on January 14th, 2021 to an audience of more than 8,600+ and growing. The event featured amazing guest speakers in the Blockchain and Crypto space along with surprise announcements, app launches, and even a musical performance. To view the full event, watch it here or read the following blog post. Other highlights:
HackStacks: HackStacks gave the community their first chance to experiment with novel Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) Mining & Stacking functionality. The winning submissions truly demonstrated the power of PoX, and showed that users are hungry for platforms that streamline the process! → View the Winners
Hack DeFi: The DeFi ecosystem in blockchain is currently exploding with activity. There are hundreds of platforms that let you participate in interesting, value-generating operations with your crypto. With Hack DeFi, we wanted to see some of those robust decentralized finance applications that Stacks 2.0 & Clarity enable. Hackers stepped up big time and cranked out some behemoth smart contracts! From token exchanges to DAOs, we are already seeing a dApp ecosystem emerging on Stacks. →View the Winners
Daemon’s Mining Challenge: The mining challenge saw over 200 registrants and helped prepare miners for a successful launch! → View the Winners
Community Growth By the end of Q42020, our online community had more than 40,000 members with steady growth in Turkey, Philippines, Korea, China, and Arabia. Shoutout to all the Stacks leaders for building their communities from the ground up!
Stacks 2.0 App Progress & Community Contributions in Development: We’re thrilled to have showcased some of the amazing apps being built. See featured ones below.
Anyone interested in building an app can apply for funding via Stacks Grants.
Stacks Grants Eighteen Stacks grant applications were approved in Q4 2020. Grant projects include an innovative hardware wallet, a marketplace for NFTs, educational content for Polish audiences, a STX mining bot, an encrypted video streaming platform, and more. → Check out the grant recipients Stacks Chapters Stacks Pakistan and Stacks MENA officially launched with their initial focus on expanding education and awareness throughout their local regions by educating developers, startups, and enterprises through a variety of activities including partnerships, entrepreneurial events, summits, hackathons, and other activities. Community Stacks 2.0 Whitepaper Translations International Community Content Spotlight:
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