Stacks (STX)

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Historical price evolution of Stacks

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Stacks was born in 2013 when Princeton engineers Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea founded Blockstack with the goal of creating a decentralised internet where users controlled their data, under the motto "can't be evil". In 2014, the project was accepted into Y Combinator and received initial funding from Union Square Ventures, Lux Capital, Winklevoss Capital and Naval Ravikant. By 2017, Muneeb Ali completed his doctorate at Princeton with a thesis that laid the technical foundations of the project, whilst Blockstack published its whitepaper and launched an ICO that raised approximately $47.5 million. By November 2019, total accumulated funding exceeded $75 million.

Technical development advanced with the launch of the first Stacks testnet in the second quarter of 2018, followed by the Blockstack v1 mainnet in October of the same year, when the platform already hosted more than 165 applications. In July 2019, Blockstack PBC achieved a regulatory milestone by completing the first token offering qualified by the SEC in United States history under Regulation A+, raising $23 million after nearly a year of negotiations. STX thus became the first token approved by the American regulator. In October 2019, STX was listed on exchanges when the ecosystem surpassed 300 built applications.

The year 2020 marked a complete transformation with the project's rebrand from Blockstack to Stacks, whilst Blockstack PBC became Hiro Systems PBC. The Stacks Foundation, a non-profit entity registered in Delaware, assumed governance of the ecosystem from April 2020. On 14th January 2021, the Stacks 2.0 mainnet was launched, introducing the Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) mechanism, the Clarity programming language and stacking (locking STX to earn BTC). At the time of launch, the platform registered 350 million monthly API requests, 40,000 Hiro wallet downloads and 2,500 smart contracts, whilst the SEC stopped treating STX as a security. In November 2021, STX reached its all-time high of $3.25.

During 2022, the ecosystem experienced 20% annual growth in smart contracts, registering 97,000 Bitcoin usernames on Stacks in the fourth quarter. The most recent developments include the closure of the SEC investigation into Stacks and Hiro without legal action in July 2024, eliminating the main regulatory uncertainty. On 29th October 2024, the Nakamoto upgrade was activated, reducing the time between blocks to approximately 5 seconds and providing Bitcoin finality. On 16th December 2024, sBTC was launched on mainnet with an initial limit of 1,000 BTC that was filled in 4 days, with Jump Crypto, UTXO Management and SNZ as the first institutional minters. On 30th April 2025, sBTC withdrawals were activated in Phase 2, when the Bitcoin L2 ecosystem TVL exceeded $4 billion, with Stacks leading amongst Bitcoin L2s by developers, users and capitalisation, utilising custodians such as BitGo, Hex Trust, Copper and ForDeFi. On 22nd May 2025, the third sBTC deposit cap of an additional 3,000 BTC was filled in a few hours.

Stacks functions as a layer 2 of Bitcoin that enables smart contracts and decentralised applications without requiring modifications to Bitcoin's base protocol. Its operation is based on the Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) consensus mechanism, where Stacks miners compete amongst themselves by transferring BTC to participants who have locked STX tokens in the protocol, known as stackers. As a result of this process, stackers receive BTC as a reward whilst miners obtain newly minted STX, creating a system that anchors Stacks' security directly to Bitcoin's hashrate.

Smart contracts on Stacks are developed using Clarity, a decidable and interpreted programming language that does not require compilation and whose source code remains visible on the blockchain. This characteristic allows the behaviour of a contract to be verified with certainty before its execution. Since the implementation of the Nakamoto upgrade in October 2024, the network produces blocks approximately every 5 seconds, and its finality is guaranteed by Bitcoin, which means that reverting a confirmed transaction on Stacks requires the same computational effort as reverting a transaction on Bitcoin.

The ecosystem features sBTC as a bridge asset, which allows BTC to be converted into a 1:1 equivalent token usable in Stacks' smart contracts. This asset is custodied by a decentralised network of signers chosen by the community. The native STX token fulfils multiple functions within the protocol: it is used to pay transaction fees, reward miners and participate in the stacking process that allows users to obtain rewards in BTC.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.