Stacks 2.0 is now feature complete.

Since being introduced in February, the PBC team, the Stacks Foundation, and community contributors across the world have been busy bringing this ambitious, ‘master’ blockchain design powered by Proof-of-Transfer, to life. Very soon, Stacks 2.0 will bring apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin, unlocking innovation on the network in a way we’ve never seen before.

By “feature complete”, we mean that we do not anticipate adding any new features to the Stacks blockchain prior to the mainnet launch. All planned features are now implemented: pull requests are either already merged or are under review. We intend to use the time between now and the mainnet launch on testing, fixing bugs, improving performance, writing documentation and generally polishing any rough edges. We do anticipate some feature work to continue outside of core Stacks blockchain like the Explorer or the Stacks Blockchain API.

To help put the sheer amount of work that has gone into the Stacks 2.0 blockchain in perspective (since the initial commit almost two years ago), here are some numbers:

• From git diff --shortstat 89bc711a50ed46d00f65a32ef87fae6ae295dd4b..HEAD → 1,236 files changed, 646,072 insertions(+), 372,395 deletions(-)
• As of today, there’s roughly 225,000 lines of code in the Stacks Blockchain repo
• More than 5,000 commits from more than 20 contributors
• More than 1,000 Github issues closed

And this doesn’t even include all the amazing work happening on all the other important components such as the Stacks Blockchain API, stacks.js, Stacks Explorer, and the Stacks Wallet! Thank you to all those who have contributed and who are still working very hard to deliver the foundation for the user-owned internet.

What’s next

Here’s what you can look forward to in the next few weeks:

• We’re planning to seed the Xenon testnet with a snapshot of the current Stacks 1.0 chainstate: besides being extremely useful for testing the Explorer, the Stacks Wallet, stacks.js, Stacking etc, this would also be an important litmus test for the upgrade process. Note that testnet addresses will be different than mainnet addresses.
• We’re planning some large-scale tests using testground
• We will be expanding our Hackerone bounty program to incentivize ethical disclosures with a focus on the consensus protocol
• We’ll continue to test and harden the upgrade process outlined in this post

We need your help and support to build the best platform for building decentralized apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin! Here’s how you can get involved:

• Participate in the mining competition
• Run a node
• Write a smart contract
• Claim a bug or tool bounty
• Use stacks.js, Explorer, Stacks Wallet, Connect and give us feedback
• Join us on Discord!
• Register for the Stacks 2.0 launch event

Ecosystem Momentum

We’ll save the celebration for later, but with this milestone, we also wanted to take the opportunity to reflect on some data that highlights just how much momentum the ecosystem has built up heading into the launch of mainnet. In addition to the sheer volume of code going into Stacks 2.0, all corners of the ecosystem have been bustling with important activity too.

Key new partnerships and entities

In the past few months, the ecosystem has also really rounded out, adding Hiro, Daemon, and Freehold to the mix, while continuing to expand the community with a new Stacks Chapter in Pakistan, and bringing on many key partners and integrations.

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Hackathons and events

Last quarter alone, over 10,000 of you attended various events ranging from townhalls to workshops and that doesn’t even include the AMAs, which have been a many-a-week occurrence from China to Chile. We can’t wait to see you all at the Stacks 2.0 launch event.

And, let’s not forget to recognize the pioneers that have already dived in to building on Stacks 2.0 through various hackathons. We hope to see to many of these projects make their way to Stacks 2.0 after launch, it’s incredible to see what developers have done even under testnet circumstances:

• Clarity Hackathon Winners: Original Hack, Part 1, Part 2 (tooling)
• HackStacks Winners
• HackDefi Winners

Project Awareness

It’s not just the community that is ramping up for Stacks 2.0. Telegram groups continue to grow like crazy, approaching 40,000 total members up from around 7,000 at the beginning of 2020. That’s not all, in the past month, mentions of ‘STX’ on Telegram have tripled. On December 14th, Lunar Crush charted STX at an “Alt Rank” of 5th out of the 2029 tokens they support; the internet is taking notice.

Headed for launch

In all, it’s safe to say we are re barreling toward the most exciting event in the history of the project with the wind at our backs. Thank you to all of you who are have contributed and to those of you who will inevitably be pulling some late nights in the coming month as we get closer and closer to launch.