stx.fan

History

The network has renamed itself, its wallets, and its consensus vocabulary more than once. This page keeps the old material and maps old terms to current ones, so links and articles from earlier eras still make sense.

last reviewed 2026-08-08

Timeline

  • 2017–2019

    Blockstack and the SEC-qualified offering

    The project began as Blockstack, building decentralized identity and apps anchored to Bitcoin. In July 2019 its Reg A+ token offering became the first SEC-qualified token sale in the United States. The company later argued that with a sufficiently decentralized network, STX should no longer be treated as a security under that framework.

  • 2020

    Blockstack becomes Stacks

    The project rebranded to Stacks ahead of the 2.0 launch. Old documentation, repositories, and articles under the Blockstack name describe the same lineage.

  • 2021-01-14

    Stacks 2.0 mainnet: PoX, Stacking, Clarity

    Proof of Transfer launched: miners commit BTC to mine STX blocks, and holders who locked STX (called Stacking, with a capital S) earned that BTC as reward. Clarity, the decidable smart contract language, shipped with it. A stacker meant both a community member and someone locking STX for consensus.

  • 2021

    NFT firsts

    First came the Badges, then Boom introduced minting your own NFTs, closely followed by the first NFT auction by This Is Number One, the Boomboxes, and Punks on Stacks. Many projects followed; Gamma and TradePort remain the active marketplaces.

  • 2021–2023

    The directory era

    An ecosystem of DEXes, pools, mining communities, DAOs, and data dashboards grew fast, and this site grew with it as a link directory. Some of that era's projects (Syvita Guild, CityCoins, Catamaran swaps, several dashboards) have since wound down; period articles from Messari, Forbes, and Bitcoin Magazine capture how it looked at the time.

  • 2024-10

    Nakamoto upgrade (Epoch 3.0)

    Fast blocks decoupled from Bitcoin block times, and Stacks transactions gained Bitcoin finality. The Ultimate Stacks Nakamoto Guide remains a good period reference.

  • 2024-12

    sBTC launches

    A programmable, Bitcoin-backed asset maintained by a decentralized signer set, bringing BTC itself into Stacks contracts. Now documented at stacks.co/sbtc.

  • 2026-07-30

    Epoch 4.0 and PoX-5: Bitcoin staking

    At Bitcoin block 960230 the Epoch 4.0 hard fork activated the pox-5 contract, first of the Satoshi Upgrades. BTC on Bitcoin L1 (or sBTC), paired with locked STX, can now earn self-custodial BTC yield through Bitcoin Bonds, rolling out in phases from the institutional Genesis Bond. Locking STX alone continues as STX-only staking. Cooldown cycles were removed and pooled participation streamlined.

Old terms, current terms

Docs and interfaces across the ecosystem are still catching up to Epoch 4.0 wording. When you meet an older term, read it as follows.

ThenNow
StackingSTX-only staking: locking STX to support consensus and earn rewards.
stackerStaker (when it meant someone locking STX). As a name for a community member it lives on informally.
pox-4 contractpox-5 contract at the genesis boot address.
BlockstackStacks (renamed 2020).
Hiro WalletLeather (renamed 2023).
lockstacks.comearn.leather.io (Leather Earn).
stacks.orgstacks.foundation.
velar.covelar.com.
sbtc.techstacks.co/sbtc.
Terminology in transition: even official documentation mixes old and new wording while the Epoch 4.0 updates land. Primary sources are the Bitcoin Staking whitepaper (PDF), stacks-core, and the pox-5 contract code itself.

Period reading

Kept for historical context, not as current guidance. External links from these eras rot; that is part of why this page exists.