Unlocking Bitcoin innovation on Stacks

Community
#1

Stacks 2 launches this week and will unlock so much potential for innovation on Bitcoin! From a technical point of view, Bitcoin builders can now build just about anything—so what else might be needed to supercharge innovation within the Stacks ecosystem?

I have drafted a few top priority standards and products below. I’ve also created three Stacks Foundation wishlist grants to help realize these efforts. We’ve brainstormed many others at Hiro, but these are the few I personally think will catalyze many Bitcoin innovators to build on Stacks.

We’re looking for Stacks community members to turn these ideas into reality. Please show your support by upvoting, adding suggestions, or by making a specific grant request from your team. You can also just start building them! :sunglasses:

Fungible token standard (ie ERC20)

This is a simple, but critical, piece of our shared economic infrastructure. The real power of such a standard is interoperability across Stacks products and services. Therefore the real work here is building alignment with the Stacks community via the SIP process, documentation, and education.

:point_right: Help create the standard for all Stacks tokens! View the Fungible Token grant.

Recommended grant: $3000 USD

Decentralized exchange for Stacks tokens (ie Uniswap)

In the next year we’ll likely see 100s of new protocols, products, and services built on Stacks—many will introduce novel token economics and growth strategies. That is why we need a decentralized exchange (DEX) to supply these projects with liquidity and support many new innovative tokens.

:point_right: Help make all Stacks tokens swappable! View the DEX grant.

Recommended grant: $50,000 USD + security audit costs

Collateralized Bitcoin asset on Stacks (ie RenBTC or tBTC)

Bitcoin is exceptionally valuable, but also exceptionally limited by design. To truly realize our vision of innovation on Bitcoin, we need a reliable and safe way to move Bitcoin onto Stacks and vice versa: We call this asset xBTC. Once we can mint xBTC on Stacks, Bitcoin innovators will have a wide open design space for new products and access to an untapped market of Bitcoin capital.

:point_right: Help realize the Holy Grail of crypto—using Bitcoin in smart contracts. View the xBTC grant.

Recommended grant: $50,000 USD + security audit costs

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#2

Hey @jeffd I have a couple of questions here:

  • RenBTC does not require over-collateralization i.e. the value of REN at stake can be worth less than the value of BTC locked in the system. Whereas for tBTC the collateral must be at least 150% of the value of the BTC locked in the system. For this grant, would either of these approaches work or do you have a preference for one or the other?

  • Have you considered a grant to implement Drivechain, which enables miner control of transfers between the mainchain and the sidechain, or Zendoo, which uses zk-SNARKs to validate transfers between the mainchain and the sidechain (or something similar to these protocols)? These two-way pegs are much more capital efficient and arguably stronger in some ways than a collateralized peg; the main downside is that they would require changes to bitcoin consensus rules to implement. However I think building consensus in the bitcoin community for these changes and ultimately implementing and activating them is well worth the effort given the amount of innovation this could unlock.