Originally envisioned as a decentralized peer-to-peer cash system, it might be much more.
One could argue that Bitcoin is now a payment method in El Salvador, despite its recent legalization. What is really missing is the notion of Bitcoin as an ecosystem.
To make one, inventors must be able to efficiently carry out operations on top of it. This calls for smart contract compatibility. And that’s exactly what Stacks is cooking.
Stacks’ History
The elaboration of Stacks began in 2013. Authors, Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea, created the design. Heaps is the product of Muneeb’s doctoral thesis. It is a detailed frame for an internet that people could erect around the Bitcoin blockchain. Muneeb’s called this frame “Blockstack“. The participation in the Y Combinator batch in 2014 made the original exploration and development.
Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea have raised funds in the early stages. They got funds from Union Square Gambles, Naval Radiant, SV Angel, Winklevoss Capital, and others. The design raised 47M in a token immolation for the Stacks cryptocurrency in 2017. Also a fresh 23M through the first-ever SEC-good US Reg A offering and concurrent Reg S offering in 2019. Furthermore, thousands of holders shared in this immolation. This includes US, Lux, DOG, Winklevoss Capital, Blockchain Capital, Foundation Capital, Hash Key, Belushi, and others.
Blockstack rebranded to Stacks in 2020. Then, the Clarity smart contract community launched Stacks 2.0 main net in January 2021. Moreover, Stacks addresses the main difficulties of structuring on top of Bitcoin (BTC).
There are two abysmal challenges to erecting apps and smart contracts on Bitcoin:
- Scalability: The Bitcoin blockchain has a limited capacity for deals.
- Secure contracts: to save the security of the Bitcoin blockchain, the smart contract scripting language is limited. Heaps has developed a result for both issues. Rather than planting smart contracts directly on the Bitcoin chain, Stacks executes them on its own Subcaste.
Stacks and Bitcoin Blockchain
A new agreement medium called Proof of Transfer (PoX) allows Stacks miners to write new blocks on their own blockchain through the mining energy consumed by those same miners on the Bitcoin blockchain. In fact, it does not require further energy consumption. Achieving speed at a micro (blocks) position Speed is of the essence when it comes to decentralized apps.
The Bitcoin blockchain is notoriously slower than most of the top chains that support smart contracts. Since each block produced on heaps must be stored on bitcoin, one could assume that stacks’ speed must be lower or equal to that of bitcoin.
To work around this issue, Stacks has designed a medium that allows its blockchain to make effective use of the time between two blocks produced on Bitcoin by means of intermediate lower blocks called micro blocks.
These blocks can work at a significantly faster evidence speed, and by the time Bitcoin has verified a block, the micro-blocks can settle from Stacks to Bitcoin and provide a future speed enhancement while exercising the security of the Bitcoin network.
