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Stacks Townhall
Recorded: Dec. 18, 2025 Duration: 1:04:12Space Recording
Short Summary
The Stacks ecosystem is gearing up for an exciting 2026 with the launch of USDC, new yield opportunities, and a focus on self-custodial solutions. Key updates from the recent town hall highlight partnerships, project launches, and a commitment to enhancing governance and community engagement, setting the stage for significant growth in the Bitcoin economy.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Hello, hello, everybody.
Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, wherever you may be tuning in from around
the world to join us today at our December Stacks Town Hall and our final town hall for
town hall and our final town hall for 2025. We've got a ton of speakers that are going to be joining
2025.
us from across the ecosystem. So we're just waiting for one or two more to jump up on stage
and they'll be here with us in just a few moments as well. That said, I will kick us off with
just a quick disclaimer. Again, everything here discussed, like every town hall, is for educational purposes only, not financial advice. Please do your own research. everything that's happening across the Stacks ecosystem and the wider Bitcoin ecosystem as well,
and all the developments in between, along with some of the builders and founders and executives
from across the ecosystem to be able to share product updates and where things are to keep you
on top of all things Stacks and Bitcoin. I'm your host today, Kyle Ellicott. It's a pleasure to join all of you.
As we go ahead and wait for one more speaker to join on stage, I will give you all a quick
update from my side at the Stacks Asia Foundation. We just returned from Abu Dhabi Finance Week,
where we were able to have a very successful week of not just participating in Abu Dhabi Finance Week,
which is about a four or five day event covering everything financial and also emerging technology in the UAE,
but also participated in Bitcoin Mina, Solana Breakpoint and so many other side summits and conferences as well. And a big thank
you to all of our global partners that were in the region with us and those locally in the UAE
and Abu Dhabi, including ADGM for hosting us all week long. We did have some very exciting
headlines. We were able to present to multiple family offices and venture funds
from within both the UAE and the wider GCC on Bitcoin's evolving role, not just a store of
value, but a productive asset, as we talk about a lot here within Stacks, and how Stacks is
empowering that future and also the future of Bitcoin staking. And a big thank you to Hash and ADGM, who invited myself to participate and represent the Stacks ecosystem and the Bitcoin side of the industry at their Web3 Leaders Roundtable,
Roundtable, where many of us across the industry talked about the future of regulation, policy,
institutional integration, and what the future may look like when it comes to Bitcoin and finance
as well. So that's a quick update on our side of the house. And that said, we've now got one of two,
we've got two of two of our speakers. Ladies and gentlemen, before before we kick off make sure you stay tuned after today's
town hall for one of the greatest events of the year and probably the most exciting event of your
holiday season the stackies uh that said let's go ahead and kick it off manib and alex welcome to
the stage give us a quick introduction and what's happening in the world of Stacks? Well, let's see. I'm a Gemini.
I like long walks on the beach and bringing programmability to Bitcoin.
Oh, and I also really like USDC usable on Stacks,
so that's pretty cool.
If you have not...
Good morning, everybody.
Good morning.
I'm Alex, CEO of Stacks Labs,
building up Stacks.
If you have not already bridged some USDC into Stacks
and used Circle's beautiful new pure USDC on Stacks,
it's pretty great.
I just did my first official real live one.
We've also got a beautiful new bridge up at bridge.stacks.co.
That one also will serve as a little bit of a preview
of kind of what our evolving design language looks like.
I think one of the things,
I can't remember if we talked about this like really explicitly,
but just really continuing to drive forward
what like our UI looks like and clean it up.
I think, you know, there was rightfully some complaints
about kind of what we used to be, what things used to look like. There's actually, I think I was rightfully some complaints about kind of what we used to be,
what things used to look like.
There's actually, I think I'm allowed to tease
that there's an update to the SBTC bridge
coming as well in the very near term
that will update to kind of use
that exact same kind of design language,
actually, before we all start merging everything together,
even into a single kind of
app that does all of the bridging and things across stacks. So just goal is to make it really,
really easy for people to interact with it, bring their assets over and on because obviously
that is a really big deal for things overall. Other than that, there's one big topic that I kind of have to talk about
today, which is just kind of thinking about what our ongoing R&D looks like and what kind
of the next major evolutions in stacks looks like. But I guess, I don't know, Manib, any
thoughts or anything you want to share before I start diving into that and we talk about
I start diving into that and we talk about that some?
that some?
I think I'm obviously super excited about the announcement that just went live from
Jeremy at Circle as well about USDC.
This was obviously a long time coming, but it's a pretty historic moment.
The way I view this is stablecoins started on Bitcoin
with Tether that launched
way back in the day on Bitcoin L1.
Like that's literally
how stablecoins started.
And today, the major stablecoin
coming in some ways,
quote unquote, back to Bitcoin
on the leading Bitcoin L2
is I think, I think it's
a historic moment.
It's kind of like saying the innovation is coming back to Bitcoin. And now I think with access to
a tier one stable coin, like this is exactly what our DeFi ecosystem needed. So I'm super
excited about that.
Yeah, it's going to be going to be really great. And there's a ton of other updates
kind of to the DeFi apps I know that are coming down the line with new pools that we're going to be spinning up.
So there will be a lot.
You know, today's really is just like the first step one, getting it fully live on mainnet, fully usable by everyone.
Give it a little bit of time to settle in on that.
And then you'll see a bunch of more new pushes coming down as well that I don't know.
Other speakers may talk some more on.
But with that said, let's dive in and start talking about
kind of like what's next for Stacks, right?
Where do we go from here?
And I think, you know,
so A, I actually just posted a thing on the forum about this.
Don't go read it. Listen to me talk first,
but you can go read it afterwards.
And then I'll also, you know, obviously tweet it out too.
But we've spent the last few months really doing a lot of technical and product,
especially product deep dive on where we want to go and continue to drive,
you know, kind of the niche and Stacks and advance kind of our mission
of the Bitcoin economy and our North Star, right?
And I think the North Star for Stacks has kind of always been, you know, again, playing with the
wording a little bit, but like fundamentally, it has always been to, you know, we say, we call it
like make the Bitcoin economy. But what that really means is provide all this functionality that
Bitcoin doesn't and arguably really shouldn't have itself, right? It's never going to be
programmable. It's never going to be that scalable. But in order to be valuable, it has to. And
actually, even more than that, one of the things we realized when we were sitting and talking
through some of this is that as wonderful as seeing the integration of Bitcoin into the larger
and traditional financial system is,
it's actually also a true threat for Bitcoin.
Not just because it couldn't get co-opted or whatnot,
but actually just quite literally,
if everyone is doing all of their Bitcoin transacting through other blockchains or through the traditional financial system
and there's no actual transaction volume on Bitcoin,
how does Bitcoin
charge enough fees to actually defend itself, right? This is a truly existential thing.
We've talked, I think probably a lot of us have felt like the irony of Bitcoin Max is hating people
building on top of Bitcoin when they like don't realize this is literally, you know, your two
options are basically either us bringing a bunch of super high-value transactions to it, or just relying on BlackRock and Coinbase spending a bunch of money to mine unprofitably in the future so that they can keep their businesses going.
And I'm not sure like five giant transnational corporations spending a bunch of money to mine Bitcoin
so that they can do it.
That feels like the opposite of decentralized.
And so, you know, there's a reason that Stacks
and like keeping transaction volume on top of Bitcoin,
building these additional features is so, so important
because we don't want to see Bitcoin
being cut out of Bitcoin's growth, right?
But the other key thing is people really like Bitcoin.
They really like keeping control of it.
And I think as Bitcoin continues to get more and more valuable, right,
the trustlessness aspect continues to also get more and more important to it.
And so I think basically where we're landing focusing is
how do we build all of the programming on the L2 to create that's where all those high value transactions happen and we can afford to help support Bitcoin through the mining of stacks.
But allow people to maintain custody of their assets on the L1.
And I think there's kind of five different phases we've identified that we can kind of sort of like, you know, elements or things we can do to drive that, right?
First one is yield, right?
Is allowing people to earn yield and participate in dual stacking while still keeping possession of their Bitcoin on the L1, right?
That alone would open up huge, huge amounts.
We've talked to a lot of investors where they just, you know, either for comfort levels or like control rules, they can't go over a bridge with their Bitcoin.
And so they're really stuck out of the game right now. But they are willing to do other things like
take stacks positions as part of it, right? Or, you know, use stacks to unlock capacity
for their staking. So dual staking is number one. Again, the Bitcoin-grade safety,
fast, scalable, and low-cost payments, privacy, and then deeper liquidity, right? These are all
things that Bitcoin needs and that stacks can really do. And so that's where we're really
looking at going right now, which is the building out these additional capability where you'll keep all the
programmability on the L2, but over the next few years, we'll roll out more and more features that
let you do things. So we'll start with pretty quickly by like Q1 next year, you can enroll in
dual staking by keeping your Bitcoin on the L1 if you want. And then with the simple click of a button,
you come over the bridge if you want to deploy into DeFi
and also have an LST so that you can be dual staking
and enrolled in DeFi.
Still working on the full technical designs of it,
but it's a pretty straightforward thing for us to do.
Then we can also do things like the trust-minimized payment,
adding the privacy transactions to it. Because again,
Bitcoin's never going to have privacy at the base layer, but we can absolutely add selective privacy
for people so that you don't have to let everyone see what you're doing, but you can still expose
it to your auditors and things if you need it for. And then finally, we build down the line
all the way to trust minimized, a full Bitcoin DeFi. Obviously, that's a thing that a lot of people are working on.
I think we're actually still a bit of a way away from it.
But I think the actual beautiful thing about it is
if there's one thing we've all learned about the crypto world,
it's that they hate when you finish shipping things.
There's nothing worse in crypto than actually shipping something.
And so I think what our goal is,
is to set out this really ambitious, like multi-year long timeline that we can be continually releasing things against and
adding more and more capability and features to and bringing in more and more capital.
But unlike with Nakamoto or something, we're never quite quote unquote done so that people always
have something more to be looking towards. They always really see, hey, this is the thing they're doing next.
This is where even more growth is going to come from out of them.
So I'm going to pause for a quick second there, Manib.
I just kind of dumped a lot there.
Any thoughts from you on the stuff we've been thinking about?
Because you've obviously, you know, I know you've been both, A, very heavy in,
I think, a lot of the investor meetings and talking to folks,
but also on the technical design work with like me and Jude and Adriano
and kind of some of the other core devs and folks who are working on this?
Yes, so I think I would say that the roots of this really go back to
probably like summer of this year, if not a little bit sooner.
And the main question was that, you know, we have a 10 plus year vision
and what we want to see in a thriving on-chain Bitcoin economy, right?
And after sort of like shipping Nakamoto, shipping SVDC,
getting, you know, $500 million of Bitcoin deployed,
obviously the biggest question was,
what are we focusing on next?
And I think that's where,
so like going back to the drawing board,
talking to a lot of the real users, right?
So one of the benefits that we have
of being in the Bitcoin space for so long
is that we have extremely strong
and extremely unique peer group
who are the actual Bitcoin holders.
Like some of them are large holders,
some of them are just OG holders,
but they are the Bitcoin community.
And I think it's a little bit like
building a product for yourself
and building a product that you want to use
and your friends want to use
and your fellow Bitcoiners want to use.
So I think going back to the drawing board for what exactly are we focusing on next,
I think we know what's going to exist like five years out, 10 years out, right?
Like a thriving on-chain economy.
It's the largest sort of like ecosystem in terms of BTC being deployed and used and all the users are here.
I think we sort of like feel it.
But the question of like what exactly to focus on next was extremely important.
And in talking to people or doing a lot of deep thinking, the biggest, single biggest
thing that sort of like stands out is what would it take for a lot of Bitcoin folks to actually use their Bitcoin and deploy capital?
And I think self-custodial is that obvious thing.
Every person that we talk to, every institution that we talk to, it's crystal clear that they are looking for self-custodial ways of doing things.
Why? Because people perceive Bitcoin to be so valuable
that their risk assessment on Bitcoin is always very different from other assets.
They're fine using other assets in more risky manners
because they inherently value it less.
But when it comes to Bitcoin,
that's their most valuable thing, right?
Like I won't take names,
but there are even liquid funds in crypto
who might not even appear like they're Bitcoin heavy
from their online sort of like communications
and persona and so on.
But internally, they actually keep
all of their profits in Bitcoin, right?
So they'll go into a trade, they'll make some money,
and whatever profits they're making, they'll actually convert it back to Bitcoin.
Because Bitcoin is their hurdle rate.
Bitcoin is what they're trying to outperform.
And I think that's very interesting to know.
So when we talk to them about, hey, what would it take you to actually deploy their Bitcoin,
the safety standards and what needs to happen actually go up a lot.
So starting from that point, we directed a lot of the R&D work.
And this has been a long time.
People would be familiar with Jude Nelson, one of the core developers.
with Jude Nelson, one of the core developers.
He did his PhD with me at Princeton
and some of the other researchers in the ecosystem.
They've been at this problem for a while.
And I think it's a holy grail problem if you think about it.
Even if you go back all the way to, you know,
block streams, papers about L2s 10 years back,
the holy grail problem has always been
how to deploy Bitcoin in a trustless way.
This is literally the thing, you know,
everyone is trying to crack.
Bitmeam and other solutions,
they're trying to do this as well.
And I think we've made a ton of progress.
As Alex mentioned, there is a forum blog post
and we've sort of like done that intentionally
because, you know, we're not
trying to do a huge marketing launch here and sort of like beat the drums right now. We want to do
a very targeted sort of like feedback loop with community members, with real builders in the
ecosystem and sort of like get their feedback, learn more before actually going out
with a full sort of like, you know,
bells and whistles about, hey, look,
this is the thing that we have built, right?
So on purpose, this is a very sort of like
humble community driven,
we just dropped some alpha publicly
for the community to go and look at
what exactly will be happening.
And I think the thing that I'm most excited about is,
like you have, let's call it a technical breakthrough,
and it needs to meet some real market demand.
And I've been talking about this a little bit publicly before,
that Bitcoin yield, like BTC on BTC yield,
is a thing that the market is absolutely ready for right now. And there are
many reasons for it, but one of the reasons is also these Bitcoin treasury companies. There are
so many of these Bitcoin treasury companies out there and they have market pressure to actually
have some income on their Bitcoin because they need to report their quarterly earnings and their
income statements and so on. They can't just be holding the assets.
They need to show that they can actually generate income on Bitcoin.
And it's a very unique scenario.
It didn't really exist even a year ago, two years ago, or so on,
where there are large builders of Bitcoin who have public pressure
to go and actually generate income on their Bitcoin.
So connecting Bitcoin staking, so I mean BTC on BTC yield, with this strong market demand is something that we can focus on right now.
And this is something that we can chip and we can show leadership on. which is absolutely critical to get right, is that as that product takes off
and as more Bitcoin comes in
into the staking product,
you need a clear value accrual mechanism to SDX.
And this actually came up
in a bunch of our discussions
with large Bitcoin miners
where we were trying to explain
how the system is going to work.
And one analogy that we used was that, you know,
just like people have mining capacity,
imagine you're a large Bitcoin miner,
you have mining capacity.
You have invested in, you have OPEX invested in your equipment,
and then that gives you the ability to mine Bitcoin,
and that's what you do, right?
And over here, it's an investment
and maybe the equipment depreciates over time.
For staking, Bitcoin staking doesn't exist right now,
largely speaking, right?
I know some products have tried it at some scale,
but broadly speaking, it doesn't exist right now.
And if Stacks, STX, is your staking capacity, right?
The more STX you have, the more Bitcoin you can deploy
and earn a BDC yield on it.
Then it gives a very interesting framework to people.
That, okay, this is the Bitcoin staking industry.
Stacks is your staking capacity.
And there is a bonding curve where you can figure out
that how much Bitcoin you can deploy and earn a yield.
And I think a lot of people get that analogy because then they're thinking about,
oh, this could be a huge industry because staking industry just between Ethereum and Solana
is like $150 billion industry, even at these prices, right?
So it's a potentially very large market.
There's strong demand for Bitcoin that is looking for on-chain yields.
And I think we sort of have this perfect product in the middle where the largest project in Bitcoin and Stacks is focusing a ton of effort because we've had this breakthrough around self-custodial.
And we can do this in a self-custodial way with strong value accrual to STX.
And I think more details around this are going to come out.
The post that we've dropped in the forum right now
teases out some of the high level.
And then there are technical papers,
there are economic paper around it
for how this is going to work.
And we're inviting all the builders and community members
to basically come and give more
feedback so it's really alpha for all of you uh before the end of the year and and also to be
involved right like this is again a community project open source project we want everyone to
come in and help help us uh there are next steps as well like what happens after bitcoin staking
what's the focus but i'm going to pause there for now because I know it's a lot to digest.
And we can come back to,
okay, what's the thing right after that?
What's the thing right after that?
Because as Alec said,
one of the things that we've learned is
that you need to set out a multi-year roadmap
and always be shipping, right?
So people always have something to look forward to.
Once one thing is delivered,
they're like, oh, very quickly, this other thing is coming.
And I think that just helps everyone, especially given the dynamics of the crypto markets.
Amazing. Thank you, Maneem and Alex.
Before we transition into our next segment with Rina and the end endowment anything else to add on to that alex
uh as well it was as many said it was a lot it's very yeah no i would say it's pretty dense
there's a lot there's a lot in there uh but i think it's um i think it's pretty good somewhere
like i said i just posted up on the forum i'm dropping twitter thread now so check it out and
let me know what you think awesome thank. Thank you very much, Alex and
Manib. We'll get the thread posted or, excuse me, pinned at the top of our spaces today so that
everyone has the link ready to jump in. And thank you very much, Manib and Alex, for your updates
today. Next up, Rena, talk to us about the endowment. Hey, everyone. Good morning. Good
morning, stackers. I wanted to provide an update
from the endowment. I want to do an overview of the budget proposal, and that was approved and
now publicly available for the community. So in December, the Treasury Committee met for a full
quorum and set out our priorities for 2026. As a reminder, the Treasury Committee is kind of the advisory board that
oversees how the endowment does funding. Our committee is actually made up of community
members. So friends like Andrea from Bitcoin Frontier Fund, Dylan from Bitflow, Jonathan
from Signal 21, Luis from Ryder, and the community favorite Jackman Switcher all have all weighed in on how we are doing
our budgeting alongside our OGs with Manif, Mitchell, and Alex.
So starting off with the budget, the committee approved a $27 million operating budget for
2026 alongside 25 million stacks allocated as working capital.
This would establish a solid financial runway,
but still understanding that macro conditions are tough, and so we are preserving as much
flexibility as we can for our long-term treasury and really focusing on capital efficiency and
execution. On the areas of spending, I'd say the budget is weighed really towards what compounds
for long-term value for security, ecosystem programs, DeFi working capital, and engineering.
We did make a lot of intentional trade-offs to reduce discretionary spend and prioritize areas that will directly impact the community for builder support, user acquisition, safety, or on-chain capital.
user acquisition, safety for on-chain capital. So it's a little bit different than previous years
because we are being very intentional of making sure that as a CMO is hired that they have budget
to facilitate new programs. As a new grants program and accelerator are launching in Q1
January of next year that there is funding available for people to seek. So this is a
intentional switch for fewer programs that have clear outcomes that directly benefit the community.
So starting off with a refresh grants program, the way the endowment has defined this is that
there are defined tracks for builders to seek, whether it's for incentives,
security audits, bug bounties, helping to release a new feature, even marketing programs and such.
We have grant funding allocated for this. And the cycles will be rolling so people can apply
on a rolling basis. And the commitment is to actually make decisions within a two-week time frame and get
people the funding and the community what they need. Alongside that, there is a new accelerator
underway with some of our treasury committee members and other community members so that we
can help a smaller number of high potential teams really hone in on building on stacks. We have great
builders here today, but we always want to
continue to expand our user awareness and our brand funnel to new builder, other builders in
crypto who have not discovered the beauty of Bitcoin L2s. And so that's what the accelerator
is there for. DeFi, working capital is a really clear priority for us at the endowment. So the Stacks allocation is focused on liquidity mining
incentives, ecosystem deployments. Your endowment is actually degen. We deploy on chain and we are
going to continue to deploy on chain, providing liquidity to AMMs, Lend and Borrows, perps,
everything kind of under the sun, making sure that our endowment is actually using our own products.
under the sun, making sure that our endowment is actually using our own products.
Finally, I want to touch on marketing and growth. This is an intentional shift to make sure that
we are focusing this year, next calendar year spend on user acquisition, activation, and making
sure we're spending to support applications who are driving strong user engagement. Our community is the heart of
our user acquisition and engagement. And so the more and more that we leave funding for that
is important to us. And then as a transparency note, you will see regular office hours from me,
from the endowment and fellow TC members on a monthly basis. They will be here on X. So they're open and public for the community.
And I want your feedback. I want you to tell us on where you want us to prioritize partnerships,
where you want us to prioritize marketing, how you would like us to see shifting dynamically.
It is important to us because this is essentially a community treasury that we're safeguarding and deploying on behalf of the community.
And so your feedback matters to me.
And then from the other side of transparency, you have annual reports for me coming out on the stacks.co blog about where our treasury is, how we've spent and such.
So transparency is critical for us.
And then I can't end a endowment budget update without addressing macro conditions.
There is market volatility in price dynamics. And I'll say from the investment thesis,
we are prioritizing capital efficiency and long-term growth. We are extremely aware of what market conditions look like right
now. And so I am exercising as much financial prudence as I possibly can, making sure that as
we return into a upswing market and all of the priorities that Alex and Manim shared about where
Stacks is going, funding will always be there. So with that being said, I just want to
say thank you. I'm looking forward to growing and building the long-term treasury alongside with
everyone. Thank you very much, Rena. Appreciate the update. Excited to see the new Accelerator
and other programs and initiatives roll out here in the new year. Andre, welcome up. Talk to us
a little bit about product and growth.
Good morning, everyone. Can you hear me okay?
Loud and clear. I hope this is your new podcasting mic as well. You sound crystal clear. Welcome to the stage, man.
Nope. Thanks, Kyle. Nope. To come with the tried and true AirPods for this one.
But no, great to be here and
happy USDC launch day, everyone super excited about what
this launch means for the Stacks ecosystem. I'll talk a little bit about that. But also,
while I was getting prepared for today's town hall, I realized that yesterday marked the one
year anniversary of SBTC. I can't believe that the protocol has been live on mainnet for over
a year now. And it's just been amazing to see how far the protocol has been live on mainnet for over a year now.
And it's just been amazing to see how far the ecosystem has come in that time over the
past year. It's really been we've had a number of milestones that have been really awesome
to see really across the ecosystem.
And when I look back at Q4, it was really about execution.
And as we completed the transitions to Stacks Labs, the Stacks ecosystem is really operating
at a high level right now.
We shipped multiple protocol level and product releases that really expand what's possible
on Stacks as the Bitcoin liquidity layer.
So first, with the USDC launch today, bringing a regulated cross-chain stablecoin directly
to the Stacks ecosystem, unlocking Bitcoin-backed lending, trading, and payments use cases, helping
to really establish deep liquidity for Bitcoin-backed markets.
It's a major step forward towards making Stacks a viable place for Bitcoin DeFi at scale. We couldn't be more excited
to work with the Circle team on this launch and what this means for our ecosystem builders moving
forward as we head in to 2026. Also, can't give a product and growth update without talking about
dual stacking. So we shipped dual stacking with really seeing strong demand
from both retail and institutional users to earn Bitcoin yield, really doubling down on what Stacks
does best, which is providing Bitcoin native yield for holders. With these upgrades, we really
align the incentives between Bitcoin holders and the growth of the Stacks ecosystem so that we can both onboard capital and create a sustainable value capture mechanism
for STX alongside of that. And so with these recent upgrades, we've really set the groundwork
for more capital efficient Bitcoin deployments and Stacks incentive designs going forward that should be rolled out in the
new year. We had some meaningful improvements on the developer experience. We shipped Clarity 4,
enabling better tooling for builders, safer contracts, and we've had major improvements
towards on-chain scalability. If you've used the Stacks chain lately, you can just feel
how much faster everything is performing,
seeing very high uptime and transactions settling in less than five seconds. It's been a very
meaningful user experience improvement alongside of this. So what's next? What do we have to look
forward to in 2026 Q1 and beyond?. Really the focus is around scaling usage,
continuing to improve the user experience on stacks
and onboard more capital into the ecosystem.
So we'll have a number of DeFi product launches
coming in early Q1 from lending
to upgraded decentralized exchange models,
yield products built on top of USDCX and SVTC.
We're going to be focusing on both core infrastructure as well as applications
that allow users to actually deploy capital with a really seamless user experience
and continuing to improve the coordination between protocol developers,
builders and the go to market between them.
In Q1, we're also expecting our wormhole integration
to launch, so expanding Stacks' reach into broader DeFi liquidity networks, enabling more
capital-efficient capital flows between Stacks and the broader DeFi ecosystem. And as we touched
on earlier with Manu and Alex, a large part of the focus is on self-custodial
staking and programmability, really continuing to push the bar forward toward trust-minimized
and ideally trustless assumptions while using Bitcoin on-chain, giving users the ability to
always exit unilaterally and ensure that their Bitcoin is being deployed in a safe and trust
minimized way on chain. In addition to that, we'll be rolling out some improvements to the SBDC
bridge, again, continuing to reduce friction, improve the user experience there, and really
make Stacks the best place for on-chain Bitcoin DeFi.
So really excited to end the year strong on the USDCX launch
and everything that we have cooking into the new year.
Yeah, thanks, folks. That's it for me.
Thank you very much, Andre.
And happy belated birthday to SBTC, to you, the team, and to the entire ecosystem.
Next up, Rick.
Welcome to the stage.
Thank you, Carl.
Thanks for having me.
Can you hear me all right?
Loud and clear.
Cool.
All right.
Hello, everyone.
Hope you are all excited about both the Circle USDC launch on Stacks,
as well as Alex and Manoub's discussion and the forum post that gives us a look into 2026 with Stax.
In my view, from the Stax Labs marketing team's perspective, both these launches
will kick off a phase of growth for Stax.
And for us, the marketing team at Labs, we have been working hard on preparing
incentive campaigns for USDC on Stax, as well as efforts ranging from KOLs to sponsorships to start reaching outside of our own ecosystem
and bring people familiar to USDC into our ecosystem.
What should then trickle down into the different other apps and use cases for Stacks as well.
And then on the other exciting sides is that part of the preview of Stacks in 2026, you'll see that self-custodial BTC denominated yield mechanism.
And to me, earning Bitcoin on your Bitcoin without giving up control is a unique positioning for Stacks that currently no other ecosystem or project has.
And the reason why that's exciting, obviously, is that together with the broader vision in mind and again please read the forum personally feedback i believe this would give
stacks a major competitive edge and for the marketing team a good narrative to build on
so as you've heard we're keeping this within our community for now as we slowly start spreading
this narrative but plans are currently in the works to expose this Bitcoin and crypto native audiences to this new safe Bitcoin staking mechanism on Stacks, as well
as their ability to increase their Bitcoin yield capacity with exposure to SDX, triggering that
value accrual mechanism for Stacks. So this gives a clear story for who we are reaching out to and
the narrative that we want to drive a
reason for people to be excited about sex and a simple why for joining the ecosystem so yes we'll
start slow with almost whispering about the plans to you guys investors and other people validating
the ideas but as we work in in the open together with the community, we are preparing for that growth phase to come later.
So all in all, last month was really spent on preparing for this with the right SEO contents, tutorials, KOL network building, incentive campaigns and narrative experimentation. USDC coming to Stacks and then the engineers working on designs allowing BTC holders to safely
own Bitcoin yields, we can start ramping up our distribution channels with the story we want to
tell. And then I do want to give a shout out to the developer relations, marketing and builder
folks as there's a lot going on as well to support getting our existing and new builders to the next
level from D-grants to talent protocol partnership and from the
endowments plans and accelerator grants program there's a lot going on there that will make stacks
a desirable place for people to start building again with a clear path to scaling your app and
finding funding i believe kenny will talk more about this later but i do want to give that shout
out because i think um people are doing an incredible job there. So, yeah, 2026 is going to be awesome for Stacks.
If you want to help spread the word about Stacks and our narrative, community leaders like Rubes and the Advisor coordinate various community programs focused on creating content about Stacks and simply being part of the SDX Legion by replying, mentioning, and spreading awareness for stacks.
So join the SDX Legion and let's enter year well and start 2026 right.
Thanks, Kyle.
Thank you very much, Rick.
Next up, Claire.
Welcome back to the stage.
Thanks, Kyle.
Great to be here and see a lot of familiar faces.
I'm going to keep our updates pretty high level today so we can get to
the stackies, but I wanted to share a little bit about where we're focused for 2026 and what you
guys can expect. So going into the new year, I would say the foundation's priority is really
representing the community's voice and doing that by improving how governance works in practice.
voice and doing that by improving how governance works in practice. So what that means is reducing
friction, making governance easier to access, and sharing clear signals about what's happening.
So at the end of the day, I think if the community can tell what's happening, trust that proposals
move in a predictable way, and also feel like participation is worth the effort, then we know
we're strengthening governance effectively. And I think this work is already well underway. Earlier this year,
the community began using ballot.gg for on-chain voting. That was a big win, I think. It made
voting more structured, easier to track, easier to participate in. And then more recently,
some of you may have noticed this, Hiro, a long
time community member, I'm sure most or all of you know, began leading governance updates around
calls and working groups. And you might see those appearing on the forum almost daily, I would say.
So that's also folded into that effort around transparency. What's coming next? So we're continuing refinements to SIP 000. This is largely
led by Jesse on our team. I know he's working really hard to strengthen the whole underlying
process for governance and SIPs, and that will be a very public, like, engaged experience with the
whole community. So that's not happening in a siloed way by any means. And once his ideas
are ready to bring forth, we'll be sharing that with you guys. And related to this,
Zero Authority will be sharing an early version of a SIP tracker in the coming weeks. I'm super
excited about this tool because it gives a clear view of where proposals are, what's moving, blocked, coming next, and how to
engage at any point in that SIP lifecycle. So definitely keep an eye out for that. We'll be
sharing more on that soon. Looking ahead, early 2026, we'll be releasing an ecosystem directory
to help people get involved, regardless of whether they're a brand new member to the community or if they've been
around forever, there should be information that's relevant for everyone. And we do expect
quite a few SIPs to reach community vote in the first part of the year. So the focus on that front
will be clearer sequencing, better context, overall more participation as always so again more on that one coming and I would say just to
close out here the goal through all this work is stronger governance through better tools
and systems that can scale as the ecosystem is growing and of course a community that can
participate confidently and without a lot of friction. So I know for builders especially,
it might feel like it's been a long time since we all came together to approve SIP 31.
But even just listening on this call, like so much has already happened in a pretty short period of
time. I would honestly say like the pieces are in place. It's really cool to hear these updates
from Alex and Munib and everyone else here I think the
ecosystem entities are focused the treasury committee just wrapped this amazing session
and there's a clear path for stacks to win in 2026 so that's a really exciting way to end this year
I think you know even despite the macro climate that we're we're all working in right now yeah
so I think last thing I I would just welcome outreach.
Our whole team is here to support and answer questions.
I'm personally eager to connect with more of you,
so please get in touch anytime.
And that's it from us.
Thank you so much, Claire.
Couldn't agree more.
Next up, Kenny.
Welcome to the stage.
Hey, thanks, Kyle.
Yeah, so the DevRel work that has been going on the last few months has really been focused on kind of two high-level goals, and that's bringing new developers and builders into the Stacks ecosystem and then helping to empower those builders with building what they want to build and build things that will contribute to the Stacks ecosystem when they're here.
So from the bringing new developers into the ecosystem, that's been kind of, we've been doing some work partnering with organizations like Talent Protocol, kind of tapping into other ecosystems and other organizations that have networks of developers that we want to kind of bring into stacks as well.
So we've got that Talent Protocol Builder campaign that's going on right now.
Our Dora Hacks competitions have been a really, really awesome source of bringing new builders and developers into the ecosystem.
We're definitely going to be running a lot of those.
Next year, we ran a few of them over the last few months, and we've seen some really cool projects come out of those.
And then for more of the empowering builders and developers side of things, we've been doing a few different things there.
The first is just we've been doing a huge push on revamping and updating the docs. And I'm going to give a big shout out to Eric here because he's really been
spearheading that effort. But if you've been paying attention to the documentation on the
Stacks website, we've got a ton of new content there, reorganizations, really with the goal
there of any builder that comes into the Stacks ecosystem or that is already in the Stacks
ecosystem should be able to go to the docs and be able to get done whatever they need to get done.
So we've been doing a ton of work there to make that as useful as possible.
And then on the other side of that is really just kind of what Rick talked about is,
how can we then take these builders and help them be able to actually build real useful
stuff on Stacks?
So whether they want to build open source developer tools or launch a business or anything
like that, how can we then take them from, okay, you've built something,
you've got the technical skills, but now how do we turn you into like a builder,
not just a developer, but a builder?
And the distinction there is I think, do you have the ability to build your product,
but also make sure that you're able to communicate about it well and message it well?
And are you building something valuable?
And can you take that product and actually start getting users to it and get some initial traction?
So we've been testing out and experimenting with a bunch of different programs around kind of taking builders and helping them to really develop those sort of soft skills and be able to add on to their technical skills with some like marketing and branding and messaging and everything like that.
And really just get them to be to be more prepared for some of these funding resources that we're going to have launching soon with the endowment and everything.
So we've got a couple of different programs around that.
One of them is an invite only program called Ascent that's really designed to take builders and be able to kind of get them,
help with them get that initial traction.
And then we've also got a new one launching soon that I will be announcing here in probably just the next couple of weeks called Stackers. but that's really just going to be a place for builders
to kind of gather and build together.
And we're going to have a couple different competitions
and programs that will run within that as well.
But really just about giving builders a place to build,
empowering them to be able to do it successfully,
and giving them some fun, cool ways to be able to earn some money
while they do that and make it fun.
Thank you so much, Kenny. I appreciate it. Excited for those new
programs initiatives next year. Jacob, welcome up to the stage. Yeah, thanks, Kyle. Jacob here,
founder of Ametica. And yeah, for us, 2026 is really going to be the year of Bitcoin yield.
We have HPTC in the pipeline, our non-custodial Bitcoin yield product. We have
just completed two independent security audits and are now actually rolling it out to our alpha
users. It's going to start next week. Some of you guys here on the call are going to be part of that,
which is really exciting. We are excited about HPTC because it really leverages the whole
ecosystem. It leverages SBTC under the hood.
It uses most of Stacks DeFi, especially Zest, Hermetica, Bitflow, to create a Bitcoin yield
product that I think a lot of Bitcoiner will be very keen on. It is non-custodial. We all like to
retain the control of our Bitcoin as Muneeb and others have discussed.
And so if you deposit BTC into HPTC,
you are the only one that can withdraw the assets.
The protocol can deploy it
and will deploy it into the most profitable yield sources
on StaxDeFi,
but you are the only one that can withdraw it.
It's also fully transparent.
I mean, you will be able to see exactly what
positions are held. You actually see every single transaction that is happening and you can verify
them on the blockchain yourself if you want to. And we have been working really hard to make the
experience really Bitcoin native, meaning you can show up with just BTC in your wallet and then
deposit with one BTC transaction into the protocol. Under the hood,
there's a Stax transactions that happen, but they're abstracted away. And if you want to
withdraw your funds, you also end up, if you want to, with just BTC native in your wallet.
We're expecting the APY to be quite significant at launch. I think something around 10% plus can be expected.
We're rolling it out in phases. The alpha will be the first small group of users, and then we're
going to open it up step-by-step with bigger caps. The first cap is already full, and we're going to
launch it to our waitlist. So if you want to be part of the first tranches, make sure to sign up to our waitlist, hermetica.fi slash waitlist.
And you're getting a lot of information
leading up to the official launch and then first access.
Yeah, so that's it for me.
Thanks guys.
Thanks Jacob.
Make sure everyone to check out the waiting list as well.
Haddon, welcome up to the stage.
Hi everyone, can you hear me clearly?
Yes, loud and clear.
Excellent.
This is Hadan with the Alex Lab Foundation.
And the updates from our side would be that, you know, the second half of 2025, really the huge unlock for Alex has been the release of Clarity 4, which has been really huge. It's something that we're really happy and super proud of the work that the Stacks core devs have done
in responding to some of our requests for both the contract hash functions and restrict
assets. We've begun implementing those.
Our first concrete steps with the Clarity 4 now live is that we're doing our trading pool V2.
So we are doing an AMM upgrade
where our smart contract swaps will be more reliable.
They'll be cheaper and they'll also be more secure for all users using
that restrict asset function. Looking on from there, we do have plans in the future to, again,
relaunch fully permissionless self-listing tokens with the new contract hash functions
that would allow, say, tokens to be generated on stacks
with the same ease as they have been on other chains where that has generated a large amount
of success.
And then after the trading pool V2 upgrade, of course, we'll be applying those new functions
towards the Alex Dam, which will be our concentrated liquidity engine,
which we are very much looking forward to launching.
And so 2026 so far for Alex will be the year of the Alex dam
and end up doing those contract upgrades
and implementing the new power behind Clarity 4
that really make all Stacks contracts inherently more secure
and was really fantastic work done by the core devs.
And so, again, a huge thank you for them and their support
and for the whole community.
Really looking forward to it and very happy
and proud to be on the stage with you guys.
Thank you so much.
Thank you so much, Hadaan. Rubis?
Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on today.
I think I speak as a community member, but also a builder in the space when I, you know, I'm very excited for what 2026 will bring for Stacks.
I'm here today to talk about the indie builders.
So I'm representing a lot of the Stacks community here today.
If I forget you or if I miss you, there is a lot of people to get through.
I will try my best to kind of cover a lot of the topics here.
I think with recent kind of, you know, activation from Stacks, we had the Buenos Aires Hacker House.
We've seen a lot of traction from D-Grant and a lot of the projects are coming out of there,
along with, you know, some more longer standing indie builders.
So I'll go through a couple of the more recent ones.
One of the ones that came out of Hacker House which kind of intrigued me
was the X402 by Toonie, kind of covering agentic payments in STX and SBDC.
I think this was covered on the Stacks Developers page as well.
I think that's something that could have a lot of traction coming into the new year,
and we've seen that pick up as well.
Rafa from FactFun, we've seen him announcing his capsule, which is interesting with the runes batching and coming across the stacks and covering it and verifying on-chain.
I think that could be an interesting angle to go for as well.
go for as well. We have Zero Authority DAO with the Nova AI. Obviously, Zero Authority
We have Zero Authority DAO with the Nova AI.
DAO with the on-chain reputation and gigs, but they're developing with the Nova AI and
kind of exploring the new age for the gig eco. We have the Stacks AI Guild with Hero
Gamer, 300, doing a lot of content-based stuff, kind of empowering a lot of these early stage projects and helping them to to grow on x
and other socials um out of d grounds we have block lift by neutron doing a lot of stuff in the
um in the community and kind of spreading the word of stacks we have crypto noughts by crypto dude
uh which is a first person shooter game on unreal engine with Stax Payments integrated, which is quite cool.
I think they had their first testnet transactions live recently.
We have CineX.
We have a Meme Dex.
We have by Welsh, by one of NJO, a community member there.
We have the Stax Legion, which I'm very excited to be helping with as well.
As Rick mentioned before, expect to see a lot more kind of news coming out of there
and helping to you know spread a lot of the exciting news that stacks have announced um we
have skull coin by xenatron with the find to earn we have deorganized media who are covering
absolutely everything in the ecosystem and again helping to amplify those people um personally
many of you will know me as the co-founder of Stax Tools. We've recently rebranded to Tenero, which is a multi-chain vision that we have with Stax being front and center of that and helping to put us up against runes and other Bitcoin ecosystems.
I think I've covered as many as I possibly can there.
I've spoken a lot there.
I've spoken a lot there.
I'm very excited personally, as I mentioned before,
to get the growth stage going in 2026,
working alongside Rick and bringing a lot of these
big, big, big announcements and getting them to the mass end user.
So I think I've covered everything there.
Thanks for having me on today.
Yeah, thank you for joining, Sarala.
Hi, thanks for having me.
I have a few updates today, so I'll get started. Last town hall,
we spoke about Chainhook 2.0 beta going live. Happy to announce that we have received a lot of
overwhelming requests for beta access, and we've been receiving a lot of feedback on Chainhook 2.0,
a lot of feedback on Chainhook 2.0.
And we are implementing that.
So beta now allows you to also edit Chainhook,
manage your secrets via platform directly.
And our performance and reliability metrics
show that it has been available 100%.
And it has been very highly performant,
kind of exceeding our expectations.
So we want to continue to test that in beta through December
and towards the tail end of Jan
is when we want to launch this production ready
and open the floodgates to everyone.
So all the beta testers, shout out to you,
continue to give us feedback as we improve this and fix bugs.
I also have another interesting update kind of related to the Circle announcement.
We have released a new service database as a service.
Basically, this is what fueling the data for the USDC integration right now and the APIs.
So we have provided access to the Stacks API database, which
is highly, highly powerful and has a lot of valuable indexing and data that helps you get started
building your applications very, very fast. So you don't have to do that on your end.
Right now, we have limited access to Circle and Bitflow and want to continue receiving their feedback
and also the labs team.
This version is read-only at the moment,
comes with a lot of disaster recovery,
replication, and failover capabilities.
So this is a powerful tool for anyone
who's relying on Stacks data.
And we plan to roll this out for more general use in Q1,
so more comps to follow on that timeline.
I have another update for the builders using API.
We have an upcoming V9 release that we are testing,
and this is a breaking change
and will require Genesis Sync for anyone who's running the API.
And we will provide snapshots.
This contains a lot of bug fixes and improvements.
But the major feature that most builders are looking forward to is a significant performance improvement,
especially on querying the transactions and the address fields and data.
And it is going to be very snappy.
So we've added a few indexes and we wrote some of the database stuff behind the scenes.
So this is also upcoming in Jan.
Right now, we are running a Genesis Sync and we'll have more updates in this early next week
for the final release.
That's all I have.
Thanks for having me.
Awesome.
Thank you so much.
Maneem, I'm going to come to you if you're still with us here
for any closing words.
We've got about 60 seconds left.
Just wanted to get any quick thoughts,
but appreciate everyone joining today.
Maneem, any final words?
Yeah, I think I was on the ground in Abu Dhabi recently.
I had a bunch of really interesting chats with people and sort of like the broader industry.
And I think one sentiment that I've definitely seen is anytime that the markets go down,
the markets go down, people sort of like, quote unquote, come back to Bitcoin.
people sort of like, quote unquote, come back to Bitcoin.
Like, as I was mentioning earlier, a bunch of these liquid funds are sort of like moving
back into BTC, running basis trades on Bitcoin now and not doing risky stuff.
And even people in general, they have this gut feeling that, hey, I know Bitcoin is going
to be valuable.
I don't know about these million other things, right?
Like what's going to happen over there?
So you generally see the shift back to Bitcoin every cycle,
every time the markets go down.
And I think what's happening is, and why our work is so critical is,
that every time, you know, Bitcoin's infrastructure
is not sort of like fully there to absorb the users and all the use cases and
applications, then Stacks is sort of like leading the charge there, right? Every single cycle,
every two, three years, right? We make a huge dent and we make a huge dent and so on. So I think
we're going through like one more of that cycle. This time around, I think that we have all the critical pieces, like the stable coins going live, the
Bitcoin deployment stuff happening, the speeds getting there with Nakamoto, right? And I think
self-custodial is likely one of that final puzzle pieces where, you know, Bitcoiners can deploy large
amounts of capital because they can dip their toes, for example, first and staking by just saying, OK, I'm just locking it on the L1.
Let me try. Let me try this thing out.
But it's an onboarding mechanism, right?
It's an onboarding mechanism.
It's a momentum building mechanism.
So when markets flush out, you know, of course, we understand where the markets are right now.
we understand where the markets are right now,
but we have the capital,
we are the leading Bitcoin project,
and the world always comes back to Bitcoin,
especially during these times, right?
So this is our time to sort of like, you know,
become a little bit leaner, become more focused,
and really, you know,
when the world comes this time around,
show the world how the Bitcoin on-chain economy really works.
And I really believe in this community. i really believe in the devs here uh i'm here actually more excited than
ever if you would believe me and and i think i think we'll march forward wonderful couldn't agree
more many even i think everyone's updates today further emphasize that and looking ahead to a very exciting start to 2026 and the
years ahead as well as we begin to build that next phase of the Bitcoin economy.
Manif, I saw you on mute. Did you have one more thing to say?
Nope, that's all. Thanks, everyone.
Perfect. Thank you all very much for joining. Thank you to all of the founders, the team members, the executives,
and to all that joined us today from across the entire Stacks ecosystem to share updates on all
that's happening across Stacks in the last 30 days, but also a little bit of a preview to what's
to come in the beginning of new year next year. That said, everybody, it is time for one of the greatest moments of the year and the most
exciting holiday event of your entire season.
It is time for the Stackies.
We're going to end today's call here in just a moment and then jump over to the Stackies.
We welcome all of you to join us as well as we celebrate not just the whole year within
the Stacks ecosystem, but also all those that contributed and give out the awards and celebration and recognition to so much that has been
contributed across this ecosystem. Again, everything discussed today was educational
purposes only, not financial advice. Please do your own research. That said, happy holidays,
everybody. I'm your host, Kyle Ellicott. We will see you over at the Stacky's in just a few moments.
