Stacks & Uphold Team Up to Boost Bitcoin Beyond Just a Store of Value

The Stacks Foundation has partnered with Uphold to boost the adoption and functionality of Bitcoin and Stacks. This partnership allows users on Uphold to not only trade STX tokens but to also transfer them between Stacks-compatible wallets and their Uphold account seamlessly. The main goal of the collaboration is to transform Bitcoin into a fully programmable asset, beyond just a store of value.

Stacks Partners with Uphold

The Stacks Foundation is taking Bitcoin's potential to everyone through its new partnership with Uphold, a versatile multi-asset money platform. The main goal of this partnership is to boost the mainstream adoption of Bitcoin and Stacks.

With this integration, users on Uphold will not just be able to trade native STX tokens, but can now also seamlessly transfer these tokens between their Stacks-compatible external wallets and their Uphold account.

What really sets Uphold apart in the financial services sector is its 'Anything-to-Anything' trading framework. This allows customers to directly exchange a variety of asset classes like cryptocurrencies, commodities, and equities. For example, users can directly swap gold for bitcoin (BTC).

Uphold also supports trading across more than 250 currencies and commodities, both traditional and digital, and has handled more than $4 billion in transactions.

Transparency is a big priority for Uphold as well. In fact, the platform maintains a reserve of 100% or more at all times, and publishes its assets and liabilities in real time.

What is Stacks and How Does it Work?

Stacks is an open-source blockchain network that integrates decentralized apps (dApps) and smart contracts with Bitcoin. This integration allows the two platforms to work collaboratively, taking advantage of the robust security of Bitcoin while exploring advanced functionalities through Stacks.

Interestingly, STX, the native cryptocurrency of the Stacks network, is the first token offering qualified by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In the Stacks ecosystem, STX is used for transaction fees and deploying smart contracts. Additionally, token holders can "stack" their STX tokens to take part in the network's consensus process, earning Bitcoin rewards in return.

Stacks employs a unique consensus mechanism that is known as proof-of-transfer, which is a variation of proof of burn. In proof of burn, miners have to destroy a portion of their own cryptocurrency to gain the right to validate transactions and mine new blocks, receiving block rewards in the crypto they are mining. In contrast, proof of transfer requires miners to transfer Bitcoin to other network participants instead of burning it.

This not only secures the network but also directly rewards Stacks token holders who lock up their STX tokens to support network consensus. The protocol selects a winner at random to validate a block of Stacks transactions and rewards them with STX tokens, while the transferred Bitcoin is sent to another randomly selected participant's wallet.

Transforming Bitcoin

The integration between Stacks and Uphold comes at a time when Bitcoin Layer 2 solutions, such as Stacks, are gaining a lot of traction and transforming Bitcoin’s role beyond just a store of value. Stacks, in particular, is pivotal when it comes to turning Bitcoin into a fully programmable and productive asset. It makes it possible for developers to build applications directly on Bitcoin, and in doing so, taps into its $1 trillion in passive capital.

Not only does this improve user and developer experiences in general, but it will certainly encourage the development of more applications on Bitcoin as well.