Stacks Blockchain Upgrade

The founder of Stacks, a blockchain designed to scale Bitcoin, hinted that a major upgrade is imminent.

Muneeb Ali, co-creator of Stacks and CEO of Trust Machines, which develops Bitcoin applications, shared in an X post that the
sBTC token may launch as soon as early December. He stated, "[Early December] is the target and that seems on-track for sBTC v1 with more upgrades coming to it in [January] and onwards."

Stacks introduces sBTC as a solution to Bitcoin's "write problem," which refers to the challenges of writing data directly to Bitcoin's main chain, an essential requirement for decentralized finance applications. According to Stacks' announcement, sBTC will "enable smart contracts to programmatically send sBTC to a BTC address, allowing it to peg out as BTC."

Essentially, sBTC is positioned as a competitor to other wrapped Bitcoin variants used in decentralized applications, such as wBTC and cbBTC, which rely on centralized custodians. Stacks argues that sBTC's innovative decentralized two-way peg can unlock value by offering an alternative that aligns more closely with Bitcoin's decentralized ethos.

The sBTC whitepaper critiques wBTC as being "entrusted to a single custodian and hence antithetical to Bitcoin ethos," although its ownership has since evolved. In contrast, sBTC is characterized as "a decentralized pegged BTC asset operated by a fully permissionless, decentralized, dynamic set of participants with a clear economic incentive to operate the peg properly."

Ali remarked, "Bitcoin rails can be upgraded through Layer-2s… There can be all sorts of use cases that are deployed there, making capital more productive and ultimately increasing Bitcoin's value," during an interview with The Block in March of this year.