🚨 Happening today: The '22 Stackies

🏆 Industry highlights & looking ahead for '23
🏆 Community highlights
🏆 Community awards 👇

⭐️ Best Technical Builder
⭐️ Best Community Builder
⭐️ Most Inspiring Thought Leader
⭐️ Meme Master
⭐️ Favorite Project
⭐️ Project to Watch

⏰ When: In 1 hour
📆 Set a reminder 👇

🚨 An exciting week for the Stacks community - Stacks Recap
⭐️ sBTC Whitepaper release
⭐️ Stacks (The Nakomoto Release) whitepaper release
⭐️ Stacks 2.1 voting ending

What an incredible week for the Stacks community!
In case you need a recap:
1️⃣ Find out more on both whitepaper releases on the landing page 👈
2️⃣ Watch Stacks Founder Muneeb Ali explain sBTC on the latest Stacker Chats 👈
3️⃣ Read the introduction blog for the whitepaper releases 👈


📆 Join us in 1 hour for the Twitter spaces recap with Muneeb Ali, Kyle Ellicott & more! Set a reminder here 👈

⭐️ ICYMI: It's Official: The #Stacks 2.1 Upgrade is Approved
🤝 Strengthening The Connection to #Bitcoin
🚀 The community voted in favour of the Stacks 2.1 update proposal

Stacks 2.1 involves
- Stacking Improvements
- New Clarity Functions for Parsing and Validating Data
- Better Bridges
- Decentralized Mining Pools
- Pay-to-Anyone Coinbase
- Mining with Segwit and Taproot
- Bitcoin-native Assets and Smart Contract Control

Find out what you can expect in terms of the remaining rollout process and how to stay up to date 👇

🗞 Read about Trust Machine's Tycho Onnasch' Zest Protocol introduction to the Bitcoin audience during Bitcoin 2022
(source: Zest Protocol, Tycho Onnasch)

"Bitcoin Amsterdam was already a little while ago - in October 2022. Yet after the FTX drama, the case for Zest Protocol has only grown stronger. I gave a talk to share Zest Protocol with the wider world for the first time and to educate Bitcoiners about Bitcoin capital markets."

Read the full article 👇

ICYMI: Growing the Bitcoin Economy with Bitcoin Layers
Introducing sBTC and the ‘Nakamoto’ Release of Stacks

sBTC: This paper discusses a trustless two-way Bitcoin peg system: sBTC. This peg system can help us fulfill the rest of the original vision of Stacks by enabling trustless writing to Bitcoin.

Stacks Whitepaper: The Nakamoto Release with a Trustless Bitcoin Peg. This paper describes changes to the Stacks Bitcoin layer needed to enable the trustless functioning of the newly proposed sBTC asset described in the first paper as well as faster block times and other improvements.

Read the full introduction article here 👇

Updates from the Stacks Ecosystem

⭐️ BlockSurvey introduced BlockSurvey 4.0 - Create gated forms & surveys with end to end encryption. Read the tweet thread 👈

⭐️ StackerDAO Labs introduced Team, a multisig tool for the Bitcoin web3 ecosystem. Now live. Read the tweet thread 👈

Stacks Merchandise
To celebrate the approval of the Stacks 2.1 upgrade by the community, all Stacks merchandise is 21% off until Sunday midnight.

Find out more about the available Stacks merchandise here 👇

Unlocking Bitcoin’s Full Potential - With sBTC, the First Trustless Bitcoin Peg
Unlocking Bitcoin to be a fully programmable, productive asset would finally enable Bitcoin to be the backbone of DeFi and a more secure Web3. sBTC solves the problem of trustlessly writing to Bitcoin, enabling easy movement of Bitcoin in and out of Bitcoin layers. This unlocks hundreds of billions of dollars of latent capital into Web3.

But what does this mean? What is a Trustless Peg? Read the full article 👇

🚀 Launch: Liquidium Decentralized Finance
The Mainnet for Liquidium is almost here! Borrow against your NFTs on Stacks.

Tomorrow, Liquidium will launch on Mainnet. MVP will introduce a treasury-based model. Liquidium will offer loans to users who want to borrow against their NFTs.

Read the thread published earlier this month on how Liquidium will launch on Mainnet.

The Future of Bitcoin Decentralized Finance With Stacks
Will Bitcoin Decentralized Finance thrive in the future? Here from industry leaders in the world of Finance!

@FransScholten - Investor @FlowTraders
@TychoOnnasch - Co-founder @ZestProtocol
@VictorvanEijk1 - Director Institutional Sales @M11Credit

Watch the video 👇

🚨 x10 YoY Stacks Smart Contract Growth in 2022

✅ The Bitcoin layer Stacks has seen more than 10x YoY growth in Total Contracts Deployed between January and December of this year!
✅ Over 370 virtual Clarity education program participants
✅ Many successful hackathons

Read Mariaverse's full thread 👈

👁 Read Bitcoin & Write to Bitcoin - Introducing sBTC With Stacks
With the launch of sBTC, the Stacks layer will be the first Bitcoin layer to enable Bitcoin writes, trustless movement of BTC in and out of the layer, while securing transactions by 100% of Bitcoin hash power.

Watch the full video 👇

🍊 Introducing Zest Protocol at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2022
Zest Protocol is the underlying infrastructure that will make decentralised Bitcoin capital markets possible for the first time. We will use the technical breakthroughs that the Stacks programming layer offers to build decentralised capital markets into the Bitcoin blockchain.

Read Tycho Onnasch's full article here 👈

Deconstructing sBTC, The Whitepaper
By @wbnns

"Being able to make Bitcoin fully programmable would unlock defi for all holders. It would be a pivotal moment in the cryptosphere, akin to discovering electricity in a dark age. Or something even more remarkable, like nuclear fission."

Read @wbnns' two part deconstruction of the sBTC whitepaper down below 👇
⭐️ Part one
⭐️ Part two

ICYMI: Liquidium DeFi launched on mainnet 🚀
Liquidium, the first NFT lending procotol on Stacks, is live on mainnet 🎉

View the Twitter announcement here 👇

🚀 ICYMI: Xverse Launched its Desktop Browser Extension
"Xverse, the leading self-custodial wallet for Bitcoin Web3, is proud to announce the launch of its new desktop browser extension. Available for Chrome and currently in beta testing, the extension enables more powerful applications in the Bitcoin ecosystem."

Read the full announcement here 👈

Builder Spotlight: Wow Labz
Advait Danke is the Project Lead for Pirates at Wow Labz, one of India's leading turnkey product development companies. Wow Labz is setting out to create a play-and-earn game based on Stacks. In this discussion, we cover the challenges of building a game on the blockchain based in randomness, how their work will help to shape the Stacks ecosystem, the distinction between Web2 and Web3, and more. 👇

Step Aside, Ethereum: Blockchain Project Stacks Wants to Bring Smart Contracts to Bitcoin
(source: Coindesk)

"Blockchain project Stacks has published a whitepaper showing how a new digital asset called “Stacks bitcoin” (sBTC) can be used to make Bitcoin fully programmable."

"Unlike Ethereum or Solana where developers can conjure up all manner of algorithmic machinations – think six-figure gorilla avatars – Bitcoin’s simpler scripting language limits what Bitcoin developers can create on the platform. Stacks, an existing smart contract platform, wants to break through those limitations by introducing a new digital asset derived from Bitcoin" Read the full article

🚀 Even more builders will soon start building on #Bitcoin
☑️ Clarity Stacks smart contract camp starting tomorrow. Join the next cohort or self-paced course here.
☑️ Web3startuplab Stacks startups cohort 3 applications opened. Register here.
☑️ Stacks Startups accelerator deadline closing soon. Register here

🎉 Stacks Hackathon Winners
Congratulations to the following three projects for winning prizes during the last Stacks Clarity Smart Contract hackathon.

🥇 1st place: Votr
🥈 2nd place: Defi-arkadiko-compound
🥉 3rd place: All or nothing

Start building on Bitcoin & get funded
Below are the top Stacks Critical Bounties that we’re ready to fund today, should a qualified party apply to work on them.

1️⃣ Clarity Smart-contracts that specifically leverage Stacks 2.1 unlocks (Continuous Stacking, Topping Off, Improved Bridging)
2️⃣ Stacks Libraries, SDKs, and associated documentation for Rust, C, GoLang, Java, Python, Clojure
3️⃣ Stacks integrations for Dune, Nansen, Token Terminal, and/or other multi-chain on-chain analytics platforms

Read the full blog post on all winning projects 👇