Hi everyone,
Stacks 2.0 went live on BTC block 666053. In the ~5 days since then, a lot has happened on the mainnet — we’ll cover some of the salient updates in this post.
- Stacks 2.0 chain is 550 blocks long (as of this writing) and has processed more than 15,000 transactions!
- There have been 40+ miners on the network so far. With the early mining bonus, coinbase is currently ~2400 STX / block!
- We’ve observed more than 1000 nodes on the network!
We are humbled by the level of interest and excitement after the Stacks 2.0 mainnet launch in the ecosystem. Needless to add, all that interest also created some challenges:
- On Friday (Jan 15th), the API service used both by the Explorer and the Wallet was overwhelmed with traffic, resulting in degraded user experience. In addition to making the API polling less aggressive in Wallet & Explorer, we have also put some of the high-traffic endpoints in front of a load balancer to mitigate this.
- We have gotten some reports on transactions pending in the mempool for a long time. When we’ve looked into specific transactions, it’s often the case that the node has rejected the transaction for a valid reason (and it will stay pending until it’s garbage collected after 256 blocks). In the meantime, node operators can run this script to manually rebroadcast mempool transactions to other peers on the network — that can potentially help with block propagation. A more robust approach involves adding an anti-entropy protocol to mempool transactions (GH issue).
- We have also been collecting feedback from independent STX miners over the past few days. There are some tactical improvements to the miner component in stacks-node that we are tracking here: all non-consensus breaking changes will be packaged into the next release, likely by end of the week (assuming they have been adequately tested).
- We’re also tracking some known issues with the Stacks Wallet, mostly around performance and issues with Ledger Nano X.
A HUGE shoutout to our amazing community of miners, STX holders, developers, users and the entire Stacks community – the mainnet launch just marks the beginning of an exciting chapter for the ecosystem!
Miners / Node operators: please read this forum post if you haven’t yet — it describes the process for handling improvements, critical bugs and more!
Thanks!