Last week, Blockstack Co-Founder Muneeb Ali joined over 8,000 people on BiHu, a Chinese digital community, to host an AMA covering how Blockstack PBC approached crypto regulation and became the first project to hold an SEC-qualified token sale. The event also covered upcoming proposals for Stacks 2.0, Proof of Transfer, STX Mining, and Stacking.
Many thanks to 休哥 for the original recap in Mandarin, for a complete review of the event in English, we recommend you check out that original article and use the translation feature in your browser. Below we’ve included the questions and answers from the session and you can read the full AMA transcript here.
The event covered:
- What is Blockstack?
- The advantages of Blockstack from other smart contract platforms
- Blockstack’s road to compliance
- Future milestones for Blockstack
- Q&A
Answers were delivered live and are not intended to be complete or all-inclusive; please review the Proof of Transfer draft whitepaper
, Stacks Improvement Proposals on Github, relevant forum posts, or the PoX introductory blog post for more detail. Answers were lightly edited for clarity.
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Q1: What are the characteristics of Stacks 2.0 and when will it be launched?
The main features of Stack 2.0 are:
- First, a new smart contract language, Clarity, will be launched to provide full smart contract functionality.
- Second, there will be a new consensus algorithm called PoX mining. In other words, miners actually write blocks, and STX holders, they will participate in the consensus, and they will get a certain BTC reward through this process of participating in the consensus. If you are interested, the code is now on github. In addition, its testnet will be launched in mid-March
Stacks 2.0, according to the current timeline, should be officially launched in June or July.
Q2: What exactly does PoX mean?
PoX is a mining mechanism called Proof of Transfer. It does not need to consume power, because PoW consumes power, we don’t need to consume this power again. Instead, you can support our new algorithm with PoX mining to achieve an interaction between Blockstack and the BTC chain. In other words, miners need to spend BTC to participate in the consensus process of the Blockstack chain, but STX holders can earn some BTC by participating in consensus.
→ More about Proof of Transfer
Q3: What is the plan for the Chinese market?
We originally plan to fly to China to participate in some events in March and April this year. However, due to the epidemic, both trips to China were cancelled, and now they can only wait until the flight resumes. That said, it is clear that Asia is a very important market for Blockstack. That’s why we decided to put this Stacks Foundation in Asia. During our token sale, we chose to raise funds in Asia because we want to expand the market to Asia. In the Chinese market, we have Hashkey support. In the Japanese market, we also have investor support for projects. We also continue working with the Spartan Group to help build community and provide localized resources and plan to prioritize more travel and content for the region.
Q4: What kind of applications will be developed on Blockstack?
Currently, we see more and more Defi appearing based on Ethereum. At present, Ethereum also intends to build its own version 2.0, mainly to solve the problem of scalability because they are aware of the limitations of version 1.0. Blockstack can support hundreds of millions of users already today. If you want to make a Twitter-like chat and tweeting software based on Blockstack, and you want to support hundreds of millions of users at the same time, you can do it. This part is exactly the research and development work that Ethereum wants to do. We are done with this piece and are now working on two main features of Stacks 2.0 that will enable even more interesting use cases with Blockstack. One is the 2.0 version of the chain itself; the other is the Clarity smart contract language. Based on this you can also do applications similar to Defi. In addition, the language is very secure and predictable.
Important disclaimer
Blockstack PBC 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.
Forward-looking statements
This communication contains forward-looking statements that are based on our beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to us. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the following words: “will,” “expect,” “would,” “intend,” “believe,” or other comparable terminology. Forward-looking statements in this document include, but are not limited to, statements about our plans for developing the platform and potential mining operations. These statements involve risks, uncertainties, assumptions, and other factors that may cause actual results or performance to be materially different. We cannot assure you that the forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof. We disclaim any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.