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The Blockstack PBC team is relentlessly focused on helping developers make high-quality decentralized apps. This focus naturally covers developer tools, but also extends to the Stacks Blockchain, platform reliability, app funding, education, and community building. In short—you are the center of our universe, and we want to get better and better at making you successful.
This quarter was unique in terms of developer feedback and priorities:
- We made ongoing preparations for our anticipated Reg A token sale, which meant prioritizing token related products, security, and stability.
- Our Q1 developer survey indicated few blockers or major bugs, so we focused on long-term blockchain and platform upgrades (more details below).
- The App Mining survey revealed frustrations with reviewers and policies so we implemented several changes throughout the quarter.
- We made big strides on the Stacks Blockchain V2, smart contracts, and collections, that said these are large, multi-quarter initiatives and still in progress (more details below).
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Here are some highlights from the last three months:
Clarity smart contract language
We released a developer preview of the Clarity smart contract language, with documentation and a Javascript SDK. With this preview, developers are able to get started with smart contracts in a local testbed. We are continuing active development of the Clarity language, so appreciate any issue reports, feature requests, and pull requests on our Github repository.
Stacks Blockchain V2
We continued work on the Stacks Blockchain V2 with the preview release of the Clarity language, the release of Version 2 of the Blockstack whitepaper, and continued implementation of the blockchain in Rust. We’ve implemented the peer to peer messaging network required by the consensus layer in our develop branch. Work on the wire format and data structures required for supporting light clients is ongoing (get excited for Merkle Trees!).
SDKs
The blockstack.js codebase was converted to Typescript with a new set of reference documentation. We also implemented deleteFile and improved overall stability. We’ve worked on bringing the Android and iOS SDKs to feature parity with blockstack.js and eliminated shortcomings that hampered successful development of mobile Blockstack apps.
Platform reliability
We introduced end-to-end test automation for Blockstack Explorer. For the Blockstack Browser, we modified the automation test suite to execute in the cloud for in-repo builds and execute locally for forked repo builds.
Blockstack Explorer upgrades
We migrated from external APIs to internal data sources on the Blockstack Explorer, resulting in more performance and stability. This migration allowed us to add a new transactions page, that displays a history of Stacks transactions.
Stacks Wallet upgrades
In version 3.0 of the Stacks wallet, we added software-only functionality so that hardware wallets are no longer required for transactions. This added functionality increases the range of options available for users when creating a new Stacks wallet.
Blockstack.org and Stackstoken.com redesign
We redesigned Blockstack.org to reflect all the progress we’ve made over the past year and serve as a better introduction to our technology, ecosystem, and community. Stackstoken.com was redesigned as an introduction to our anticipated token offering.
Community events
- The Blockstack team spoke at 26 meetups, 16 conferences, 11 webinars, 2 AMA’s internationally and participated in 30 hackathons. We also partnered with Major League Hacking for a 23 school hackathon tour. Outside of MLH, we participated in 7 notable hackathons such at Stanford’s Treehacks hackathon and Bitcoin Games.
- We announced the latest Blockstack Summit, in San Francisco happening on October 23, featuring Neal Stephenson, Naval Ravikant, Elizabeth Stark, and Dave Morin.
- We partnered with Devpost, Lightning Labs, Product Hunt, and Dapp.com to hold the Can’t Be Evil contest which encouraged new app development – winners to be announced by mid-July!Come meet the Blockstack team at these upcoming events and webinars.
App Mining
Our team focused on solving reviewer and policy challenges while working with our community of App Miners. A full list of program changes is available in the App Mining repo. Here is a summary of the high-impact improvements in Q2:
- Partnered with Awario, the new awareness app reviewer.
- Allowed App Miners to define specific target-users for TryMyUI testing.
- Increased to 10 user testing sessions for the TryMyUI scores.
- Paused voting on the investor community reviewer, Democracy Earth.
- Added an audit period so the community can help verify rankings.
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All the credit goes to our Engineering, Product, Design, and Growth teams—I’m honored to highlight their great work for you, our developer community.
As always, we welcome your feedback. It would be incredibly helpful if you could complete the survey below. This is the primary way we measure our progress and your answers directly feed into our priorities for next quarter.
Complete the survey to be entered for a chance to win a Blockstack hoodie!
Important disclaimer:
This communication may be deemed “testing the waters” material under Regulation A under the Securities Act of 1933. We are not under any obligation to complete an offering under Regulation A. We may choose to make an offering to some, but not all, of the people who indicate an interest in investing, and that offering might not be made under Regulation A. We will only be able to make sales after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has “qualified” the offering statement that we have filed with the SEC. The information in that offering statement will be more complete than the information we are providing now, and could differ in important ways. You must read the documents filed with the SEC before investing.
No money or other consideration is being solicited, and if sent in response, will not be accepted. No offer to buy the securities can be accepted and no part of the purchase price can be received until the offering statement filed by the company with the SEC has been qualified by the SEC. Any such offer may be withdrawn or revoked, without obligation or commitment of any kind, at any time before notice of acceptance given after the date of qualification.
An indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind.
Any person interested in investing in any offering of Stacks Tokens should review our disclosures and the publicly filed offering statement relating to that offering, a copy of which is available at www.sec.gov. You may obtain a copy of the preliminary offering circular that is part of that offering statement here.
Blockstack is not registered, licensed or supervised as a broker dealer or investment adviser by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) or any other financial regulatory authority or licensed to provide any financial advice or services.