After a year of virtual hackathons, virtual conferences, Zoom workshops, remote work, and digital communication, it was genuinely empowering to get the Stacks community together in Miami and celebrate the explosion of activity in our ecosystem. Bitcoin 2021 was the perfect event to kick off summer, and Stacks was thrilled to participate and spread the word about Stacks 2.0, Clarity, Proof-of-Transfer, and the multitude of projects spinning up on Stacks.

Since 2019, Stacks has sponsored Bitcoin’s annual conference. It has always been one of the largest celebrations of crypto in our industry, and this yearit’s taking place in Miami, Florida from June 3 - 5. After over a year hiatus from in-person events, we’re thrilled to share that Stacks will be out in full force at Bitcoin 2021. We’ll be exhibiting at Booth #510 at the Mana Wynwood Conference Center, educating attendees on Stacks, Hiro, our latestBTC.US launch, and asurprise announcement. Stop by our booth to snag limited edition BTC“laser eyes” sunglasses, and meet some fellow Hiro team members!

When you're ready to start Stacking, you'll need to decide whether to Stack in a pool or by yourself, for how long, and how much. It may seem like a lot to reason through at first, but this post will guide you on a few of the key factors that impact your rewards and help you choose a strategy that’s right for you.

There are two ways to Stack: in a pool or by yourself. To Stack by yourself you’ll need to meet the dynamic minimum of currently 100,000 STX. If you don’t meet the minimum, you can Stack by pooling with others. That said, the decision to pool or go on your own isn’t just about meeting the minimum, if you’re at or near the minimum, you may still want to pool anyway.

STX have been listed on the Upbit KRW market, a top digital asset exchange in Korea. This news comes at an opportune time with the Stacks Korea chapter also launching this week.

The listing will significantly expand token access within the Korean community. Chapter lead, GM Chung, has high hopes for the Stacks Korea chapter, expressing that token accessibility and enabling developers to build apps and smart contracts on Bitcoin are their number one goals for this year.

In just over two months, Stacking has paid out more than $8.5M in BTC via Stacking rewards. And while Stacking, at over 21%, is by far the highest Bitcoin APY we’ve been able to find, it’s about much more. Stacking helps secure the Stacks network, attracts new users to crypto, is helping people earn Bitcoin at a time when supply on exchanges is at a two-year low, and is pushing the whole Stacks Ecosystem forward.

We believe Stacking is already (and will continue to be) a key first step for new users and contributors as the Stacks Ecosystem continues to grow. Let’s review a few things we've learned from the first 5 cycles of Stacking since the launch of Stacks 2.0 in January to explore why we think that just a bit further.

Highlighted stories from around the Stacks Ecosystem. This blast was first shared to Blockfolio users via Signal - 'Watch' Stacks for key updates to your mobile device.

• STX hits a new ATH at $1.4
• Stacking surpasses $430M locked, paying over 21% APY to Stackers in BTC 
• Meltem Demirors, industry heavyweight and Coinshares CEO, joins the Stacks Foundation Board
• Floating Point Group, a capital markets infrastructure firm has launched a new Stacking service for holders of STX
• Boom announces a new breed of 'Stacking NFTs'

Over the past 2 months, Stacking has paid out more more than $1.39M 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. Now, with more data available we wanted to share two key reminders about how Stacking works along with best practices for Stackers, particularly those Stacking on their own at or near the minimum threshold.

On January 14th, the Stacks 2.0 blockchain was officially launched and marked a huge milestone on the journey to building Web 3.0 on Bitcoin. To celebrate the launch of mainnet, we wanted to give developers an immediate opportunity to dive into Stacks tech with the Stacks 2.0 Mainnet Smart Contract Challenge! The testnet training wheels came off, and hackers had an entire month to sharpen their Clarity skills and crank out some truly substantial smart contracts. In order to keep the challenge accessible to all technical skill levels, there were also two categories of contract difficulty (Basic & Advanced).

What is now the Stacks ecosystem started in 2013 as a research project at Princeton University. Those academic roots continue to be of central importance to the founders of Stacks and central to the culture of several leading entities within the Stacks ecosystem. We remain committed to these roots and to the future engineers and entrepreneurs who will continue to drive this technology forward. As part of this commitment, we’re supporting LUMS with a Stacks research grant of 5 million STX tokens, worth approximately $3.6 million USD and over Rs560 million, that aims to fuel research on blockchain technology and distributed applications.

Stacks 2.0 is humming along and we're excited for the first Stacking cycle with bitcoin rewards to be kicked off later this week. As of Tues Jan 26th there are over 14M STX locked in the consensus protocol. We appreciate all the feedback and enthusiasm we've received from the community thus far as we continue to make improvements in Stacking access and tools.

As a new part of a novel consensus mechanism, there are some complexities to Stacking. It's a dynamic system with a lot of inputs, so we wanted to highlight some information for those of you participating in early Stacking via the Stacks wallet.

Since the launch of the Stacks 2.0 blockchain on Thursday, January 14th, independent entities and miners throughout the Stacks ecosystem have been working hard to integrate, use, and improve the network further. As expected, there have been things that have gone really smoothly upon launch and some areas that need improvement. This post is meant to give you a high-level view of where things are on the Stacks blockchain so you can have visibility on issues that may be affecting you.

Remember that Stacks is an open-source project and decentralized ecosystem, so all code improvements happen transparently and anyone can submit issues or enhancements.

Blockchain.com is one of the most established and long running crypto companies that has helped build the foundations of crypto access since the beginning. Today, we're excited that as long-time supporters of the ecosystem, Blockchain.com continues their support of the Stacks community and our mission as we upgrade to Stacks 2.0 by announcing plans to support STX trading on the Blockchain.com Exchange and to explore ways to allow Blockchain.com STX holders to earn BTC through participation in Stacking.

Stacks 2.0 builds on years of work that has always taken place in close proximity to Bitcoin. From the earliest iterations of the project that embraced the Bitcoin blockchain, to Stacks 1.0 which was itself a virtual chain on Bitcoin, it seems that all roads have led to Stacks 2.0 master design, which is now natively connected and anchored to Bitcoin.

Full circle for Stacks has led us right back to Satoshi's original design. Stacks 2.0: A separate blockchain that shares consensus with and settles to Bitcoin

With the launch of Stacks 2.0 today, we're excited to announce that Foundry Digital LLC, a leading Bitcoin mining company, is mining STX and will provide other infrastructure services to the Stacks 2.0 network. Foundry is a Digital Currency Group subsidiary and brings institutional knowledge and capital to the Stacks ecosystem. As a mining leader, Foundry is building on their work to support a decentralized future supporting the Stacks chain, which in turn bring apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin.

Today, we're thrilled to announce that 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.

Stacks was one of the first blockchain projects to join the Flipside Data Cooperative - a transparency initiative for partner networks to showcase their on-chain activity publicly. A new version of the public dashboards will be launched in February 2021 to provide insights and data into Stacks 2.0's health as a project.

Every successful mainnet launch starts not with a bang, but with a Boom."

That man was Dan Trevino, Co-founder and Lead Developer of Boom, a Stacks wallet launching on Stacks 2.0. Dan makes up one half to one fourth of the Boom (formerly Webby) team. He and Co-founder and Lead Designer, Layton Diament, have been working together on the wallet since 2018 but have since enlisted some help from other Stacks community members. Their project has understandably grown and evolved over the years, especially through the transition from Stacks 1.0 to 2.0. But now, with the launch of Stacks 2.0 just around the corner, Boom is ready for its official debut.

Daemon Technologies was founded in 2020 with the goal of spreading the adoption of Stacks technology in Asia. Our initial focus in service of that mission has been to lower the barrier of entry and improve the experience of mining Stacks (STX) tokens. To this end we are excited to announce the Beta release of the Mining Bot for mainnet! You can follow this documentation and watch the demo here to give it a try.

The Skynet and Stacks community are no strangers, with developers from both communities often mingling and combining different aspects of each protocol in their projects. Notably, the winner of a recent hackathon hosted by Skynet was a project that combined Skynet and Stacks technology. Now, Hiro PBC and Skynet Labs are teaming up to support more bridges between the Stacks and Skynet protocols in an effort to give developers new options as they build decentralized apps and work with smart contracts.

On Saturday, January 9th, Stacks 2.0 activation reached miner threshold. You can see the registrations in the .miner namespace here. Miners selected Bitcoin block 665851 for the launch of Stacks 2.0. At the current rate of block confirmations, we expect this to happen on the afternoon of Wednesday, Jan 13th, Eastern Time.

As we detailed earlier, 300 blocks after the miner threshold Stacks 1.0 would stop accepting new transactions. This was block 665550 which has now...

Ahead of the upcoming launch of Stacks 2.0 on Jan. 14th 2021, we wanted to outline some important information for Stacks holders and others that may be entering the ecosystem for the first time. First of all, thanks for being here. We're so excited for all the rich features and opportunity that Stacks 2.0 holds!

The Stacks 2.0 launch is a hardfork of the network happening over the course of...

Many thanks to Betty Xi of Hiro PBC for translating the paper to Chinese and to GM Chung of DeSpread for the Korean version. The Stacks 2.0 white paper is a light read that gives an overview of the Stacks 2.0 blockchain design, its connection to Bitcoin, and links out to further technical details throughout. It is meant to be a helpful go-to resource for everyone in the community and a helpful onramp for those first getting oriented to the Stacks ecosystem.

Long-time app developers and community leaders at Pravica launch Stacks MENA, a new community-led chapter of the Stacks Ecosystem. They will now begin efforts to educate potential blockchain developers throughout 27 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. The chapter was formed by Mohamed Abdou, an Egyptian entrepreneur and software engineer known for founding Dmails, a 500 Startups backed project which now goes by the name 'Pravica'.

I'm excited to share the Stacks 2.0 whitepaper draft. The paper is a light read that gives an overview of the Stacks 2.0 blockchain design, connection to Bitcoin, and links out to further technical details throughout. I hope this paper becomes a helpful go-to resource for everyone in the community and a helpful onramp for those first getting oriented to the Stacks ecosystem.

We are thrilled to share that OKCoin expects to be the first to list STX tokens in the US and will support the Stacks 2.0 release as a launch partner. 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, upon the release of mainnet by independent miners...

The summary of a new legal memorandum illuminates a path for crypto projects to achieve compliance with U.S. federal securities laws. Today, Blockstack 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 after the launch of the Stacks 2.0 blockchain...

Thanks to many Evangelists, ambassadors, and community managers, we've long seen the power in people stepping up to very intentionally build their community through local events, content, and networking. Now, we're excited to introduce the Stacks Chapter program. Stacks Chapters, starting with this pilot in Pakistan, will take community growth and development efforts even further, serving as a vehicle for local leaders to bring the user-owned internet on Bitcoin to more people and places.

Today, we're excited to call them partners on our mission to building a user-owned internet on Bitcoin. In the very near future, it will be as easy to earn Bitcoin rewards on the Stacks 2.0 network as it is to download a new app for your phone. Both communities believe the next internet will be built upon distributed networks and Ankr makes it easy for anyone to support this evolution. This partnership means whether you're a trader or holder looking to earn rewards, or a developer looking to engage more deeply with the upcoming Stacks 2.0 network, you'll have an easy path to running a node through Ankr, minimizing your security risk as well as your time to manage it.

The energy around Stacks 2.0 is obvious. Momentum across the ecosystem has continued to grow in recent weeks with all kinds of new partnerships, new efforts from independent entities, and community activities. Today, we're excited to share further details on the mainnet launch itself. Thanks to the hard work of engineers at PBC, the Stacks Foundation, and community contributors, the Stacks 2.0 blockchain is on target to reach code completion by December 15th.

The Stacks ecosystem continues to grow ahead of the Stacks 2.0 launch; today we're happy to share that Staked will be a Stacks 2.0 launch partner as the chain brings apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin. Staked is the provider of the most diverse staking solutions for crypto assets, an industry leader that helps investors earn rewards from staking and DeFi products without taking custody of their crypto assets.

You can now follow Stacks on Blockfolio and receive important updates! If you're already a Blockfolio user, it's as easy as making sure you've added your STX holdings to a portfolio or visited STX in the app and hit 'Watch'. Once you've done that, you'll receive 'Signals' right to your phone with important Stacks ecosystem news, technical updates, and community initiatives.

A few months ago, Coinbase and other industry players came together to release Rosetta – an open industry standard to make blockchain integrations more streamlined and faster. The Stacks ecosystem was one of the first supporters of the effort with community contributions beginning to trickle in almost immediately after the announcement. Today, we are excited to share that the Stacks Blockchain API was extended to fully support the Rosetta specification!