The Stacks ecosystem is a collection of independent entities, developers and community members working to build a user-owned internet on the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. Stacks’ STX cryptocurrency was distributed to the general public through the first-ever Securities and Exchange Commission-qualified token offering in the United States.
Mitchell Cuevas, head of growth for the Stacks Foundation, held an exclusive ask-me-anything, or AMA, session with Cointelegraph Markets Pro users on Dec. 2. During the session, he discussed the Stacks blockchain’s technological capabilities, future growth and major developments.
Cointelegraph Markets Pro User: PoW [proof-of-work] blockchains are known to be the most secure. Does Stacks PoX [proof-of-transfer] match BTC security or are there other vulnerabilities?
Mitchell Cuevas: Stacks’ consensus recycles PoW already done to secure Bitcoin. It does this via Proof of Transfer, a mining mechanism that provides a new take on consensus, allowing for a Proof of Work chain to be leveraged and extended in new ways. As a result, all Stacks transactions settle on Bitcoin, enabling Stacks transactions to benefit from Bitcoin’s security. Every Bitcoin block, Stacks transactions are batched and hashed on the Bitcoin blockchain. In addition, the history of all Stacks blocks produced is recorded to Bitcoin.
CT Markets Pro User: With smart contract capabilities, how long before Stacks will be able to integrate NFTs, gaming, and metaverse experiences?
MC: This can already be done and is being done today. We see massive growth of NFTs, reaching about $6-7 million in daily transacted value of late. The cost varies based on network activity. The minting cost is generally somewhere from $0.15 to $0.50. NFTs can be minted on Boom at boom.money. Monday games are building an exciting metaverse style open-world game. We’ve got teams, such as Jolocom, working on various identity-related efforts, which will be important in the metaverse. It’s exciting because the idea of the metaverse was an early anchor point for folks working at Blockstack back in the day, it was our company book, and we had Neal Stephenson out to one of our summits!
CT Markets Pro User: I only know of a few other platforms that build off of BTC to maximize its security, decentralization, and popularity (Lightning, RSK, Sovryn). So why do you think there aren’t more protocols integrating with BTC?
MC: It’s the difficulty of it. It took core engineers and the Blockstack team a while to crack Proof of Transfer, making the fully expressive contract layer possible in a truly decentralized way. When you have the option of working with a restrictive and unmoving base like Bitcoin or something else (or creating your chain entirely), I think many will end up in that last bucket. It’s an easier path and with how hot crypto is, is I can assume it’s more immediately lucrative, so that’s where the focus has stayed.
CT Markets Pro User: There were congestion issues with Stacks. Has that been resolved?
MC: For the most part — the main bottleneck that was noticed was the popularity of some NFTs and the architecture of the stacks-blockchain-API. Since then, the architecture has changed a bit, so many read-only API nodes can be brought up during higher traffic events, as we noticed in the past. The API write node is still a 1:1 ratio to a Stacks node running in follower mode since any particular blockchain node can be slightly ahead/behind other nodes at any given moment, making load balancing very difficult. In addition, an upgrade to the chain is expected to go live around December 8th that will provide a 2-10x increase in capacity. There are additional exciting future scalability and speed solutions now being explored that should give developers several different options as they build.
CT Markets Pro User: Can you explain microblocks? Is that the main factor to allow Stacks to scale?
MC: This is a great question and one we’ve seen some…
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