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Founder of Stacks: Stacks' 2024 roadmap and why Bitcoin Layer 2 is important.

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L2 is like building a new highway next to a congested one.

Original author: muneeb.btc, Founder of Stacks

Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow

Bitcoin L2s and Ordinals are gaining more and more attention. Many new users have recently discovered Stacks, which is a quick guide for new users.

Stacks focuses on unlocking the Bitcoin economy. Imagine a system similar to Solana, but using BTC as the asset.

Project History: The Stacks mainnet was launched in early 2021, using a Bitcoin-powered consensus mechanism. The project is undergoing a major upgrade called Stacks Nakamoto, which will bring it closer to Bitcoin L2 (more details below). Builders in the Stacks ecosystem are Bitcoin believers who aim to build everything with BTC as the asset.

Why Bitcoin Layer2 is important, there are three main reasons:

1) Bitcoin L1 cannot scale to one billion users. We see that the fees for BTC L1 are very high, increasing by 100 times, making it difficult for regular users to pay a $40 fee for a $100 BTC transaction. Fees on L2 are much cheaper, increasing the effective bandwidth of Bitcoin. L2 is like building a new highway next to a crowded one.

2) Bitcoin L2 allows developers to build any application they can build on Ethereum or Solana using BTC. Looking at various non-BTC ecosystems, it is clear that some use cases have clear product-market fit, such as being able to obtain stablecoin loans by mortgaging with ETH or SOL, or having a local DEX to trade ETH/SOL. Bringing these validated use cases to BTC is obviously desirable.

3) Bitcoin L2 makes L1 tools like DLC (Discreet Log Contracts) more useful. Users can participate in certain Stacks contracts through DLC without needing BTC to leave the L1 chain, for example, participating in liquidity pools without needing BTC to leave L1. (BTC only moves to L2 when the user is settled.)

2024 Roadmap: Stacks is a highly decentralized ecosystem, and the open-source ecosystem's working group has summarized some highlights for the first half of 2024, including:

1) The Stacks Nakamoto upgrade plan will be launched before the Bitcoin halving. This will bring fast (5 second) block speed to Stacks, a significant improvement over the current 10-30 minute block speed bound to Bitcoin L1, and will increase Stacks' security (reorg resistance) 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. What makes sBTC unique is that it is secured at the consensus level. There is a proposal to use it directly as Gas on Stacks. In addition, the open network of sBTC signers may be the largest and most decentralized set of signers when Bitcoin L2/anchoring is launched (based on estimates of signer library performance and signer interest).

3) Stacks supports WASM. The ongoing work on WASM not only accelerates the execution of Clarity (a secure language) contracts, but also opens the door to support other languages such as Rust.