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 public through the first US Securities and Exchange Commission-certified token offering.
Mitchell Cuevas, Head of Growth at the Stacks Foundation, held an exclusive ask-me-anything (AMA) session with Cointelegraph Markets Pro users on December 2nd. During the session, he discussed the technical capabilities, future growth, and majors of the Stacks blockchain. development.
Cointelegraph Markets Pro Users: PoW [proof-of-work] Blockchain is known to be the safest.Do you have a stack PoX [proof-of-transfer] Is it consistent with BTC security or is there another vulnerability?
Mitchell Cuevas: The stack consensus recycles PoW that has already been done to protect Bitcoin. This is done via the Proof of Transfer. It is a mining mechanism that provides a new perspective on consensus, enabling the Proof of Work chain to be leveraged and extended in new ways. As a result, all Stacks transactions are settled in Bitcoin and Stacks transactions can benefit from Bitcoin security. All Bitcoin blocks and stack transactions are batched and hashed on the Bitcoin blockchain. In addition, the history of all generated stack blocks is recorded in Bitcoin.
CT Markets Pro Users: How long will it take for Stacks to integrate NFTs, games and Metaverse experiences with smart contracts?
MC: This is already feasible and is being done today. Significant growth in NFTs has been seen, with recent daily transaction value reaching approximately $ 6-7 million. The cost depends on your network activity. Casting costs are typically somewhere between $ 0.15 and $ 0.50. NFTs can be created with Boom in boom.money. The game on Monday is building an exciting metaverse-style open world game. Teams such as Jolocom are working on a variety of identity-related initiatives that are important in the Metaverse. It’s exciting because the Metaverse idea was an early anchor point for those who worked at Blockstack at the time, it was our company’s book and took Neil Stevenson to one of our summits. is!
CT Markets Pro users: Only know a few other platforms (Lightning, RSK, Sovryn) built from BTC to maximize security, decentralization and popularity. So why do you think there are no more protocols to integrate with BTC?
MC: That’s the difficulty of it. The core engineers and the Blockstack team took some time to decipher the Proof of Transfer, enabling a fully expressive contract layer in a truly decentralized way. If you have the option of working on a restrictive, immobile base (or creating a complete chain) like Bitcoin or something else, I think many will fall into that final bucket. It’s an easier path, and depending on how hot the crypto is, I can think it’s going to be profitable sooner, so the focus stays there.
CT Markets Pro users: There was a congestion issue on the stack. Has it been resolved?
MC: In most cases, the main bottlenecks of interest were the popularity of some NFTs and the architecture of the stacks-blockchain-API. Since then, the architecture has changed a bit, and as we’ve noticed in the past, we can launch many read-only API nodes during high-traffic events. API write nodes remain at a 1: 1 ratio to stack nodes running in follower mode. This is because a particular blockchain node can always be slightly in front of / behind other nodes, making load balancing very difficult. In addition, the chain upgrade will begin around December 8th, with capacity expected to increase 2-10x. There are additional exciting future scalability and speed solutions currently under consideration that offer several different options when developers build.
CT Markets Pro User: Can you explain about Microblock? Is it the main factor that allows stack scaling?
MC: This is a great question and there has been some confusion in the past. However, it should be noted that microblocks are not a scalability solution. They allow for faster transaction confirmation. Simply put, microblocks are intended to resolve transaction latencies, allowing transactions to be seen on the stack chain in seconds before they are later settled in Bitcoin.
CT Markets Pro User: The PoW blockchain is labeled as a significant energy consumer, thanks to one man who remains unnamed. Where is the energy consumption of Stacks PoX evaluated? Did you need to explain this difference as it is integrated with BTC?
MC: As for the stack, that’s a brief explanation. PoX recycles PoW already spent on Bitcoin. This means that we are not burning or consuming new power for Stacks transactions. More personally, I’m starting to work with NFT artists who are passionate about zeroing or minimizing their environmental impact, and they’re excited about Stacks. The initial launch of Stacks included Cara Delevingne. This was an important issue for her as her NFT was useful for climate-related topics.
CT Markets Pro users: Each STX block is somehow recorded on the BTC blockchain. How much block space does this require? What will be recorded?
MC: You can check this publicly! All BTC transactions show a size of 352 bytes. The state of the system settles in Bitcoin — to create a new Stacks block, you need to send a well-formed Bitcoin transaction that records the hash of the Stacks block and where it connects to the blockchain. Setting the system to Bitcoin gives the stack new security properties not found on other blockchains. Take advantage of Bitcoin’s security to ensure that all stack forks are public and prevent stack nodes from identifying legitimate stack forks and not yet finding stack blocks. I downloaded it.
CT Markets Pro Users: How many full nodes are in operation? Is there a limit to the amount of decentralization that can be achieved?
MC: Simply put, the last thing I checked was hundreds. The rest is a great question and concludes with a longer answer. It is important to note that unlike PoW-based networks like Bitcoin, the number of STX miners alone does not accurately reflect the relative ability of miners to acquire blocks over time. As a result, it does not reflect the security or decentralization of the network. To successfully attack Stacks 2.0, miners need to mine a chain that is truly longer than the rest of the network. Unlike PoW-based chains, the quality of a stack chain is measured by its length, not the total amount of BTC (or resources consumed) burned. This means that spending 100 times the BTC of all other miners will not lengthen or improve the tip of the stackchain. Instead, the miner needs to consistently outmining all other participants in order to successfully attack the stackchain. To do this, the “malicious” miner must effectively ensure that he can win all blocks during the period of the attack.
CT Markets Pro Users: Do you have any plans to interconnect with other blockchains? What solutions can you adopt today?
MC: Yes! The community has several bridge efforts, including bridges to public blockchains such as Ethereum, BSC, SOL, Polygon, Clayton, ICON, Orbit. See some of the initiatives below. Stack Bridge — Move NFTs between blockchains using a cross-chain transfer service or STX-based NFT that allows ETH owners. Banana Bridge — Megacon can now be mint on Ethereum and transferred to the stack. This is an important step. This opens up Ethereum’s liquidity and, perhaps more importantly, provides a gateway for Bitcoin NFTs to access some of the exciting Metaverse projects. Orbit Chain — Orbit Chain is currently bridging the stack and welcomes the upcoming $ 100 billion DeFi economy to grow Bitcoin. Orbit Chain has built a remarkable reputation over the past year, bridging over $ 10 billion in assets across other top chains such as Ethereum, BSC, Polygon, Klaytn, ICON and Ripple.
CT Markets Pro Users: Will Layer-1 / Layer-2 solutions on the BTC blockchain become less relevant over time in the event of future updates like Taproot?
MC: Bitcoin is probably a stable blockchain just because it is unchanged and predictable. Proposed changes can take a long time to merge, as there is an incentive not to change the protocol and there is a large community with many opinions about the proposed changes. Bitcoin is stable and predictable. Therefore, native on-chain solutions are unlikely to replace stack-like solutions. Could you? Of course, that’s unlikely. In particular, Taproot is not close to bringing expressive smart contracts to Bitcoin.
