Stacks is Fast Now, What's Next?

The Nakamoto Upgrade is the most hyped release in the history of Stacks.

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For years, DeFi here has been limited by the speed of Bitcoin blocks, making it difficult to convince degens to come and trade.

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For example, whenever you wanted to swap from one token to another, or deposit a token to earn some yield, you had to wait around for 30+ minutes sometimes for it to go through.

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This is not the future of finance. Especially when chains like Solana are able to process transactions in seconds (despite their security tradeoffs).

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<10 Second Transactions

That all changes now. 

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With the Nakamoto Upgrade, the sky's the limit as far as transaction speeds go.

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The current benchmark that Stacks is aiming for is <10 seconds per transaction, this will put us in competition with the largest, most successful smart contract blockchains out there today.

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What’s the killer difference though? Bitcoin finality.

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Bitcoin Finality

A blockchain is just an Excel Sheet if it is not secure.

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Every transaction on the Stacks network is now as secure as a Bitcoin transaction.

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In order to reverse a transaction on Stacks, you would have to reorganize Bitcoin itself. All things considered, this is the most important unlock for the ecosystem.

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It can be argued that users don’t care about security, but this is simply not true. Long-term, the most secure blockchains will be the most resilient to attacks, attracting the most value over time.

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Developers will want to build on top of blockchains that prioritize security AND speed - Stacks is doing both.

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What’s Next?

Nakamoto is a work in progress.

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It becomes clear when you submit a deposit into Zest Protocol and still have to wait for a Bitcoin block to confirm.

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There are optimizations being made over the coming weeks to get us closer to the <10 second sweet spot. In the meantime, the Stacks core devs are prioritizing security over everything else.

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There are some incredibly exciting things being built on the network parallel to the Nakamoto improvements:

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• sBTC - a 1:1 Bitcoin asset that lives on the Stacks network
• Bitflow Exchange launching their runes bridge and AMM
• Zest Protocol’s BTCz and new asset listings soon

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Stacks is a slow burn. We have a small, dedicated community that is focused on one goal: making Bitcoin more productive.

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Despite the speedbumps, we are stronger than ever and will continue on our journey to become the zestiest protocol on the zestiest blockchain. One zestie at a time.

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As a reward for reading this entire blog post - say “bababooey” in the #general channel in the Zest Discord to earn 10 Oranges!

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Follow us on Twitter for all of the latest updates and memes!

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Join our community via Discord!

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And as usual, stay zesty🍊

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