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Stacks Townhall - March
Recorded: March 20, 2026 Duration: 0:51:30Space Recording
Full Transcription
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Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Thank you. Oh The Oh I'm All right. Hello, everybody. Good evening, good morning, good day, wherever you may be tuning in
from around the world. We are going to kick right off. And before we do, first and foremost,
everything discussed today is for educational
purposes only and not financial advice please do your own research uh that said i'm your host
kyle elicott um i want to kick things right off today let's welcome up our first speaker
uh alex of stacks labs um you're on good morning we're jumping We're jumping right into it, aren't we?
Going right into it today, yeah.
All right.
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you all are doing well on this beautiful Friday.
It is morning for me over here in the Mountain West,
but if it is evening for you out in, well,
I guess Europe would be afternoon.
Asia would be the evening.
It's great to talk to you all.
I believe I am mainly
supposed to talk today about some of the recent changes you saw blog posts on yesterday coming
out of the work that we've been doing. I think Rina, I assume, will be up here a little bit later
to dive deep on the Stacks endowment and the Treasury Committee meeting that we recently had there.
But I'll just start with kind of the overview from Labs.
So we have continued to be heads down on all of those things
that we talked about kind of at the end of last year.
Scaling up the chain capacity, 100x is a big focus for us right now.
Shipping just lots of, like, little upgrades.
So thank you, by the way, to everyone who voted in the most recent.
I believe we may have lost Alex.
Apologies, everybody.
Fun technical difficulties on a Friday.
That said, I think we can continue to move on.
Manib, do you want to jump in?
Oh, never mind.
Time out.
Sorry, Maneb, denying you for just a minute more.
Let's get Alex back up on stage.
Alex, I think we have you.
Okay.
Can you hear me now?
Yeah, I completely rug-pulled Maneb on that.
Got it.
Yeah, well, you know.
Get back on.
That's fine.
I'm more important than Maneb.
Okay, where did I cut off, by the way?
You were thanking everyone for the recent vote.
Yes.
And good thing I'm here, man.
I got you.
Keep going.
Wonderful.
Okay, so yes, for everybody who voted on the most recent SIPs,
thank you very much.
There are some huge, awesome upgrades like passkey supports.
You know, in Clarity 5, it's going to make life a lot better for both users and developers.
So I am psyched that they went through.
And those are very technical things.
So especially, it's really important that people vote on those.
I know that when we've done big economic changes or things in the past,
those are ones that people obviously get passionate about and vote on.
But voting on the technical stuff is actually really important to the future of the network.
So thank you to folks for that.
The other big news is we have onboarded a fractional CMO to help us with all of the upcoming launches,
in particular working with Rick and the marketing team here at Labs.
He's a great guy.
You will probably be meeting him over the next couple of weeks.
I think he'll make some appearances maybe in places. A lot of deep, great crypto experience.
And I think most importantly, especially in areas that we're not, right? One of the things we're
looking for is that I think Stacks has a very long history of a project of recruiting developers and
app builders really well, because that's kind of where our roots came from. We didn't need a lot
of help there. And, you know, there's obviously a lot of people out there who do that. But where
we do need is, you know, some more of the like kind of traditional go to market work with users
and things and, you know, with the crypto specific applications. So that's really, you know, where
we've been prioritizing and focusing. So I'm really excited to see what happens there.
excited to see what happens there. So as I mentioned, referencing, we did yesterday decide
to move forward with reducing a lot of the burn out of labs, and some of the other entities did
as well too. That included letting go of 15 of the great core contributors that we have,
a little bit from every team. None of, none of those decisions were easy to do.
But ultimately, we just felt that, you know,
given how unpredictable,
not just the crypto markets are right now,
but just the general macro markets,
it was really important to stay ahead of that and keep in control.
You know, we have this great new treasury
and that is wonderful,
but we are also trying to be very, very smart
and conservative about it
because,
you know, that is not something that just exists for the next few years. It is meant to exist for
like the next 10 or 20 years. And doing so means we don't want to overspend down on it. Again,
Rena will talk a little bit more about the philosophy there. And so we just felt that,
We just felt that, especially with where things sit right now,
like, especially with where things sit right now with the ability that our team has to execute,
with the ability that our team has to execute,
as painful it is to separate with people who are really amazing and wonderful,
we can still keep moving forward on all of the really big key priorities that we have
while also being just a little more conservative with how we're approaching our spend
and making sure that we're preserving that treasury well.
So if you see any of those folks, please say thank you to all they've done for it.
And other than that, like I said,
you shouldn't notice that much of a change
of what we're doing.
We're still full steam ahead
on all of the work we're talking about.
You're going to see more marketing coming out from us.
You're going to see more info on Bitcoin staking,
which we've started talking about a lot coming on.
You're going to see other product development.
I'm sure Adrian will talk about that.
But overall, I'm really bullish for where things stand.
One of the things we've noticed is it keeps coming back
is so many projects have kind of been,
that claim they were doing Bitcoin L2
or Bitcoin staking type thing,
any of this stuff, have dropped off the map, right?
They've gone away entirely.
They've pivoted into something else
because they never really had a there there on it.
And I think, you know, one of the things that continues
to really define stacks is how long
term of you we have taken
to everything, how real we've been
about it, and
really feels like this is going to be a great
year for what we want to open up there.
So, if you have any other questions around that,
you can always shoot me DMs and things.
You know, or ask on the forum wherever, and I'll, I don't know, Kyle, any other questions around that, you can always shoot me DMs and things, you know,
or ask on the forum,
wherever.
And I'll,
I don't know if Kyle,
any other questions,
anything else I should cover?
I do have a few questions that came in from the community overnight and early
this morning,
but I know Manib has a few updates on his side as well.
So I want to give him the floor and then endowment and we'll,
we'll jump right into cues.
Great.
So Manib, I'll turn it back over to you officially now. So you won't get rug pulled. give him the floor and then endowment and we'll jump right into queues.
Manif, I'll turn it back over to you officially now so you won't get rug pulled.
We won't mute you.
All right.
Good morning, everyone.
You guys can hear me fine?
Loud and clear.
All right. Awesome.
Yes.
So I think updates from my side are that I'm pretty excited about the Bitcoin staking launch.
As Alex was mentioning, that one of the unique things about Stacks is our sort of like, you
know, history of survival, this blue chip status that we have now.
And that's something that we're seeing out in the market,
where a lot of other projects are sort of like frizzling out,
whereas Stacks is actually standing out even more.
And with the staking launch,
I think a lot depends on your distribution.
So your distribution partners,
who are the people who basically come in
and are able to back the product launch.
And we are seeing some great traction over there,
which again goes back to this sort of like a trusted brand
that we have built over the years.
So people know this is not a project that's going to go away.
So if you're a tier one institution you you take it
seriously and when we are building something i think we have a reputation of going really deep
both on the technical side both on the economic side of feasibility and how
how sort of like you know something could be sustainable over the long term.
So that's pretty exciting.
Obviously, more details are going to come out,
and everybody would hear about the exact plans, what we're doing.
But that remains to be sort of like the thing that, you know,
I'm by far the most excited about.
In terms of some of the broader markets and you know cost cutting, just I'm going
to remind everybody that this project has survived multiple bear markets at this point, right? Like
when we started in 2017, I think 2018 was probably like one of the worst bear markets ever and we
have survived another bear market after that. This is officially the third one.
And we've been able to survive it by making sort of like clear-headed decisions
and making moves out of strength versus being caught in a corner somewhere
and then you react to things.
So overall, for the cost- cost cutting that just happened this week,
it's a proactive move, right?
The Rina will talk more about the state of the treasury and the endowment,
but what we are sort of like at a high level preparing for
is the possibility that the bear market is much longer
and much deeper than everyone's expecting.
We don't want to be caught blindsided
six months from now, nine months from now,
that, oh, you know, Bitcoin went down a lot more,
STX went down a lot more,
and the markets are not recovering
and our brand is too high, right?
So right now we have,
it's almost like making a move out of strength
when we have multiple options available
and we pick the one that we think minimizes our risks
and maximizes our chances of success.
So that's basically what happened.
And this is happening elsewhere as well, right?
So there's nothing unique to Stacks either.
I think other mature projects
who have also uh weathered the strong arm and survived multiple bear markets are doing similar
things so i think i think uh obviously it's unfortunate for the subset of folks uh that it
impacted and great people a lot of them love the project project and have publicly sort of like said this week that they
would love to continue to support the project however they can or come back into the ecosystem
when new opportunities start. So I think that sort of sentiment was really good to see that people
who are unfortunately leaving labs, they still remain so passionate
and so like mission-driven about what we're building.
And it just goes to show the kind of great culture
that we have over here.
Thank you very much, Manit.
Reena, a little bit update on the endowment.
Thank you, Kyle.
GM, everyone, good morning or good night
or for wherever the world that you are, it is morning for
What I wanted to cover today was an update from the Treasury Committee.
So I put out a blog post yesterday summarizing the Treasury Committee meeting for Q1.
As you all know, the Treasury Committee is members of the community as well as members
from kind of various
Stacks entities who all meet quarterly to discuss priorities, fiscal decisions, and where Stacks is
going next. So I'll start with the biggest portion, as everyone has already alluded to it, the Treasury.
What I want to say is that the Treasury is in strong financial position. We have more than $25 million in assets and under management currently, and our treasury
continues to grow through the emissions curve.
With our $25 million, we are being extremely careful and prudent to plan our spending for
a multi-year horizon.
So when I think about treasury planning, I'm thinking about three, four, five, 10, 20 years
out to making
sure this treasury lasts.
There are ecosystem treasuries not only meant to fund product development and technology
and marketing, but more so it also is for the community.
Remember, we run grants programs.
We run DeFi programs to provide liquidity into crucial apps and hopefully we'll be launching an accelerator
at one point this year. And so when I think about the treasury, I'm thinking not only from our burn
perspective, but how we further invest into the community because that's what the treasury is
meant for. For our financial help with our $25 million in assets that we have, the TC did align on reducing our annual spend by
another $7 million. And the way that we have identified our areas of reduction was not only
headcount, which is painful to say because we love all of our team members and contributors who have
been with us for a long time, but we also took reductions on what vendors that we work with, renegotiating if there
are different deal terms that we can get into, as well as reducing some of our DeFi positions that
we're not utilizing or actually yielding for the community. And so we are taking areas all across
the board to be prudent on spend and making sure the spend is meaningful for every
dollar, every stack's like reinvested into the ecosystem. More so than that, I've also taken out
really favorable lines of credit against more mission-driven counterparties to make sure that
we are reducing any sell pressure on STX. With that in mind, I am managing the treasury on a significant multi-year,
more so multi-decade horizon and being careful on what we spend, whether it should be now versus
later. What I want people to walk away with is that we have more, we have runway for many years.
If the market stays as is in this somewhat prolonged bear market, we are 100% fine. If the
market goes through a further downturn, we have planned for it and we are taking care of it.
And so I don't want anyone to feel that there isn't a treasury for them or anything like that.
I am being as careful and prudent with myself, the endowment directors, and in open communications with RTC members, many of whom
are community members, that this treasury is meant to last. The other things I did want to talk about
are what's not changing. As we go through reductions, people probably have questions of
like, what else are you going to keep? What is going to be cut? And like, let's start with the first run.
The grants program continues on.
This has been really exciting for me
during the first quarter of grants
for the Stacks Endowment.
And we've had over a hundred applications,
many of them in kind of different elements of Stacks,
touching AI, privacy, payments, DeFi,
a little bit of everything. And I'm so excited to be
funding grants as this quarter closes. You'll see the announcement of who was funded and it's a
fairly widespread group of builders who are pouring their heart and souls into stacks. So
I can't wait to be able to share that. Some of the other things the Treasury Committee had met on in March was just
about what's coming next for Stacks. I think Alex and Maniv had alluded to this, but we are really
framing with the fractional CMO to come about the next narratives of Stacks and what will be for
being the missing layer of Bitcoin, being the on-chain Bitcoin economy and making sure that the products
and launches kind of going around the next chapter of Stacks really center on staking on-chain and
such. What we want of the narrative kind of going out is Stacks is the best way for Bitcoin holders
to offer real native yield and continue to invest in Bitcoin and have the benefits of an
on-chain economy. What we are still bullish and continue to believe in is that $10 billion of
Bitcoin capital is going to be actively looking for productive use and Stacks will be the layer
for that, whether it's through staking, whether it's through growing DeFi builders and dApps and vaults that are coming.
This is what matters.
And I would say that there is kind of more coming to the roadmap.
If you have read our blog posts, you'll see that there are open roadmapping sessions for
the next chapter of Stacks.
Many of it will touch staking, AI, privacy, payments,
or choose your own adventure. And we definitely need to hear from you because this is a community
project. And then the last thing I want to close with is that I know this period hasn't been easy
for anyone. As we continue to adjust to the macro environment, I'm saying that I'm taking these decisions not lightly
and they're coming from a place of genuine conviction and optimism. I fundamentally believe
that the next chapter of Bitcoin will happen on stacks and I want to make sure that we're
well resourced and prepared to fund it no matter what. Thank you. Back to you, Kyle.
Thank you very much. And as I noted when we
kicked off, I had a lot of questions from the community overnight and this morning. So thank
you all for those questions. Some of these may have been addressed, but just to make sure that
they are clear. Since there were some departures, There were questions around which departments were cut. Is there any
information that can be shared on kind of who's staying and what percentage of the team is
remaining as well? And kind of what does this mean near and long term to the broader upgrades? But
I think let's maybe break that in two. So first you know what departments were reduced or were cut from and if we can comment on a percentage and or who
was let go. Alex Maneeb I don't know if you guys want to take that one.
Maybe Alex?
Sorry I'm still having some in and out issues can you say that again kyle
yeah no worries i it might have been on my side so apologies the joys of uh technical issues
fridays um just a question of what departments were cut and or reduced who is staying um and
kind of what percentage of the team still remains?
That was a few questions.
As I mentioned before, there was a little bit of reduction everywhere across the board.
So there's no one team who took it all or where there was.
And again, part of that came down to trying to be very careful about the decisions we made there so that we would have capacity to keep doing all of the key functions that we still needed to do on things.
And so, yeah, like there were.
People.
Little.
Everyone who. And, you know, using everything we've learned over the last six months, the integration
of like AI deep into some of our workflows is going to allow kind of that remaining team
to continue to do a lot.
As a matter of scale, there's about not just at labs,
but across the ecosystem as a whole, there's about 75 to 80 people
working full time in the ecosystem before that.
So, you know, while this is obviously a material decrease in our burn and everything,
it's not like, you know, we cut our team in half or, you know, lost
too much capacity to keep executing on all of the important things.
Thank you very much. And next question I got as well is specifically around AI. So what specifically
will AI be used for to streamline across stacks? Where is it being used today?
As we see a number of companies and organizations
integrating stacks,
but also we have a lot of work happening
on the network surrounding around AI as well.
So maybe it's a two-sided question.
Are we using it across the ecosystem internally?
And then externally,
maybe we can talk a little bit
about some of the cool AI work.
Yeah, so basically everyone I think inside of Labs at this point is using AI pretty substantially
in their workflow.
What I'd say is, you know, our philosophy comes back to we don't do a lot of like just
straight automation.
Like if you email us, right, or something, you're not going to get like an AI bot responding
to you on it.
Instead, the way we use it is having kind of each contributor figure out
how best to use it to like massively leverage up their workflow.
So the best example of this is right now, like if you submit an issue on the Stacks Explorer repo,
that's a Hidar, who's our like lead dev on it, has a whole automation flow set up
where it's going to get parsed, validated, and even like an initial solution proposed by an LLM coding agent before he even has to look on it. And so if you
look at that, if you look at like recent issues, they're getting closed out in like 24 hours or
less a lot of the time, because it's just so quick to like get us in the right direction on it.
We use it a lot internally for like thought and writing and just lets us much more quickly iterate on our development cycles across each team. a lot of spaces and good for Bitcoin has built like an entire monitoring dashboard for all
of our content and analytics that was like entirely vibe coded, but vibe coded in a good
way. So like Andre, who you guys all know, and like our product team use it every day,
like we no longer have to like, wait to do wireframing. Our entire product team just
basically like anytime we want to build like a new front-end user, I think, user experience,
just dive straight into like rapid prototyping the front-end using usually Claude.
Claude definitely seems to be our favorite model, I think, internally now.
Again, people can use whatever they want.
But so, like I said, the biggest thing it does first is just like massive reduction on cycle time.
And then obviously the other thing we're doing is on the security front,
building out a bunch of our own security monitoring and analysis
for both the code base and general security practices
so we can kind of stay ahead of anybody who is using AI maliciously there.
So that's kind of how we're using it internally at labs.
More generally, there's
obviously a lot of great AI development going on in the ecosystem, especially the AI BTC.dev guys
have been really driving forward on that. Someone else just kicked me a couple days ago. There is,
I forget the name of which website it is, but somebody's building an entire developer tool stack
for AI agents. And I think that really goes to how we're thinking
about it here.
You guys probably heard me on previous town halls
and previous spaces talking about like,
well, we're not gonna be like the AI first chain, right?
We're not gonna like go pivot and go after Tau
or something like that and BitTensor and be like,
oh, run your AI models here.
But what is really fucking crucial that we do
is that the experience of interacting
on stacks is like, is just as good if you are a human or an AI agent, because obviously as we go
forward, AI agents are going to be like moving crypto around a bunch. And so making sure our
docs and our SDKs and like the way the network works itself is compatible to it.
Doing Rick and the marketing team have been doing a ton of work on, I forget what it's
called.
It's the AI equivalent of search engine optimization.
Rick can weigh in a little bit on that and what we've done there to make sure that like
if you go to Claude and ask about programmable Bitcoin or chat GPT or perplexed or whatever, it's going to know about us and make sure it surfers into people.
And I think that's the other really big thing is that like this just changes who can build
applications, right? Again, I think if you talk to any of the app builders in our space who are
working right now, you can do so much more with less. Actually actually it's just like a fun aside story. A friend of mine here in
Bozeman runs a, um, a, uh, barbecue restaurant and he wanted to start to, he started taking
pre-orders for it. And he, uh, posted a, uh, whole Instagram post with like a page of instructions
on what you needed to do in order to place a pre-order
because like you had to only do things in certain ways and like you can only select
these times even though the system will let you select other times.
Three hours of Claude code running in the background while I was doing other things
and boom it had built an entire new online ordering application for his restaurant that only worked in the
way he wanted it to and wouldn't let people do the things he didn't want them to do.
And like, I'm not actually a developer, guys, right?
Like, I'm a tech guy, but I'm not a developer.
And the fact that I was able to build something that literally rivals like what Toast or Chow
Now offers to people is absolutely insane.
And so like, enabling that same thing on stacks,
I think it's really critical in the long-term growth because we want anybody who wants to
build like a crypto app, even if they're not a developer, to be able to come in and do it like
securely and well. Thank you. And one last question before we continue on around governance
updates and SIPs with Claire. All three of you have addressed this at some point in your updates
this morning, but I just want to throw it out there in case there's any additional
comments to add. We're seeing a lot of questions about Stax and STX. And with all of this latest
news, what does this mean for STX? and how is the management of the Treasury looking at from a long-term perspective in this bear cycle and even in the short term as well?
Yeah, I would say, oh, I guess Rina's not still up here.
No, I'm here.
I'm here. Twitter tells me it's not, so I'll let you take it guess Rina's not still up here. No, I'm here. I'm here.
Twitter tells me it's not, so I'll let you take it.
Well, Twitter is rugging you.
I'm sorry.
Cool.
Kyle, was the question about what this means for Stax and how the treasury is being managed in the bear cycle?
I want to make sure I heard you correctly.
Yep.
That is correct. Amazing. So let me answer
it honestly. So the endowment's treasury is designed to protect the STX holders. That's like
our kind of North star going into this. And part of the reason why I took out lines of credit was
explicitly to make sure that I do not have to sell stacks in this down market condition
to fund our operations.
As you all know, as part of SIP 31, the endowment does not sell STX on market or anything like
that.
When we have to fund a small amount of OPEX, think like 100K, 200K, something like that
200K, something like that in the month, I sell via OTC. So I am doing everything that is possible
in the month, I sell via OTC.
to not have to sell STX on market and make sure that there is no down market condition for the
STX token. It's a real commitment to make sure that when reducing sell pressure. At the 24-month
target of Runway, we had based it on the stacks that we already have in our possession and
what will be continued to be minted via emissions so that I am not dependent on price appreciation
to stay funded for the treasury over the next 24 months.
I would say the longer bull market case for Stacks is that Bitcoin staking and kind of
the DeFi on-chain economy shows the world that Stax is the best way
to find a risk-adjusted yield for the Bitcoin economy
and that repricing is kind of in the story.
On more of the treasury management for the bear market,
if you'd seen the blog post,
you'll see that the treasury is actually diversified.
So our treasury is not only STX.
We have BTC, we have stables, we have cash.
So the kind of multi-year horizon is that we continuously rebalance the treasury to add other
assets in our treasury. Really, it's going to be BTC, stables, cash adding to our treasury
so that we have a surely well set of assets that we could utilize and deploy. I'll say the TC and the endowment explicitly
is planning for a scenario that if the bear market goes for longer and lower, our budget
reflects that and our treasury reflects that as well.
I just want to say just real quick to weigh in because, you know, Rena has done a really
great job managing this and, you know, through what is very complex i should also say we don't necessarily i don't
want everyone to get like too sad and think that like there's you know we're in for like definitely
in for like two years of you know absolute misery or something in the crypto world it's the reason
we're doing this and the reason we're taking the conservative approach is obviously that we would
much rather be safe than sorry in this kind of thing, especially that we, you know, maintain plenty of resources,
again, to do all of the key things we need to do on it.
But it's also partly that, like, we're just so stupidly bullish STX, obviously, that it
would be kind of crazy to overspend the treasury now because, like, we're confident it's going
to be worth so much more in the long run and will allow us to build like even more and more and more so part of the big reason that like
even if you know it's not going to be quite as bad as like it might be um it makes sense to kind
of plan for that scenario right now agreed agreed and thank you all three of you for going through all this and also the questions as well.
Manny, have anything else to add? If not, I'm going to keep moving us on as well.
I think you can move on and I'll chime in a bit later.
Okay, sounds good. All right, next up, Claire, talk to us a little bit. Thank you again, everybody. Claire, up next, talk to us a little bit about what's going on with Sips.
Yeah, thanks, Kyle. Can you guys hear me okay?
Loud and clear.
Awesome. Happy Friday. So before I get into some updates, just a quick final plug for the Clarity 5 vote.
final plug for the Clarity 5 vote. As Alex mentioned earlier, the vote is wrapping up
and the count stands. Last I checked, about 98 million stacks in favor of the changes.
So we've met the threshold. Once that vote closes, we're going to move into an audit and then prepare
a breakdown of the final results. So big thank you if you have voted. If you haven't, there's
still about a day left. So feel free to test the new platform if this would be your first vote on that platform.
Okay, yeah, today I think for I'll just take a minute here because I think it's worth resetting on where the foundation stands just heading into the rest of the year, especially in light of the recent changes across the ecosystem. And with that,
we shared a post yesterday that grounds everyone on where the foundation stands and what we're
focused on. As I think most of you already know, our team is leaner. We've been reviewing our spend
and have been really intentional about how we use all of our resources and our time to support the community.
And we've organized that focus around three pillars, and those are governance, education,
and R&D. So under those pillars for the rest of the year, I'll share just a few notes on what that
is going to look like most likely. On governance, the theme for us is visibility. So making it easier to find and follow where important conversations are happening.
And I think as most of you know, we've been working with zero authority to solve for that
with some new tools.
And in addition to the SIP tracker, which is already live, the team is working on a
community grants and projects tracker, which is meant to give anyone a place to share progress
and collaborate on their work. Beyond that, we're also planning to move the forum to a cleaner
platform, and we expect that to be a really seamless shift, but look for more on that,
I think, in the near future. We're excited about that one. The second pillar that we have for the year is education.
And this work is about making sure that people have what they need to participate.
With that, we're working on updated documentation, clear standards for governance leaders,
things like cab rotations to keep fresh perspectives coming in, updates to the steering committee.
And I don't mean just like personnel,
but more so how these committees and how these roles operate in the ecosystem.
We'll be simplifying things like working groups
so that builders have a straightforward path
to creating solutions.
This work also will inherently involve more AI solutions.
So you can expect that from us as well.
We'll be using that for recapping community calls and making a couple different aspects of governance easier to navigate.
And as those things get introduced, we'll be sure to update you guys on what that looks like.
Our third pillar is R&D.
This is about stability and security with labs focused rapidly on shipping, on rapidly shipping, excuse me.
The foundation is really this independent role for reviewing and testing blockchain releases before they reach the community.
So you can almost think of us like a checks and balances layer on upgrades.
layer on upgrades. And within this category, we're also building on the work done with Rendezvous
to embrace some AI tools that help core devs and builders catch vulnerabilities. And finally,
we still remain the legal home for ecosystem IP to make sure Stacks' assets stay protected from
bad actors. So that will continue to be the case for now and for the foreseeable future.
And yeah, I think this is just a really high-level look at these buckets.
But I would say that you can expect some pretty regular updates on these work streams as they take shape more so.
But looking at us as the place for governance, education, and R&D is a good way to understand
the work and how we're prioritizing it this year.
All right.
And then last thing, I really wanted to be sure that everyone knew about the upcoming
roadmap series.
This is going to be a set of four workshops that starts this Thursday, or sorry, excuse
me, not this Thursday, but next Thursday, the 26th.
These are going to cover topics like builder support and scaling, AI governance and more.
If you cannot make a session, we're going to provide outcomes and notes from these workshops.
And then once the series wraps, then the updated roadmap will be presented at a town hall.
Other folks on this call may have more to add on this topic, but this is a really cool series. So I hope you guys can check out the forum post about it and let me know if you have questions. Be sure to sign up. I will drop some links to this and the other info that I've shared here. But yeah, reach out anytime with questions.
Awesome.
Back to you.
Thanks so much, Claire. Next up, Adriano for an update on the technicals.
Thanks so much, Claire.
Next up, Adriano for an update on the technicals.
Hello, I hope you guys can hear me
and that this time Twitter gods will help.
Thank you so much for having me on stage, Kyle,
and it's a pleasure to be here.
I'm gonna keep it small since we have talked already
quite a lot about what's coming,
but in short, we are gonna to release STAT 3.4.
It is actually being voted upon right now.
There's still one day left to vote.
So go ahead and give everybody your vote if you want to.
This is going to be a nice quality of life improvement
that is going to allow us to do a couple of nice things.
The first one is that we're going to ship a new set of post-conditions,
which are going to basically allow for better expressivity
in order to do the same things better and more securely.
In particular, this stuff is described in SIP 40, and it allows you to specify the originator of a transaction
as the one that needs to be protected by post conditions rather than having blankets allow
or deny conditions.
And it allows better post conditions for NFTs.
We have also fixed a couple of issues in Clarity 4, introduced a couple new nice things in
Clarity 5, a couple of opcodes that builders asked for in order to build better DeFi apps.
We made the VM a lot more powerful because we are making the stack debt, which means pretty much
how much code you can execute in a single transaction double. And lastly, we are making the stack depth, which means pretty much how much code you can execute in a single transaction double.
And lastly, we are removing the at block opcode.
This is part of our roadmap in order to make stacks perform a lot better and run a lot more lightly.
In particular, this is a first step in order to run pruned nodes,
In particular, this is a first step in order to run pruned nodes,
which will mean that for anybody that runs a node,
you're going to be able to run it with reduced disk state
and a lot less money in order to operate it at home,
in the cloud, or wherever you are running your node.
We also already shipped MARF compression,
which reduced the amount of disk required by every
new block. And so this is part of a bigger roadmap to make stocks faster, leaner, and
a lot better. Kyle, I'm going to give it back to you and I'm going to keep it short for
today.
Thank you very much, Adriano. Next up, Andre, talk to us a little bit about what's going
on with Bitcoin staking.
Yeah, thank you, Kyle.
And good morning, everyone.
It's a pleasure to be here as always.
So I'll give a quick product update this time around.
You've already heard in this call,
a big focus of this year is on Bitcoin staking.
And a lot of the core thesis really comes down to that Bitcoin holders want to access yield
without giving up their custody.
We've seen really clear demand for this and there's a significant addressable market for
doing it in a trustless and non-custodial way.
And we think that Stacks is uniquely positioned to deliver on this, building on a consensus
mechanism that has already distributed over 4,000 Bitcoin since the network launched in
2021. Furthermore, we've proven out this concept through the existing dual stacking program,
which saw over 100 million of value within its first three months. So we're excited to
double down on that progress and continue to expand it. So as far as the status update, the research and development is ongoing. We're actively
modeling different designs for self-custodial Bitcoin staking, and importantly, how STX can be
an integral part of the capital formation and the network growth there. And so far,
early feedback from institutions has been very positive for
this. So more to share on this soon. Definitely stay tuned. And lastly, I'll just also add
that we are, as part of this, continuing to explore future opportunities to add to the
roadmap. Everything from private transactions, AI growth, looking closely at the work that
AIBTC team has been doing, and non-custodial lending, so other sorts of trustless DeFi
products that we can roll out to the market. And so again, the product team is closely following
the latest progress in all of these categories and evaluating them for
opportunities to add to our longer-term roadmap. And yeah, as I mentioned, stay tuned for more
updates. We'll be sharing more on Bitcoin staking and the broader roadmap plans over the coming
weeks. So yeah, thanks everyone. And back to you, Kyle. Thanks, Andre. Next up, Rick,
Thanks, everyone. And back to you, Kyle.
Thanks, Andre.
Next up, Rick.
Recent marketing and a little bit more on the CMO.
Thanks, Kyle. Appreciate it.
Can you hear me all right?
Loud and clear.
Great.
So as Alex mentions, we are indeed onboarding a fractional CMO
with executive level experience in prominent crypto networks.
And he'll be incredibly valuable in pointing us to the right directions to make stacks
grow further and distribute our narrative quicker.
And really having another marketing expert, especially with that tokenized ecosystem
background, will be super beneficial to us as we look to grow as an ecosystem.
So I'm very stoked to start working with him.
And with that said, the marketing team obviously isn't standing still.
So you may have seen crypto and DeFi voices like Stacey Mu, Rand Group, DeFi Edge, DeFi Warhol, and others dive deeper into Stacks in the X space.
in the X space.
We are working harder than ever
to try and make sure Stacks is top of mind
for these crypto leaders
who are able to bring Stacks to a broader
and especially non-Stacks native audience,
which is really our goal.
So if you see them around talking about Stacks,
but even more so,
if you see new people from their communities
exploring Stacks,
please do welcome them with open arms
and make them feel welcome because I think that's what this ecosystem really is about. We've also been updating a lot
of evergreen content explaining Stacks, the SDX token, SBDC, our applications, and other things
crucial to making sure that there is a clear journey outlined for people to learn about our
ecosystem and about Stacks, about SDX and everything in between.
And that's because our goal is really to make everything more user facing.
And we've already been seeing a lot of success with this, as we saw a 180 day high in visitors coming to Stacks landing pages,
which is so great to see and shows that the work we're doing is really resulting in more eyes on Stacks, which is really all we want.
And also, Stacks is now more and more being represented in leading crypto media.
This week, the block covered Stacks' latest upgrades for network capacity that Adriana
was talking about.
Alex and Muneeb joined major crypto news outlets from Wolverine Street to Roxham and others.
And we're really making sure that
Stacks has kept top of mind for
every crypto audience from your average
investor to actual
app users. And I want to end
it on AI demand
generation or, as Alex mentioned,
generative engine optimization.
Marketing team is really doing incredible
work in making sure that crypto
AI tools such as CoinMarketCap AI, as well as Claude, as well as ChatGPT,
that they cite the correct sources and mention Stacks and SDX in the right context and especially also more frequently.
And we don't want to give away too much of the strategy here, but there are some great early results.
We're seeing that growth hack our way into these ai
models and make sure more people start finding out about stacks like even two days ago coin market
cap ai shared as the access trending because of the latest network upgrades giving 30x capacity
and the reason why it uses that has different levels of planning making sure that those media
hits and the content is easy findable
in the right context for these AI models.
And so, yeah, there's been great work going on there
that we really look forward to further expand.
And speaking of AI,
lastly, I do want to give a shout out to the AI BTC team.
They've been doing awesome work
and the marketing team has already seen a lot of success
creating more momentum for Stacks
through the rise of AI agents autonomously earning Bitcoin with key opinion
leaders catching on, articles that perform well. So yeah, that's all been going great for us and
be prepared to see more on that front. And yeah, that's pretty much it for me. Thanks, Kyle.
Thanks, Rick. Diego, I see you have made it to the stage.
A little update on Bitflow for us, please.
Good morning. How are you guys doing? Can you hear me?
Loud and clear.
Well, things have been going pretty well.
I mean, it's been two weeks since we launched HODL,
the concentrated liquidity engine on Bitcoin, built probably on Stax, which is the first institutional great market maker tooling made for this market and made for Bitcoin economy.
Dylan just posted here.
I'll try to pin it up as well.
But we just had over $160 million worth of tokens that have moved through the biflo liquidity
concentrated liquidity engine in just two weeks which is pretty awesome it just shows the efficiency
of the model and the work that the team has put behind and also this you know translates to more yield more more fees more volume had almost 14,000 transactions and a total volume of swaps of
nearly 21 million for liquidity that's around 2 million right now. So that just shows almost a 10x
volume to TVL ratio, which is what we were aiming for. And it shows that the infrastructure is
there. We're ready for the next steps and we're ready to bring in even more liquidity and make
Stacks the default venue for Bitcoin to USD spot as well. As we all know, 99% of the Bitcoin trading
happens on centralized exchange and it's time for us to bring it
home and keep liquidity here.
Until now, Bitcoin had to leave the ecosystem to find liquidity and to find a dollar.
Not anymore, especially with the Bitcoin and USDCX via Circle Reserve.
We have a huge opportunity in front of us to capture this $8 trillion spot market. And I think stacks is ready. Bifo is ready. I'm ready.
Right on. I'd say we're ready. Diego. Great, great way to not only get the community amplified,
but also close us out for today's and this month's town hall as well. Thank you to all of our speakers
and to all of you, the community who participated, listened in, join and contribute, vote and give so
much to this entire ecosystem. We're very thankful and very appreciative of each and every one of you
and all the contributions across as well. As discussed today, everything here was for educational purposes only,
not financial advice.
Please make sure to do your own research.
That said, until next time, I'm your host, Kyle.
Everyone have a wonderful day, evening, or morning,
wherever you may be tuning in from around the world,
and we'll see you back here next month.
Take care, everybody. from around the world and we'll see you back here next month take care everybody Thank you.
