Stacks’ Satoshi Upgrade

So, what exactly did the Nakamoto upgrade upgrade?

1. Performance

Previously, Stacks' block confirmation time followed Bitcoin (PoX consensus mechanism), and the block time was about 10 minutes. This means that as Bitcoin Layer2, Stacks is unqualified. Although it inherits the security of Bitcoin, it has not improved enough performance on the basis of Layer1.

After the Nakamoto upgrade, according to Grayscale's calculations, Stacks' block time and gas fee have been reduced from 6min/6.65u to 5s/0.25u.

Higher performance means better user experience, and better experience means higher attractiveness to users and developers. It will become the foundation for the development of the Stacks ecosystem. For example, it was very tiring to hype memes on Stacks before, but now it will be much easier. We can also see more possibilities for Stacks DeFi, such as a wider range of DeFi products and a wider range of DeFi participants.

Another point is that Stacks is optimizing the Nakamoto upgrade to achieve lower latency and higher bandwidth.

In terms of thinking, Stacks is still committed to solving the previous shortcomings of Stacks to achieve higher performance. Only with higher performance can it have the opportunity to compete with other high-performance Layer1/Layer2.

2. $sBTC

Speaking of DeFi, after the Nakamoto upgrade, the sBTC upgrade will occur in early December (at the earliest), and more upgrades will be carried out in January next year and beyond. The Nakamoto upgrade is the basis for the sBTC upgrade. The upgrade in early December will optimize the Stacks token issuance mechanism and launch sBTC.

Btw, I hope it won't be delayed like the Satoshi upgrade.

After the upgrade, sBTC will likely become one of the important assets in the crypto market (the previous $WBTC incident also helped the development of cbBTC and sBTC, and Coinbase also removed $WBTC).

For sBTC, the most noteworthy indicator is its adoption. We can also see that Stacks is working hard to promote the adoption of sBTC, such as working with Bitcoin ATM operator Coinflip to integrate Stacks and sBTC, such as introducing sBTC to Aptos, Solana, and so on.

For sBTC, the growth model of cbBTC is very worthy of reference. For example, supporting Moonwell and using $WELL tokens (and pulling $WELL) rewards to promote the adoption of cbBTC. (And Stacks is very rich, having recently raised $20 million in new financing. They can use this money to incentivize the adoption of sBTC, such as incentivizing the adoption of sBTC on the lending protocols of Stacks, Aptos, and Solana.)

Overall, the overall expectations for Stacks are OK: the Nakamoto upgrade has brought higher performance, and introduced sBTC as the core asset of the Stacks ecosystem. The strong strength of Stacks has increased the adoption expectations of sBTC.

Finally, let me digress. Recently, public blockchains have been upgrading, such as Fantom Sonic and Avalanche9000, and their core purpose is to promote the adoption of public chains. It is foreseeable that the next few months will be quite exciting, and the public chain war is about to begin again~