信維與阿伍德
總長DR
來源：領英
Stacks is a project composed of multiple independent entities and communities, initially led by Blockstack PBC and later renamed Hiro Systems PBC. According to the latest information from Linkedin, the headquarter is in NYC and the team currently has 49 people.
Key team members and their responsibilities:
Muneeb Ali: Co-founder of Stacks and CEO of Hiro. He holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Princeton University and focuses on the research and development of distributed applications. He has spoken at TEDx and other forums to spread the word about encrypted digital currency and blockchain. , and has written a large number of academic journals and white papers on related topics. Muneeb is also the CEO of Trust machine.
Jude Nelson: Stacks Foundation research scientist, former Hiro engineering partner, holds a PhD in computer science from Princeton University, and was a core member of PlanetLab, which was awarded for its implementation of planet-scale experiments and deployments won the ACM Test of Time Award.
Aaron Blankstein: Engineer, he joined the Blockstack engineering team after receiving his PhD in 2017. He studied computer science at Princeton University and Provincial University of Science and Technology. His research covers a variety of topics, focusing primarily on web application performance, caching algorithms, compilers, and applied cryptography. His research on CONIKS won the Caspar Bowden Privacy-Enhancing Technology Award in 2017. Emacs has been used for more than 10 years.
Mike Freedman: Hiro technical consultant. He is a professor of distributed systems at Princeton University and provides technical guidance for the project. He has received the Presidential Early Career (PECASE) Award and the Sloan Scholarship. His research has spawned multiple commercial products and deployed systems with millions of daily users.
Albert Wenger: Director of Hiro and managing partner of Union Square Ventures (USV). Before joining USV, he served as president of del.icio.us and was an active angel investor, having invested in companies such as Etsy and Tumblr. Albert graduated from Harvard University with majors in economics and computer science, and holds a PhD in information technology from the Provincial University of Science and Technology.
JP Singh,director of Hiro, professor and undergraduate director of Princeton University, mainly researches parallel computing systems and applications. He has won the Presidential Early Career (PECASE) Award and the Sloan Scholarship. He also co-founded a business analysis company, FirstRain Inc. . He graduated from Princeton University and holds a graduate degree in electrical engineering and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He is also one of the founders of Trust machine.
In addition to Hiro, there are multiple independent entities in the Stacks ecosystem. Including Stacks Foundation, Diling Technology, Freehold, New Internet Labs, and Secret Key Labs.
Source: stackschina
Hiro: Focus on providing and maintaining developer tools in the Stacks ecosystem.
Stacks Foundation: Supports the development of the Stacks ecosystem through governance, R&D, education, and funding.
Daemon Technologies: Focus on supporting Stacks mining and staking business.
Secret Key Labs: Focus on providing Chinese mobile wallets that can directly participate in Stacking.
2. Fundraising
Stacks has conducted a total of 5 rounds of financing, totaling $88M.
The specific time points and resources are as follows:
Source: Rootdata
Trust machine：
Trust Machine was founded by two Princeton computer scientists (Muneeb Ali, co-founder of Stacks, and JP Singh, executive director of Hiro), both Bitcoin.
A true believer in Bitcoin, I believe that the Bitcoin layer can unlock a wide range of new use cases for Bitcoin. Muneeb Ali, one of the founders of Stacks, and JP Singh, executive director of Hiro, Trust machine was established.
Trust Machines has three products: Leather (wallet, formerly known as Hiro wallet), Console (social platform), and LNswap In April 2022, Breyer Capital, Digital Currency Group, GoldenTree, Hivemind and Union Square Venture announced investments in Trust Machine$150M[1]
In addition, in March 2023, Trust Machine and Gossamer Capital announced a $2.5 million investment in Alex (the largest dex on Stacks).
Source: Compiled by Awood & Xinwei
3. Development History and Current Situation
Source: Public information
Status quo
Dedicated hardware enables participation and provides greater transparency to network participants. However, POW and proof-of-burning are also destructive, requiring miners to destroy value in exchange for blocks. Stacks has carried out the latest v2.1 network upgrade in the first quarter of 2023, which includes improving the stacking function, improving the Clarity programming language, Stacks underwent its latest v2.1 network upgrade in Q1 2023, which included improvements to the stacking function, enhancements to the Clarity programming language, internal blockchain upgrades, reliability enhancements, and more. In addition, the Hiro Developer Platform was launched, enabling developers to build and deploy smart contracts on Stacks through a hosted experience.
Currently, the community is actively preparing for the Nakamoto upgrade, which is expected to occur in 2023 Q4.
Mining mechanism of miners, Source: Stacks white paper
Participant (network maintainer) incentives, Source: Stacks white paper
Reward Period:
During each reward period, miners transfer funds to the address that receives the reward. Each reward address receives only one Bitcoin from miners during the reward cycle.
Eligibility:
The Stacks wallet has no less than 0.02% of the total unlocked STX tokens, this threshold will be adjusted based on the level of participation in the Stacking protocol;
A signed message is broadcast before the start of the reward cycle, which includes the protocol to lock the corresponding STX token specifying the locking period, specifying the Bitcoin address to receive the funds, and voting for a certain block on the Stacks chain.
Address Validity:Participants need to be able to verify the address receiving funds, as the reward address needs to be confirmed as valid each reward cycle.
Preparation Phase and Reward Consensus:Before the reward cycle, participants go through a preparation phase, where two key things are decided:
Anchored block: During the reward cycle,there is an anchor block that miners need to transfer their funds to the appropriate reward address. This anchor block is valid throughout the reward period.
Reward Set: The reward set is the collection of Bitcoin addresses that will receive funds during the reward cycle. This set is determined by the Stacks chain state of the anchor block.
Rules for Selection of Reward Addresses:Different rules apply to the selection of reward addresses depending on whether the blockchain tip established by the miner is a descendant of the anchor block. If a miner builds a blockchain tip that is not a descendant of the anchor block, then all of that miner’s committed funds must be destroyed. If a miner builds a blockchain tip that is a descendant of the anchor block, then the miner must send committed funds to two addresses in the reward set.
5. Technical Architecture
L1 or L2?
Stacks is described as a smart contract layer built on top of Bitcoin.
The initial version (released in 2021) of Stacks has a security budget separate from Bitcoin L1 and is treated as an independent layer (L1.5)
Future Nakamoto versions are planned to rely entirely on Bitcoin’s hashing power, making it a fully affiliated layer (L2) of Bitcoin, meaning that Stacks will have Bitcoin’s security determine the irreversibility of its transactions.
Sidechain?
Stacks is interoperable with Bitcoin to some extent, but it does not meet the definition of a traditional sidechain. Stacks’ consensus mechanism runs on Bitcoin L1 and is closely related to Bitcoin’s finality, and data and transactions on Stacks are automatically hashed and permanently stored on the Bitcoin blockchain. This is different from traditional sidechains, whose consensus runs on the sidechain and does not rely on Bitcoin L1 and does not store data on Bitcoin L1. Therefore, Stacks does not meet the definition of traditional sidechains.
Smart Contract Language — — Clarity
Clarity is a decision-making smart contract programming language designed specifically for the Stacks blockchain with the following features:
Security First: Clarity is designed with a focus on security and predictability to protect against common vulnerabilities and attacks in Solidity contracts. It is specifically designed for security and aims to avoid common problems in the smart contract world.
Interpretability: Clarity’s code is interpretive, which means that it will be interpreted and executed line by line when submitted to the chain, unlike other languages (such as Solidity) that need to be compiled into bytecode first. This reduces the vulnerabilities that compilers can introduce and keeps smart contracts readable, because the code of the Clarity contract is the code that is executed, there is no compiled bytecode.
Decision-making: Clarity is a decision-making language, which means from the code itself, you can know exactly what the program will do. This avoids problems such as “downtime issues”. Clarity ensures that it does not “run out of fuel” during a call because it guarantees that program execution will end in a limited number of steps.
Recursive calls are prohibited: Clarity’s design prohibits recursive calls, which is a situation that may lead to contract vulnerabilities, in which one contract calls another contract and then calls back to the original contract, which can trigger multiple extraction operations.
Prevent overflow and underflow: Clarity prevents numerical calculation overflow and underflow situations, which is a common type of vulnerability that may lead to abnormal behavior of smart contracts.
Built-in support for custom tokens: Clarity has built-in support for creating custom fungible and non-fungible tokens, which is one of the popular use cases for smart contracts. Developers don’t need to worry about internal asset management, supply management, or the emission of token events, as these features are already integrated into the Clarity language.
Post-condition based transaction protection: Clarity supports attaching post-conditions to transactions to ensure that the chain status changes in the expected way after the transaction is completed. If the postcondition check fails, the transaction will be reversed.
Forced return response handling: Public calls to the Clarity contract must return a response indicating success or failure. This helps ensure errors are not overlooked, increasing the security of the contract.
Composition over inheritance: Clarity adopts the principle of composition over inheritance instead of inheriting other contracts as in languages like Solidity. Developers can define features that are then implemented by different smart contracts, which provides greater flexibility.
Access Bitcoin Base Chain: Clarity smart contracts can read the status of the Bitcoin base chain, which means you can use Bitcoin transactions as triggers in smart contracts. Clarity also provides a number of built-in functions to verify secp256k1 signatures and recovery keys.
Gaia Storage System
Gaia is a unique decentralized storage system in the Stacks blockchain that emphasizes user ownership and control of data. Unlike some other immutable storage solutions on the blockchain (such as IPFS and Arweave),
