Stacks Founder: Stacks' 2024 Roadmap, Why Bitcoin Layer 2 is Important?
L2 is like building a new highway next to a crowded freeway.Original Author: muneeb.btc, Founder of Stacks
Compiled by: ShenChao TechFlow
Bitcoin L2s and Ordinals are gaining increasing attention, and many new users have recently discovered Stacks, which is a quick guide for new users.
Stacks focuses on unlocking the Bitcoin economy, envisioning a system similar to Solana but using BTC as the asset.
Project History: The Stacks mainnet launched in early 2021, utilizing a Bitcoin-powered consensus mechanism. The project is undergoing a significant upgrade called Stacks Nakamoto, bringing it closer to Bitcoin L2 (more details below). The builders in the Stacks ecosystem are BTC believers who wish to build everything using BTC as the asset.
Why Bitcoin Layer 2 is important can be summarized in three main reasons:
1) Bitcoin L1 cannot scale to a billion users. We see that the fees on BTC L1 are very high, with costs increasing by 100 times, making it difficult for average users to pay a $40 fee for a $100 BTC transaction. Fees on L2 are much cheaper, increasing Bitcoin's effective bandwidth. L2 is like building a new highway next to a crowded freeway.
2) Bitcoin L2 allows developers to build any applications they can build on Ethereum or Solana using BTC. Looking at various non-BTC ecosystems, it is clear that there are some use cases with a clear product-market fit, such as being able to collateralize with ETH or SOL for stablecoin loans or having a native DEX to trade ETH/SOL. Bringing these validated use cases to BTC is evidently desirable.
3) Bitcoin L2 makes L1 tools like DLC (Discrete Log Contracts) more useful. Users can participate in certain Stacks contracts via DLC without needing to move BTC off the L1 chain, for example, participating in liquidity pools without needing to move BTC off L1. (BTC only moves to L2 when users are liquidated.)
2024 Roadmap: Stacks is a highly decentralized ecosystem, and the working groups in the open-source ecosystem have summarized some highlights for expectations in the first half of 2024, mainly including:
1) The Stacks Nakamoto upgrade is planned to launch before the Bitcoin halving. This will bring rapid (5-second) block speeds to Stacks, a significant improvement over the current 10-30 minute block speeds tied to Bitcoin L1, and will enhance Stacks' security (reorganization resistance increased to 100% of Bitcoin's hash power).
2) sBTC may be released as a second hard fork after the Bitcoin halving, making "BTC on L2" possible. The uniqueness of sBTC lies in its guarantee at the consensus level. There are proposals to use it directly as Gas on Stacks. Additionally, the open network of sBTC signers may represent the largest and most decentralized collection of signers at the launch of Bitcoin L2/anchoring (current estimates based on signer pool performance and signer interest).
3) Stacks' support for WASM. Ongoing WASM work not only accelerates the execution of Clarity (secure language) contracts but also opens the door for supporting other languages like Rust.
