Original author: muneeb.btc, Founder of Stacks
Original translation: Deep Bitcoin L2s and Ordinals are getting more and more attention, and many new users have recently discovered Stacks. This is a quick guide for new users.
Stacks is focused on unlocking the Bitcoin economy, imagining a system similar to Solana but using BTC as the asset.
Project History: The Stacks mainnet was launched in early 2021 with a Bitcoin-powered consensus mechanism. The project is undergoing a major upgrade, called Stacks Nakamoto, which brings it closer to Bitcoin L2 (more details below). Builders in the Stacks ecosystem are BTC believers who want to build everything with BTC as an asset.
Bitcoin Layer2 is important for three main reasons:
1) Bitcoin L1 cannot scale to a billion users. We saw high fees on BTC L1, fees increased 100x, and it was difficult for the average user to pay $40 in fees for a $100 BTC transaction. Fees on L2 are much cheaper, and they increase the effective bandwidth of Bitcoin. L2 is like building a new highway next to a congested highway.
2) Bitcoin L2 allows developers to build anything they can build with Ethereum or Solana with BTC. Looking at the various non-BTC ecosystems, it is clear that there are use cases with clear product-market fit, such as being able to get a stablecoin loan with ETH or SOL as collateral, or having a local DEX to trade ETH/SOL. It is obvious to bring these proven use cases to BTC.
3) Bitcoin L2 makes L1 tools like DLC (Discrete Logarithm Contract) more useful. Users can participate in certain Stacks contracts through DLC without BTC leaving the L1 chain, for example, participating in liquidity pools without BTC leaving L1. (BTC will only move to L2 when the user is liquidated.)
Roadmap for 2024: Stacks is a very decentralized ecosystem. The working group in the open source ecosystem has summarized some highlights for the first half of 2024, mainly including:
1) The Stacks Nakamoto upgrade is scheduled to launch before the Bitcoin halving. This will bring fast (5 second) block speeds to Stacks, a significant improvement over the 10-30 minute block speeds currently tied to Bitcoin L1, and increase Stacks’ security (reorganization resistance) to 100% of Bitcoin’s hash power.
2) sBTC will likely be released as a second hard fork after the Bitcoin halving, making "BTC on L2" possible. sBTC is unique in that it is secured at the consensus level. There are proposals to use it directly as Gas on Stacks. In addition, the open network of sBTC signers may be the largest and most decentralized set of signers at the launch of Bitcoin L2/anchoring (currently based on estimates of signer pool performance and signer interest).
3) Stacks support for WASM. The ongoing WASM work not only speeds up the execution of Clarity (safe language) contracts, but also opens the door to support other languages such as Rust.
