Author: Haotian

With the eye-catching performance of this wave of old currency sectors, let me talk about Bitcoin The absolute old coin of the ecosystem @Stacks.

1) There is no intention to compete with the FOMO trend of BTC layer2, but it is already a "pioneer";

2) The POX consensus mechanism relies on economic binding to catch the "express train" of BTC growth;

3) sBTC's native BTC cross-chain design, although it does not have Babylon's The encryption technology is enough to be "native".

Come, let’s analyze the above three points point by point from a technical perspective:

1) As early as 2017, when Bitcoin was still in a dispute between conservatives and innovative factions, conservatives firmly believed that functions should be simplified and only focused on being a reserve asset, while innovative factions believed that BTC needed to expand more application scenarios to support smart contract functions. To cope with competition from new chains such as Ethereum.

Obviously, Stacks chose the latter, which was somewhat "alternative" in the environment at the time. But many years later, the wave of asset issuance on the BTC chain set off by the Ordinals protocol, the wave of BTC layer2 network expansion, and other extended developments around the BTC ecosystem have all confirmed that the choices made by Stacks back then were extremely strategic.

So, to some extent, Stacks should be the originator of this BTC ecological expansion craze, but this BTC FOMO trend is mainly driven by "Chinese" , Stacks seems to be "absent" and has not participated too much in the momentum and discussions. However, its purely technology-oriented and steady development confidence has also allowed it to reap the market's expected dividends for BTC layer 2, and the overall market performance is remarkable.

After all, as a "pioneer" and after 7 years of accumulation and market verification, Stacks has explored a complete set of technology stacks to explore smart contracts for BTC Practice provides feasible solution examples;

2) When it comes to the operating mechanism of Stacks' technical architecture, the overall feeling is slightly "alternative" to me. Why? So? This depends on its special consensus mechanism.：

Stacks did not adopt the POW or POS consensus mechanism that was more common at the time, but adopted a special POX consensus mechanism. Simple understanding: POX is Proof of Transfer Proof of transfer.

Miners of the Stacks network must prove to the Bitcoin main network that they initiated a transfer of BTC to a specific address, and then they can win the "right to produce blocks" of the Stacks network. , win $STX rewards, and users of the Stacks network (Holder), who hold and stake STX for a certain period, can receive the BTC dividends invested by this part of the miners in proportion.

It is not difficult to see that the POX consensus mechanism as a whole is biased towards a "dual-layer design", with the Bitcoin network as the basic layer precipitating and locking BTC assets to provide network "consensus layer" security , and the Stacks network is the "execution layer" for implementing complex smart contract-related applications and network communication collaboration.

This design fully maintains the authority of the BTC main network and achieves "strong correlation" with the Bitcoin main network through "economic binding" . How to understand it?

If miners want to participate in block production, in addition to the network operation and maintenance fees and "electricity fees" for basic operating nodes, the main cost is to invest a certain amount of "BTC", BTC The higher the price, the higher the mining cost for miners, which also determines the more precious the STX rewards;

Users can pledge STX to maintain the security of the network. This is the same as the way most POS networks maintain security. The difference is that the economic profit and loss ratio of most POS networks cannot withstand the fluctuations of the secondary market itself. Users of the Stacks network who stake $STX can receive BTC rewards.

This creates a "virtuous" internal economic cycle. Miners consume $BTC to fight for the right to produce blocks, and this part of BTC will be distributed to Stakers. This makes more users willing to actively pledge to obtain BTC rewards, which in turn reduces the circulation of STX and drives the price of BTC in the secondary market to improve, further motivating miners to consume BTC for mining.

For miners, if STX mining is unprofitable, the mining industry will not be able to take off. For users, the risk of pledging STX assets can be obtained through Get hedging with real BTC rewards.

This special economic incentive mechanism gives it advantages in terms of its ability to resist market fluctuations and the stability of the market ecology. Especially when the price of BTC continues to be in an upward cycle, the consumption cost of the entire network and Dividend rewards will increase simultaneously, which means that the value accumulated by the network itself will also increase. Moreover, it can adjust the mining difficulty according to the secondary market price of BTC, and the cost of miners investing BTC will be proportional to the reward STX ratio.

In my opinion, the alternative or advanced aspect of Stacks' POX consensus mechanism is that it binds BTC, the most stable asset in the market, relies on BTC to provide network security, and obtains network expected enhancement through BTC. Originally, The common problem of POS network's long-term "loss" of pledged assets has been resolved by the super growth buff of BTC assets.

3) Recently, Stacks product manager @andrerserrano shared an overview of sBTC’s upcoming mainnet launch, which shows the uniqueness of sBTC, a so-called native BTC cross-chain asset.

Compared to the more commonly used centralized custody assets, chain A locks asset chain B The traditional Wrapped version of Mint assets uses sBTC to implement BTC’s native security, cross-chain freedom, atomic transactions, and non-centralized risk points. How to implement it specifically?

Stacks uses a multi-signature threshold mechanism to ensure the security of the Stacks network. Therefore, there are a large number of "signers" on the Bitcoin main network to verify transactions and implement multi-signature operations. Users send BTC to the designated BTC multi-signature address. After the transaction is confirmed, the signer deployment party of the Stacks protocol monitors and verifies the transaction and will automatically mint the corresponding sBTC to the user on the Stacks network.

The key point is that Stacks deploys a large number of independent signature nodes, such as 100. When the threshold number of nodes is signed and confirmed, the transaction will be truly verified and confirmed, such as (68/100).

In order to understand the advantages and disadvantages of this multi-signature mechanism more quickly, I tried to use @babylonlabs_io to make a comparison: The special thing about Babylon is that it uses mathematical encryption algorithm techniques to ensure that nodes do not do evil, because if a node does evil, its private The key will be "exposed", which greatly limits the possibility of doing evil;

In comparison, the mechanism of Stacks is relatively simple. It relies on the trust of a large number of light nodes and a higher threshold design to reduce the probability of evil. Once evil occurs, the Stacks network itself relies on the economic bundling mechanism. Very complementary, the severe Slash penalty feature will greatly reduce the risk of nodes doing evil.

Of course, this multi-signature security mechanism that relies on scale and quantity will also have an inflexible feature. For example, if the addresses of most of the 100 nodes are changed, the original multi-signature address assets will be lost. Forced to migrate. Therefore, Stacks is exploring advanced "dynamic member" management mechanisms such as Multisig2 to expand flexible features such as multi-layer authentication mechanisms and permission hierarchical control. In short, it will continue to explore more sophisticated and secure methods to optimize technology. p>

Above.

Finally, in addition to technical elements, one thing has to be said. Stacks is a US-based company and the first to obtain SEC Reg+ registration certification. The double Buff blessing of compliant tokens adds a lot of room for imagination in the current macro context of Trump’s “encryption”.