Thread by @muneeb

Stacks turns one year old today!

With my party hat on, let’s reflect on the year. Tweet thread👇

1/ The Stacks whitepaper came out in 2017 outlining design for Bitcoin apps.

It typically takes 2-3 years to build new blockchains. Projects that raised in the 2017 era (Filecoin, Dfinity, Stacks, etc.) went heads down and launched their mainnets in 2020-2021.

2/ Stacks brought a new type of PoX mining and consensus to life. PoX is a cross-chain consensus between Bitcoin and Stacks and recycles PoW energy.

Connecting chains to BTC to add new features is an idea that goes back to Satoshi in 2010. Stacks turned this idea into reality!

3/ It was unclear if the consensus and game theory would work in practice. Given the decentralized nature, there was no “soft launch”.

Designing blockchains is like launching rockets; you get one shot. Seeing everything work flawlessly was both exciting and a relief. It worked!

4/ Earning BTC was a completely new concept introduced by Stacks. More than $1B got locked in the contract, and people earned 1201 BTC ($51M today).

The PoX contract put Bitcoin DeFi on the map and is now the largest product in the category.

5/ The mainnet launch introduced Clarity, a new language that focuses on safety. Clarity is decidable, and developers like it for safety features.

We saw 10x growth in deployed contracts in H2 of 2021. See the inflection point after summer:

6/ Bitcoin DeFi apps came online.

This includes @ArkadikoFinance @alexgoBtc @Stackswap_BTC & others.

The ecosystem map below captures the Cambrian explosion of apps:

7/ We saw a revived interest in Bitcoin NFTs through Stacks. NFTs started on Bitcoin but got popularized by ETH.

Now NFTs are coming back home!

140,000+ minted NFTs, 7+ marketplaces, and trading volumes going into tens of millions. This is just the beginning in many ways.

8/ The .btc domains didn’t exist until recently. We saw 23,000+ registrations and an active community of .btc folks.

Whenever you see a .btc name, you know that it’s a friendly Bitcoiner rooting for Bitcoin apps.

I love this community: ₿ + Ӿ = 🔥

9/ There are always new, unthinkable things. Citycoins is one such project.

We saw the community-driven, mining-only launch for Miami and NYC. Mayor @FrancisSuarez made history by officially voting to accept the protocol treasury and by giving BTC rewards to Miami citizens.

10/ The API by Hiro Systems, a dev tooling company in the ecosystem, saw a 6x increase recently: 50M → 100M → 200M → 350M monthly requests.

We saw infrastructure and tooling improve with 120+ monthly active devs.

Stacks emerged as the fastest-growing web3 project in Bitcoin.

11/ Everything that happened within the first year of Stacks mainnet launch is hard to capture in a tweet thread.

2021 laid the foundations.
2022 is the year of growth.

Cheers to unleashing the true potential of Bitcoin: happy birthday, Stacks! 🎉

P.S: Hiro Systems made this quick website capturing the year: from0to.hiro.so/two/