ab4fif.btc

Stacks is the frontier of Bitcoin. Bitcoin staking shipped. 100x capacity, privacy for BTC and post-quantum next.

The historic low for STX/BTC was always 1,000 sats. Last cycle was strange: (a) Stacks was the first project to cross the previous all-time-high last cycle. It ran as bitcoin beta before the 2024 halving. Earlier/faster than we expected, honestly. (b) Stacks peaked in Dec 2025 (ten months before the bitcoin peak) and has been in a bear for 20 months already. Much longer than other assets. (c) This bear Stacks got hit much worse than before. Breaking the historic 1,000 sats line. Even now we are at 300 sats. With fundamentals at an all-time high, in my view, this is one of the most asymmetric market positions. Not financial advice, but my family office is positioned accordingly. We think that $0.77 represents what STX/BTC should’ve been at (1,000 sats, the historic low, and BTC at 77,000). That’s roughly a 3x from here. But that is just catching up to going into an ultra-negative zone against BTC. As bitcoin starts to recover, the market will start looking for the bitcoin beta, and there is just no other asset. See Hal Press 2023 thesis for a detailed breakdown of this. But the bitcoin beta is just one part, maybe a smaller part now because the real fundamental shift is the launch of bitcoin staking with 5% institutional STX purchase/demand to participate. This simply didn’t exist before and is a 100B-200B market. I’m writing publicly about this because after the Binance risk monitoring tag I promised to stop being the “humble engineer” and speak my mind. These are my unfiltered thoughts. Not financial advice. Please do your own research. See disclaimers. In summary, wake me up at $0.77 or more precisely 1,000 sats for STX/BTC and then the next cycle can start. We’re going back to building. Forward!

Price attracts attention. Since I have your attention for a brief moment today because of blockstack:native, let me tell you about bitcoin capital markets. We have a ~2T pristine asset, BTC, that has been sitting idle with few builders showing up to develop the bitcoin capital markets. The tech was old & clunky so it took a few iterations to build the right rails for it. However, the key catalyst was public companies and large institutions putting BTC on their balance sheets last cycle. Once BTC was on corporate balance sheets, every CFO needs to figure out how to generate some income from the asset. Unlike Ethereum, there is no native staking, no native lending or liquidity pools. However, a bunch of mission-driven devs at Stacks kept iterating to finally crack native BTC yield that is fully self-custodial. ETH & SOL staking is a ~150B market. BTC staking can be a 200B+ market, especially if yield is in BTC (which it is), and no bridge or smart contract risk (which there is not). This BTC capital once deployed then flows into on-chain markets (lending for stables etc). This is not a pipe dream. Stacks already shipped Satoshi Upgrades I. First staking capacity launch is Sep 10th. New capacity launches already sold out for coming months. Public companies like Nakamoto, through UTXO subsidiary, already signed up. The market is barely waking up to a new reality where potentially billions of dollars of BTC starts getting deployed in Stacks. All these public companies and large institutions need to buy & hold STX. Any price movements (like today) create additional capacity for more BTC to be deployed to earn native BTC yield. We are at the beginning of the era of bitcoin capital markets coming to life. Thank you to everyone who patiently waited while we perfected this product. It’s go time now. Forward!

Some quick Stacks updates: — The Satoshi upgrades I hardfork went as smoothly as we could’ve hoped. Core devs have been monitoring the network, and we regularly push code updates as needed. — As part of the upgrade, new signers came online, further decentralizing and increasing the reliability of the signer set. A few of these signers were offline at the boundary of cycle 141, causing a temporary pause in blocks that was quickly resolved. See the 99.94% uptime because of this temp issue. — Cycle 141 got 392.4M STX staked. This required massive upgrades across wallets like Leather, Xverse, custodians, pool operators, DeFi apps, etc. I expected that hitting 300M would be great, and exceeding this to almost 400M (approx 80% of historical highest levels) straight away is a strong sign of participation and of market confidence among long-term holders: they’d rather go through new steps to upgrade instead of leaving. — On the Binance monitoring tag, I had a call with them on Thur. We’ve been a great partner to Binance for 6 years now without any issues. They clearly recognize that Stacks is a blue-chip project. I explicitly discussed any risk of “delisting” and the FUD around it, especially in Korean markets. They communicated (a) no delisting risk and (b) no concern about liquidity or trading volume. They seem happy with all the information we have provided about the hardfork and with how clearly we communicated the token emissions update. The next review meeting has not happened yet. Unfortunately, the monitoring tag process got triggered/flagged before the hardfork, and we just need to wait for the next meeting and a fresh review. I’m personally not concerned about the monitoring tag at all and will update the community as soon as the next review meeting happens. I’m also personally in touch with execs at Binance in addition to our dedicated team. All of them have been super helpful and transparent. Their recommendation is to communicate the details to the community to address any FUD. I hope this update helps. — On the Genesis bond, we’ve picked Bitcoin block 966,350 (approx Sep 10) for the Genesis bond. This is when the institutional participants in staking start getting announced. Genesis bond will demonstrate the full system on mainnet, and the first real bond will launch a month later, with monthly bond issuances following. It’s an extremely exciting time where we’re going after a potential $100B BTC staking market. I’ll separately write about our innovations here and how we’ve unlocked something completely not possible before, and how direct value accrual to STX happens as more Bitcoin gets deployed in staking and goes into our DeFi. Start of on-chain Bitcoin capital markets! — On trading markets and liquidity: in recent months/weeks, given negative sentiment and especially the unfortunate Binance monitoring tag, the liquidity and trading volumes are lower than before. These levels still meet the liquidity requirements of various exchanges. However, the Stacks endowment is working with partners to improve liquidity further. Healthy trading markets for STX are critical to a successful launch of bitcoin staking, as large institutions should be able to easily get access to the STX they need globally. I’m available on X and Telegram community channels for any questions. I’ve been listening to all feedback and questions, and it’s been very helpful. Our global community is our strength, and their passion shows! Forward 🚀