The Stacks project was initially launched by Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea as OneName in 2013. The project's brief was to act as a domain name system for bitcoin, which they later extended to offer a suite of tools for proving one's online identity on chain. For this, the project received a $1.4 billion via a seed round, behind which a number of notable backers were involved including Union Square Ventures and SecondMarket chairman Barry Silbert.
Shortly after, also in 2013, Blockstack was created and another $4 million in funding was raised. This time the project brief was extended further to designing an alternative browser powered by the BTC blockchain which would enable users to store all their posts, photos, messages, and calendar appointments in their own cloud sites.
Then, just five years later in 2019, Stacks was created. Stacks became the first company approved by the SEC for an ICO under the SEC's Regulation A+ exemption. Blockstack PBC raised over $75 million via a combination of venture money and token sales ($50 million from the token sales alone), with many of the same backers from previously involved and the addition of funding from Winkelvoss Capital. When asked about the funding, Blockstack stated that "of the funds acquired, only $10 million will be immediately available to the company, as the firm has agreed to a lock-up until milestones are hit. The next $20 million will be released when its board of advisors verifies it has delivered the next version of its product, a network that integrates the token. The final $20 million will be secured when it achieves its final milestone, one million verified users."
Around 800 people and entities were said to have participated in the public token sale (there was no pre-sale) where the minimum investment was $3,000. The median investment was $6,140. So, these are all big players here - leaving little room for retail investment in early token rounds.
In 2019, the Blockstack Whitepaper 2.0 was released to include two new components: 1. the design of the Stacks blockchain and consensus mechanism and 2. new smart contract language.
The Stacks testnet then went live in Q2 2020. In a blog post released at the time, it stated "Stacks 2.0 represents the design by which Web 3 can emerge and scale."
In Q4 2020, Stacks achieved non-security status by the SEC in the US.
In Q2 2021, the Stacks Accelerator was introduced, a three-month program aimed at supporting teams building on Bitcoin via the Stacks blockchain. The accelerator raised an initial fund of $4M USD to support over 100 early-stage startup teams.
In Q4 2021, the Stacks 2.05 upgrade was completed which provided the network a 2x-10x increase in capacity to take on more Bitcoin DeFi and NFT projects.
In Q1 2023, Stacks 2.1 was introduced. This was a hard fork upgrade which included improvements in stacking, better bridges and decentralised mining pools, amongst other upgrades.
In Q1 2023, the Hiro Platform was created to be a hosted service that will make it easy for developers to build on the Stacks blockchain. Hiro PBC (formerly known as Blockstack PBC - interesting enough) states that it is a public-benefit corporation building open-source software. Another name change here with the same people behind it is quite interesting!
In Q4 2023, Nakamoto is planned for release which will introduce sBTC, a Bitcoin-pegged asset to allow smart contracts to run faster and more cheaply. In the same period, Bitcoin Write will be introduced, which is an L2 scaling solution that allows for trustless writing to Bitcoin to build DeFi, NFTs and apps. This seems like one of the final pieces in the puzzle to bring the whole project together and allow for large scale building on the Bitcoin blockchain.
There is no doubt that a lot of development has gone into Stacks over the past ten years, with a number of apps and NFT projects (including Ordinals) already up and running. As much as it seems to me like a ‘good old boys club’ with a lot of high-level investors, huge funding raises and little opportunity for retail to get in at the ground level, it has been continuously progressing. I believe it is definitely one to watch with a renewed focus on Bitcoin and its ecosystem in recent times. Show Less
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