Where Bitcoin Earns

Core Protocol: Bitcoin Staking, Borrowing and Performance. Replace the intro line with: "Core protocol work keeps Bitcoin staking running and prepares Stacks for borrowing, higher throughput and stronger security.

Extending Bitcoin Capabilities

• Self-Custodial Bitcoin Staking: Live since September 2026. Holders stake BTC on the Bitcoin L1, in their own custody, paired with STX on Stacks, and earn BTC. PoX-6 opens it to anyone through an open auction in 2027.

Major Core Performance Upgrades

• Self-Custodial Bitcoin Borrowing: Holders will be able to borrow stablecoins against staked BTC without selling it, while it keeps earning. Planned for 2027.
• Scalable, trust-minimized programmable payments: Fast, low-fee BTC payments for people and AI agents, settling in seconds with an experience close to using the Bitcoin L1 directly.
• Trust-Minimized Bitcoin DeFi: Ongoing work to reduce the trust assumptions involved when BTC is used in apps on Stacks.
• Compliant Privacy Options: Features that allow institutions and retail users to manage Bitcoin while protecting financial history, business strategies, and sensitive information.

• 100x Throughput: Enhanced scaling and throughput (via Clarity Wasm and other efforts) with a working goal of increasing chain speed and throughput by 100x.
• sBTC Bridge Optimization: Improve sBTC bridge experience, considering paths such as dynamic scaling by transaction size, and others.
• AI / Agent Infrastructure
  Collaborate with leading AI projects to support 10k active agents. Open agent frameworks, agent account contracts, agentic readability of docs/APIs.
• Security: Continued major investment in sBTC and Core security, including the ongoing development and use of new AI-powered testing suites.

Improved Node UX

• Reduce disk space requirements (early tests show ~70% improvement) and operational complexity.
• Improvements to both node and Stacking mechanics/operations to reduce costs and increase profitability for network operators and builders.

Push Stacks toward a best-in-class developer experience while adding full support for Bitcoin Staking across tools. Work with builders to enhance their ability to produce high quality, secure code.

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• Clarinet & Clarity Toolchain: Improvements to testing, linting, security tooling, cost estimation, and deployment flow.
  
• Stacks.js and Application Building: Building a modular and type-safe TypeScript library for all interactions with the blockchain and our APIs.
• Stacks Extended API & Chainhooks: Modernizing endpoints for performance and reliability. The Stacks Mesh API is included to support exchanges integrating Bitcoin Staking.
• Founder focused programming and funding: In concert with the Stacks Endowment, we will ship multiple programs aimed at onboarding high-quality, mature teams ready to build on Stacks.

Accelerate the end-to-end onboarding and growth of major institutional partners, infrastructure providers and Bitcoin capital users for Stacks. This includes making Bitcoin Staking widely accessible and intuitive by providing hands-on integration support for institutional and other ecosystem partners. This also includes maintenance and user support for the key Lab-maintained product surfaces that drive adoption and onboarding.

Bridging & Partnerships

• Partner Support: Hands-on technical support and co-design for institutional partners like Fireblocks, Bitgo, Ledger, and others integrating Stacks capabilities (including Bitcoin Staking) into their platforms.
• Wallets & Onramps: Explore integrations and support for STX and Bitcoin Staking with major wallets outside the Stacks ecosystem as well as additional strategic fiat on-ramps (fiat → BTC/sBTC/STX) as resources and available deals allow.
• Thoughtful Cross-Chain Asset Bridging: Operating and improving bridge infrastructure (esp. for stablecoins) in strategic lockstep with builders so that assets can move onto Stacks reliably.

User Experience

Reducing friction across core dApps, focusing on priorities such as:

• Fee Abstraction: Exploring pathways to allow sBTC to be used for transaction fees, reducing the requirement for users and agents to hold STX solely for gas. This is being evaluated for feasibility and implementation approach.
• Passkey / WebAuthn support: for wallet creation and agent wallets. There is ongoing work related to this from Core Contributors Degen Labs, with support from the Stacks Foundation.
• Stacks Explorer: The explorer received a substantial design overhaul in 2025 and remains open source — we welcome community contributions and will continue iterating based on specific usability feedback as ecosystem activity grows.

Leather Wallet Partnership

Leather is a critical gateway to the Stacks ecosystem. Labs' partnership with Leather in 2026 is focused on ensuring the wallet keeps pace with the ecosystem's most important product launches and fills critical functionality gaps that are limiting adoption. We'll work directly with their team on key upgrades such as:

• Native Bitcoin Staking support: Leather must be a first-class interface for the Bitcoin Staking program.
• Multi-sig functionality: Adding multi-signature wallet support to Leather, enabling shared custody arrangements that institutional users and teams require. Multi-sig is a prerequisite for meaningful institutional participation.
• Ledger hardware wallet integration: Continuing to support and improve the Ledger app ensuring that hardware wallet users have a reliable, up-to-date integration path for interacting with Stacks through Leather.
• Improved Leather interactions: General UX improvements to core wallet interactions: transaction signing, token management, dApp connections (based on user feedback and observed friction points).
• BNS V2 / Bitcoin Identity: Support for BNS V2 is on the backlog for both Leather and the Explorer. As usage and demand grow, we intend to bring improved Bitcoin identity features into the products where they matter most.