What Is Stacks
Stacks was formerly known as Blockstack and sought to power a new kind of decentralized internet which gives users a lot more control over their data and makes it a lot more difficult for content to start getting censored. It has properties such as privacy built-in where the data in Stacks applications are encrypted by default, and apps that will not be able to see, access, or track your activity are the norm. All of the data is fully owned by the user itself, and users are free to move their data and trade and transfer assets easily without permission from any company. Furthermore, Stacks implements smart contracts which are based on the programming language known as Clarity that enables new kinds of digital assets such as collectibles that can be created, owned as well as traded on the network. Through using the Stacks applications, creators also have a share of the value that they can help create. It is a hybrid consensus mechanism that is called Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) which besides storing a hash of the blockchain on Bitcoin, many of the participants can receive rewards in BTC, which is a lot more reliable source in terms of value than the native token nSTX.
PoX uses miners as well as stackers, where the miners themselves can log the transactions, and the stackers can keep a copy of the blockchain which signals what fork to mine on. Miners can earn new STX from inflation and they can pay to participate through the usage of BTC.
Stacks Founders
Discussing the founders of Stacks, it was originally created by many venture capitalist funds, such as the Digital Currency Group, Y Combinator and Winklevoss Capital. It was developed by Blockstak PBC which operates under the name Hiro Systems PBC now and has a wide range of companies that have joined to truly build on Stack's platform.
Speaking of Blockstack PBC itself, it was founded by Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea, who after graduating from Princeton University, co-founded Stacks in 2013 together.
How Does STX Work
The PoX algorithm is a generalization of Proof-of-Burn, where the cryptocurrency of an already established blockchain is not burned but used to secure the new blockchain. this means that instead of burning the existing cryptocurrency, it is transferred by miners to other participants within the network.
The STX price is based on the usage of the smart contracts and the stacks network and stacks ecosystem as a whole, which enables decentralized apps, user-owned internet, uses the Bitcoin blockchain, and the decentralized applications work the same as regular apps, however, are a lot more accessible and gain a lot more dominance, as showcased by the smart contracts implementations.
The network itself has four major layers. First is the application layer, then is the protocol layer, then is the Stacks blockchain, and then is the Bitcoin system.
The blockchain is what holds all of this together and it is a distributed layer where the users have the opportunity of deploying smart contracts and even create virtual assets with ease. This is not a layer-2 chain however, it is connected to the Bitcoin-powered chain in a 1:1 ratio. Whatever happens in the Stacks ecosystem is fully verifiable in the Bitcoin blockchain as a result of this.
Connecting two independent distributed ledgers is actually accomplished to the aforementioned PoX consensus, where the miners are able to mine STX tokens through simply transferring bTC. This decentralized platform even supports smart contracts, dApps, and the creation of virtual assets that are easily transferable, These virtual assets can represent any number of use-cases such as governance and even funding of different business models. Stacks support both fungible token creation as well as non-fungible token creation.
In order to power all of this, Stacks uses the Clarity programming language that provides an enhanced level of security and is predictable while using no compiler.
The protocol layer is where the storage, authentication, and financial and naming services are, and the storage system which is used in Stacks has been named Gaia. It stores the app data off-chain without needing to rely on a third-party storage provider and uses off-chain cloud systems such as Azure in order to provide the application with fast data access. All of this data remains secure through the private keys the creator puts. The consensus mechanism has two types of participants, including the STX miners and the STX holders. The PoX mechanism works through four phases, including registration, commitment, election, and assembly. For the first four years, 1000 STX are released per block, after 4 hours, it gets to 500, after 4 more years, to 250 and for the rest of the period the block rewards are 125.
Where Can You Buy STX
Stacks has an available supply of 1,052,561,462 and a total supply of 1,818,000,000 coins. If you want to buy, sell or trade Stacks (STX), you can do so on exchanges such as Upbit, OKEx, Binance, and Tokok.
