Nikolas Sargeant
The Stacks team announced on Tuesday that industry leaders are integrating Stacks ahead of its upcoming network upgrade.
In a press release shared with Cryptowisser, Stacks said the upgrade, called Nakamoto, is a critical piece of the network’s new functionality. So far, eight new organizations have committed to supporting the Stacks network as Signers: Blockdaemon, NEAR Foundation, DeSpread, Luxor, Chorus One, Kiln, Restake, and Alum Labs, bolstering Stacks' position as the leading layer-2 solution for Bitcoin.
These eight organizations join a group that already includes Copper, Figment, Luganodes, Xverse, Ryder, community Stacking pools, and individuals currently Stacking.
The team added that these organizations collectively represent billions of dollars in AUM and include many of the most highly-rated staking providers in the industry. Furthermore, these organizations will join an open and decentralized Signer set where they will be responsible for validating new Stacks blocks. These participants will eventually be responsible for signing deposit and withdrawal transactions for BTC/sBTC transactions.
Improving the Network Security
According to Stacks, the Signer set remains open and will include the thousands of Stackers currently locking over $1B in STX in Stacks consensus. Once the Nakamoto upgrade is completed, Stackers, who currently earn a BTC yield for helping secure the network, will take on the additional role of validating Stacks blocks.
The addition of these organizations to the Signers set means that the Stacks network will benefit from parties who have a vested interest and track record for behaving honestly. These Signers are publicly and transparently participating and further, have infrastructure and tools in place that may help spot any bad actors if necessary.
Thus, enabling the highest level of decentralization possible in alignment with the values of those interested in new use cases for their Bitcoin.
Here are the New Signers
Here are the latest signers to join the Stacks network.
-
Blockdaemon: Blockdaemon is an industry-leading infrastructure solutions provider and ISO-27001 certified partner with extensive protocol coverage, offering technical depth, industry-leading SLAs, 70+ global points of presence through 10+ cloud and bare metal providers, and 24/7 support for an unmatched institutional-grade experience.
-
NEAR Foundation: NEAR Protocol is a fully sharded, proof-of-stake blockchain built for mainstream adoption. Performant, scalable, and secure, NEAR is designed to scale the Open Web to a billion users.
-
DeSpread: The third member, DeSpread, is a leading blockchain consulting firm based in South Korea. The firm provides GTM strategy for web3 initiatives seeking into the APAC market. Its development arm, DeSpread Labs, operates PoS validators to secure the network and participate in on-chain governance.
-
Luxor: This is a US-based compute power company focused on Proof-of-Work Bitcoin mining and compute. The team is building traditional markets & derivatives to support compute.
-
Chorus One: This is one of the biggest institutional staking providers globally operating infrastructure for 50+ Proof-of-Stake networks and managing over $3B in staked assets. It has been around since 2018 and the firm has been at the forefront of the PoS industry. It now offers easy enterprise-grade staking solutions, industry-leading research, and also invests in some of the most cutting-edge protocols through Chorus Ventures.
-
Kiln: Kiln focuses on providing asset staking and white-label staking integration for institutional clients. The platform controls over $5 billion in crypto assets and boasts a particularly strong track record on Ethereum, managing approximately 4% of the network as its largest independent node operator
-
Restake: Restake is an institutional architect for blockchain ecosystems, driving project growth through robust infrastructure and impactful partnerships.
-
Alum Labs: Finally, ALUM LABS represents a group of seasoned blockchain professionals and institutions that have partnered up to help secure and scale innovative blockchain networks. The firm also openly shares its expertise with the community and grants engineering resources to further strengthen the ecosystem.
While commenting on this latest development, Andre Serrano, sBTC Resident at The Stacks Foundation, said,
“These Signers add yet another layer of decentralization and bring industry-leading infrastructure to the leading Bitcoin L2 as the ecosystem seeks to unlock the Bitcoin economy and bring Bitcoin to billions of users. Together, we are poised to unlock exciting new use cases for Bitcoin.”
Stacks concluded that the integration of these new organizations will further enhance network security and foster greater decentralization, solidifying Stacks as a leading Bitcoin layer 2 solution.
Stacks is a Bitcoin L2 that enables smart contracts and decentralized applications to use Bitcoin as a secure base layer. The 2024 Nakamoto and sBTC releases will bring faster speeds and transactions backed by 100% Bitcoin finality. Stacks is the current leading Bitcoin L2 by developer traction and market cap and is poised to help unlock Bitcoin and its $500B in passive capital as a fully programmable, productive asset.
