On the first anniversary of the launch of the blockchain Stacks (STX), which seeks to make Bitcoin (BTC) programmable, the network achieved more than 350 million monthly API requests, 40,000 downloads of the Hiro wallet (Stacks’ development tool for building applications on top of Bitcoin), and 2,500 Clarity smart contracts . According to a report by Electric Capital, a venture capital firm focused on cryptocurrencies and financial technologies, these statistics make Stacks the largest project on Bitcoin.
Over 11,000 users earned over 100 BTC rewards per month on Stacks due to their unique Proof of Transfer, or PoX, consensus mechanism. Miners bid on BTC to verify transactions, smart contract executions and mine new blocks on the blockchain and earn STX tokens as a reward. Meanwhile, BTC bids are sent to STX holders as rewards for performing tasks like running nodes. To date, the mechanism has delivered more than $50 million worth of BTC rewards and has exceeded $1 billion in total value locked.
According to the report, there were also advances in decentralized finance, or DeFi, in BTC created through Stacks. Among them are the launch of wrapped BTC (xBTC), the Arkadiko lending protocol, and Bitcoin Lightning decentralized swaps, that allow users to trade STX for Bitcoin, stablecoins, and altcoins.
The first projects to launch on Stacks were the New York and Miami CityCoins, which generated $50 million for their respective city’s treasuries. Brittany Laughlin, Executive Director of the Stacks Foundation, issued the following statement regarding this milestone:
“The Stacks community has demonstrated the incredible potential of smart contracts for Bitcoin, from DeFi to NFTs, city coins to philanthropic efforts, wearable identity to new infrastructure, all in a single year. The technology and resources are here. what happens next will be dictated by the visionary builders.”
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