Stacks 2.0 Launch Recap

Soon after ushering in the new year, the Stacks Foundation, Hiro PBC (formerly Blockstack PBC), and the Stacks community celebrated a major milestone on January 14th, 2021: The Stacks 2.0 Mainnet Launch.

“Stacks 2.0 brings secure apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin, unlocking a new wave of innovation upon the world’s most robust and most valuable blockchain”, said Stacks Co-founder and CEO of Hiro PBC, Muneeb Ali. “The launch is just the beginning of an exciting new era for the Stacks community and crypto broadly, as developers leverage Stacks to build a user-owned internet on Bitcoin.”

The Stacks 2.0 mainnet is well on its way to a thousand blocks, and there are other healthy signs you can read more about in this recent status update. Now that independent miners have launched the network, no single party — including Hiro (formerly Blockstack PBC) — has the ability to change it, pause it, or shut it down. PBC is now shifting its primary focus to developer tools for the Stacks blockchain under the Hiro banner.

To celebrate and say thanks to the dedicated members of this community who helped make this milestone happen, Stacks ecosystem entities hosted a global event on the launch date. The event has been streamed over 8,000 times and more than 15K+ people have newly joined Stacks related Telegram and Twitter recently. Amazing guest speakers in the Blockchain and Crypto space — along with surprise announcements, app launches, and of course, a musical performance — made it a party.

Below are some some highlights from the day and you'll find the full slate of videos available too. A massive thank you to our community for making the day what it was. A new era for the user-owned internet is beginning on Bitcoin!

“As usage, adoption, and the number of use cases that we are utilizing for Bitcoin grows, we are going to need different layers that have features optimized for the specificity of the use case.”

— Speaker Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer, CoinShares

Announcements:

• Stacks 2.0 network officially launched! Check out the launch blog post, the Stacks 2.0 explorer, and the new wallet.
• North American mining giant Foundry, a Digital Currency Group subsidiary, commits to allocating mining resources to Stacks (STX), its first cryptocurrency beyond Bitcoin.
• Wrapped.com, a collaboration between industry stalwarts Tokensoft and Anchorage, and specialists in wrapped crypto assets, will soon offer wrapped bitcoin on Stacks, or 'xBTC'.
• Blockchain.com to list STX
• Sia SkyNet and Stacks developer bounty
• OKCoin STX listing and trading are live
• Daemon announces beta release of STX mining bot

“The promise here was can you bring that level of innovation and programmability to Bitcoin without polluting the nature of Bitcoin itself."

— Asiff Hirji, President, Figure One

Apps and businesses in development:

• Secret Key Labs — mobile wallet and authentication update
• Pravica — a Web 3.0 communication suite
• BlockSurvey — private and secure forms and surveys
• Boom Wallet — STX wallet and NFT generator
• BTC.US — .btc domain names
• Dualx.Finance — yields on cryptoo buy options through a DEX with Dual Asset Deposits & Gamma Trading

“We want to educate the people in government, and get them comfortable with new pieces of the future decentralized internet that we think are going to be critical to human rights and human dignity going forward,”

— Peter Van Valkenburgh, Director of Research, Coin Center

Additional Community Highlights:

• Smart Contracts on Bitcoin — Max Levchin, Version One
• Stacks 2.0 — Rodolfo Gonzalez, Foundation Capital
• Smart Contracts on Bitcoin — Fred Wilson, USV
• YC S14's Stacks brings apps and smart contracts to Bitcoin — YC
• Thread: Stacks mission and progress — Jorn Van Zwanenburg, STX Community Member

Whether or not you were able to join the celebration, we want to thank you for helping us evolve to Stacks 2.0. We appreciate all the contributions this community made to get us here, and we’re even more excited for what’s to come in this new era.

Stay tuned for more Stacks related news and updates from Hiro, the Stacks Foundation, and all the other entities and individuals from across the decentralized ecosystem here at blog.stacks.co.

All Launch Videos on YouTube