Blockstack PBC is now Hiro! In October, we introduced the Stacks brand to serve as the banner under which Stacks ecosystem entities and individuals should unite and we’ve already seen fantastic adoption throughout the ecosystem. At the time, we also announced a name change for Blockstack PBC to Hiro (pronounced he·ro); a change that’s now official. We are excited for all the new eyeballs that will be looking at the ecosystem around the Stacks 2.0 launch and want to be sure the project and the various entities and their roles, are easily and quickly understood.

At Hiro, our primary focus will be to provide developers the tools they need to build this new internet on Bitcoin. This change comes as PBC’s work on the Stacks 2.0 public infrastructure winds down as the Stacks ecosystem continues to decentralize and grow ahead of mainnet.

The Blockstack PBC, now Hiro, team has long believed that developers are the key to our mission and upon Stacks 2.0 launch, are excited to focus on their needs as they build apps and smart contracts on Stacks. The change to Hiro is meant both as a signal of this commitment to developers, as well as a practical change designed to push focus previously often put on Blockstack PBC, to the Stacks ecosystem. The two have often been conflated and we want to take this opportunity to clearly communicate Hiro’s narrower developer focus while indicating that we, just as with the other independent entities, are one organization within the broader Stacks ecosystem.

To better understand the separation between/focuses of each entity, you can refer to this post.

Why Hiro?

You can read the full breakdown of the name change here, but the short version is that Hiro is a name that resonates with our team and serves as an ode to the origins of PBC and connection to the 90s cypherpunk culture. Hiro firmly connects us to broader themes like cryptography, privacy, digital ownership.

What to expect now

With this change now official, you’ll start to see some movement on various web properties, some adjustments to social handle names, and things like the team switching to @hiro.so emails. Beyond that, content that’s currently available on blockstack.org will largely stay there until the mainnet is launched, after which we will have more time to tease apart the web properties and sort content into the most sensical places. We imagine that some content will migrate to stacks.org, some to stacks.co, some to hiro.so, and so forth.

We’ll be sure to communicate about these changes, make them clear, and likely often put redirects in place so you won’t have to think too much about where to look or risk getting lost. Your patience (and feedback) as we manage that is always appreciated, please use the appropriate Discord channels or repos if you come across anything that doesn’t seem right.

Thank you for being our heroes, we look forward to continuing the mission with you as Hiro.