Stacks Founder: Stacks' 2024 Roadmap and Why Bitcoin Layer 2 Matters
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Stacks Founder: Stacks' 2024 Roadmap and Why Bitcoin Layer 2 Matters
An L2 is like building a new highway next to a congested highway.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: muneeb.btc, Founder of Stacks
Translation: TechFlow
Bitcoin L2s and Ordinals are gaining increasing attention, and many new users have recently discovered Stacks—here’s a quick guide for them.
Stacks focuses on unlocking Bitcoin's economy. Imagine a system similar to Solana, but using BTC as its native asset.
Project History: The Stacks mainnet launched in early 2021 with a consensus mechanism powered by Bitcoin. The project is undergoing a major upgrade called Stacks Nakamoto, bringing it much closer to becoming a true Bitcoin L2 (more details below). Builders within the Stacks ecosystem are BTC believers who aim to build everything using BTC as the primary asset.
There are three main reasons why Bitcoin Layer 2s are important:
1) Bitcoin L1 cannot scale to support billions of users. We've seen high fees on BTC L1—increasing by up to 100x—making it difficult for average users to pay $40 in fees for a $100 BTC transaction. Fees on L2s are significantly cheaper, effectively increasing Bitcoin’s transaction bandwidth. L2s are like building a new highway alongside an already congested one.
2) Bitcoin L2s allow developers to build any application they could build on Ethereum or Solana—but using BTC. Looking at non-BTC ecosystems, certain use cases clearly show strong product-market fit—for example, being able to stake ETH or SOL to obtain stablecoin loans, or having a native DEX to trade ETH/SOL pairs. Bringing these proven use cases to BTC is an obvious and desirable evolution.
3) Bitcoin L2s make L1 tools such as DLCs (Discrete Log Contracts) more useful. Users can participate in certain Stacks contracts via DLCs without requiring BTC to leave the L1 chain—for instance, joining liquidity pools without moving BTC off L1. (BTC only moves to L2 if a user gets liquidated.)
2024 Roadmap: Stacks is a highly decentralized ecosystem. Open-source working groups within the ecosystem have outlined key highlights expected in the first half of 2024, including:
1) The Stacks Nakamoto upgrade is scheduled to launch before the Bitcoin halving. This will bring fast (5-second) block times to Stacks—a significant improvement over the current 10–30 minute block times tied to Bitcoin L1—and enhance Stacks' security by achieving 100% resistance to reorganizations relative to Bitcoin's hash power.
2) sBTC may be released after the Bitcoin halving as a second hard fork, making “BTC on L2” a reality. What makes sBTC unique is that it is secured at the consensus level. There are proposals to use sBTC directly as gas on Stacks. Additionally, the open network of sBTC signers could become the largest and most decentralized set of signers available at the time of launch for any Bitcoin L2 or peg (based on current estimates of signer pool performance and participant interest).
3) Support for WASM on Stacks. Ongoing work on WASM not only accelerates the execution of Clarity (a secure language) contracts but also opens the door to supporting other languages such as Rust.
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