Stacks is a decentralized Bitcoin layer-2 solution that introduces smart contract functionality to Bitcoin. The blockchain was introduced in 2013 by Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea, both of whom are Princeton alumni. It was originally named Blockstack and had a rebranding in 2020. Its mainnet was launched in 2021.
Stacks uses a special consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Transfer (PoX). In PoX, miners transfer the crypto of an established PoW blockchain (Bitcoin in this case) to other participants in the network to secure it. This unique approach allows the layer-2 participants to secure the PoX network and earn rewards in the layer-1 cryptocurrency at the same time.
As a part of this PoX mining process, a hash of each Stacks block is recorded to the Bitcoin chain, inheriting some security as a result of this process.
Also, Stacks is designed in a way that allows an entire block of transactions on Stacks to correspond to one Bitcoin transaction, and the blocks of both chains to be confirmed simultaneously. This makes transactions on Stacks significantly faster and cheaper than those on Bitcoin.
STX is the native token of Stacks that is used to reward those who confirm transactions on Stacks.
STX's total supply: 1,818,000,000
STX's circulating supply: 1,366,457,779
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