"sBTC is the ability to participate in an application ecosystem where you are not leaving the #Bitcoin ecosystem in a way. Ultimately @Stacks is a Bitcoin layer."

⭐️ Trust Machinesco’s Engineering Partner Igor S. about sBTC

Full Hiro Systems video available here 👇

🗞 ICYMI: The Stacks Monthly Newsletter
The Stacks ecosystem closed out 2022 with one of the biggest quarters yet, officially voting in the Stacks 2.1 upgrade while two new whitepapers were published that outlined a vision for an even more complete Stacks Bitcoin layer.

In Q4, we also watched Clarity smart contracts grow over 100%, the network crossed 7 billion in total STX transferred, and we welcomed 84 new members to the talent pool, a growth of 44% from the previous quarter.

Read & Subscribe here 👇

What type of Stacks smart contract tutorial do you want our builders to work on? 🤔

⭐️ Last time, BowTiedDeployer taught the Stacks community how to integrate NFTs into a web application or game.
📺 Video available below 👇

👁‍🗨 Clarity Stacks smart contracts are decidable.

1️⃣ It makes analyzing the behavior of the code much more straight forward
2️⃣ It closes off classes of hacks, bugs, and exploits

Hiro Systems' Dev Advocate Max Efremov on Clarity's benefits.
Full video available down below 👇

📄DeSpread Report: sBTC (Stacks Bitcoin) — Unlocking Bitcoin to be a productive asset

[Table of Contents]
- Bitcoin and Financial Market
- Bitcoin Layers and $sBTC
- $sBTC Use Cases & Limitations

Read here: https://medium.com/despread-global/despread-report-sbtc-stacks-bitcoin-8eb11302ce76

Spread the word: https://twitter.com/DeSpreadTeam/status/1614860613607632898

🚨 Just in: Stacks Is the #1 Web3 Project on #Bitcoin For Second Year in a Row

The 2023 @ElectricCapital report measured this by developer activity. #Stacks is also a top-30 crypto project (at #28) as measured by total developers.

Explore the full report 👇

🚨 ALEX Introducing Trading Pool Introduction

ALEX takes every effort to ensure their AMM protocol stays relevant and is future-proof. The result is the Trading Pool, which implements Generalised Mean Equation and, with a suitable parameterisation, supports both risky pairs (i.e. xy=L), stable pairs (i.e. x+y=L) and any linear combination in-between (i.e. Curve). Read the full article here 👇

👁 sBTC Explained with Xverse
Although Stacks has made significant progress, there’s still no way to move BTC in and out of smart contracts in a fully trustless manner. This has been Bitcoin’s evasive “holy grail” issue for almost a decade. Enter sBTC: a non-custodial form of pegged Bitcoin with 100% Bitcoin finality.

The Stacks network's PoX connection to Bitcoin facilitates sBTC’s novel trustless peg design. Soon, users can convert BTC to sBTC for use in applications without involving centralized entities. Furthermore, users don’t pay any fees when converting between BTC and sBTC other than Bitcoin gas fees.

Read the full article 👈

🔄 Release the StableSwap - Arkadiko X ALEX
(source: Arkadiko Medium)

The fine folks at Alex are bringing Arkadiko the technology to create a new type of liquidity mechanism, a StableSwap pool. Such a pool is fundamental to the Arkadiko Protocol as it allows for low fee and low slippage swaps between USDA, Arkadiko’s Stablecoin and xUSD, a wrapped version of USDC custodied by Anchorage and issued by Tokensoft. The two stablecoins already exist on the Stacks blockchain but are not directly linked to each other. Thanks to the StableSwap pool, we’ll soon be able to swap between the two stablecoins.

Read more 👇

🎯 Hiro's Focus Areas for Q1 2023
It’s worth noting that the upcoming Stacks 2.1 upgrade took up a lot of the Hiro team’s bandwidth in Q4, so several of our Q4 projects will continue to be priorities in Q1. Those priorities include:

⭐️ API Microservices
⭐️ Subnets
⭐️ More Bitcoin Support Across Hiro Products
⭐️ Product R&D
⭐️ Network Support
⭐️ Docs

Read the full article 👇

📈 State of Stacks - Messari Report Q4 2022
⭐️ Stacks network average daily active users and addresses, increased by 76% and 42%, respectively, in Q4’22.
⭐️ Smart contracts deployed compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.8%.

State of #Stacks report by @MessariCrypto - full report available 👇

👁 Why Developers Should Build on Bitcoin in 2023
⭐️ Developers Are Heads Down Building
⭐️ Tooling Is Getting More Sophisticated
⭐️ Stacks 2.1 Is Coming
⭐️ Subnets Arrive in 2023
⭐️ More Big Network Unlocks on the Horizon

Read the full article by Hiro 👇

🚨This Week in sBTC with Andre.btc

✅ Andre.btc sBTC residency proposal finalized
📙 Go-To-Market plan
🖥 Engineering: sBTC bridge development & more

📅 Weekly updates: View the first update down below. Updates will soon expand in size as activities to successfully launch sBTC increase 👇

The Weekly Stack - Gamma's newsletter
Featured Artists & Collections
Stacks Parrot Radio 📻🦜
We love seeing NFT projects go beyond art — and Stacks Parrots has done just that with the STX Parrot Radio, now available on iOS & Android!

Parrot Radio is the first Web3 music player on Stacks, supporting all audio and audio-visual NFTs. If you’re a Stacks Parrot holder, you’ll get lifetime access to the app. Check it out! 🎶
Read the full article 👇

📺 Stacker Chats with Stacks creator Muneeb Ali is Back
Tune in for weekly insights about Building on Bitcoin!

In this episode, Muneeb Ali and Gina Abrams talk about how sBTC (via Stacks) makes building on Bitcoin more decentralized.

They also discuss why's there is a need for a separate gas token ($STX) to make a decentralized building on Bitcoin future work.

Watch here 👇

State of Stacks - Messari Q4 2022 Report
One of the core tenets of the Stacks community has always been transparency and open dialogue between the great contributors, experts, and builders who are working to grow and elevate the network. Messari leverages their industry-leading crypto market intelligence to bring the same transparency and discussion we believe in to the entire crypto industry. We are excited to share some of the key takeaways from their State of Stacks Q4 2022 report that was just released. Read the full article 👇

🔨 Industry Lessons: Due Diligence for Developers
Researching protocols? Don't let hype and market cap distract you from what counts.

As a developer, you didn't select the language you first learned without consideration, and you shouldn't do that with protocols, either. Protocols are more than just a modular part of your application or business, they’re fundamental to the value you're going to provide users.

Below, we've compiled a list of critical aspects to consider when assessing which protocol is right for you (and which will still be around next year).
Read the full article 👇

🚨 ICYMI: Stacks is the number one Bitcoin layer
Despite some losses in 2022 due to the market downturn, Stacks has shown steady developer growth since its launch. In addition to healthy developer interest, Stacks has had nearly 24,000 smart contracts deployed, 1 million NFT events, 500,000 stacks addresses, 140,000 .btc names registered, 7 billion STX transferred, and dozens of companies launched in the ecosystem.

Read the full article 👇

🗣 What is Stacks?
Although it's likely that none of the people in this channel need education on Stacks, we're sharing this great Stacks explainer blog post by Xverse anyway in case you want to share this with your friends. Read full article 👇