Many of you know that we pushed the Stacks blockchain v1 live in October 2018, details here.
The v1 blockchain implements the Stacks token (which is an account-based system vs. a UTXO based system used by blockchains like Bitcoin), and distributed the Stacks tokens to respective purchasers in the genesis block. With this release, the Stacks token becomes the default/native token that is used as fuel to register digital assets and smart contracts on the Stacks blockchain.
In this post, I want to give a quick summary of what’s going on in the design/development of the Stacks blockchain and link to places from where you can get more information.
Stacks Blockchain v2 development:
We do a major network upgrade roughly every year and 2018 was one of the biggest ones that marked our move away from the underlying Bitcoin blockchain to a separate Stacks blockchain. Stacks blockchain v2 upgrade, planned for late 2019, will be another major step in that direction. Two biggest changes/features are:
- A new consensus algorithm
- A full smart contract system
Our new consensus system aims to combine the best of classic distributed systems consensus algorithms and proof-of-work. We want an open membership system (unlike classic distributed consensus algorithms) but want better scalability and throughput than proof-of-work blockchains like Bitcoin.
Stacks blockchain v2 is being written in Rust. You can follow the development here.
The new consensus algorithm and the new smart contract system are proposed as Stacks Improvement Proposals (SIPs) and can be found as SIP-001 and SIP-002.
It’d be great to get feedback from the community on these two SIPs!
UPDATE: The “meta” SIP about how the Stacks Improvement Proposals work is here: SIP-000
– Muneeb