The ambitious Bitcoin Layer-2 Stacks said today its ambition to bring smart contract capabilities to the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency and open up its ecosystem has been validated by a number of key players in the crypto staking and infrastructure business.
In an announcement, the company revealed that Blockdaemon, NEAR Foundation, DeSpread, Luxor, Chorus One, Kiln, Restake and Alum Labs have all signed up to its network as “Signers”, meaning they are taking on the role of validators in its ecosystem. Within Stacks, Signers are tasked with validating new blocks and will later be given the additional responsibility of processing transactions from BTC to sBTC, a new asset that’s pegged to the price of BTC and is designed to enhance the functionality of Bitcoin.
Stacks said its new Signers include some of the best-known and most highly-rated staking and infrastructure providers in the crypto industry, collectively managing billions of dollars of crypto assets. They’ll participate in Stacks block creation alongside existing Signers such as Copper, Figment, Luganodes, Xverse, Ryder, community Stacking pools and the hundreds of individuals who are already “Stacking”, which is the term used to describe users who stake STX, the native token of Stacks.
Stacks is on a mission to make Bitcoin more useful, creating an L2 network that aims to unlock the more than $1 trillion worth of capital tied up in BTC. While Bitcoin has always been the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency, it’s also one of the least useful, in the sense that it doesn’t provide much utility beyond payments and a store of value. All of those people “hodling” Bitcoin are stuck with what is essentially an “idle asset”, but Stacks believes it has so much more potential.
It’s aiming to build up an ecosystem around Bitcoin that’s similar to the one that has grown around Ethereum, which hosts thousands of DeFi, GameFi and SocialFi dApps, as well as NFTs and so on. By bringing smart contract functionality to Bitcoin through its L2, Stacks paves the way for builders to use Bitcoin as a base-layer for a new generation of Bitcoin-native dApps that can tap the trillion dollar-plus value that’s currently trapped within its ecosystem.
In line with those plans, Stacks is on the cusp of launching a major update to its platform. The Nakamoto upgrade will decrease block times to just five seconds and also introduce sBTC, which is a new mechanism that will facilitate deposits and withdrawals from the main Bitcoin Layer-1, enhancing the functionality of BTC.
The reputation of Stacks’ new Signers is a strong validation of its plans, and should provide plenty of reassurance to developers who may be considering building Bitcoin’s new economy. Each of them are serious projects that have a long track record and a vested interest in behaving honestly and ensuring transactions are processed fairly. In addition, their expertise will also make life much more difficult for any bad actors that attempt to manipulate the Stacks network. Stacks can also claim to be much more decentralized, in line with one of the main values of Bitcoin.
“These Signers add yet another layer of decentralization and bring industry leading infrastructure to the leading Bitcoin L2 as the ecosystem seeks to unlock the Bitcoin economy and bring Bitcoin to billions of users,” said Andre Serrano, an sBTC Resident at The Stacks Foundation. “Together, we are poised to unlock exciting new use cases for Bitcoin.”
