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This Week’s News & Stories - Fri, 04 Sep 2026 View this on stackssnacks.com and subscribe to receive updates via email. Gm 👋 It’s all coming together. Bitcoin Staking is here. Let's dig in. 😋 Stacks Snacks Bitcoin Staking arrives on Stacks next week at Bitcoin block 966,350. For the first time in crypto, self-custodial Bitcoin Staking earns native BTC on the Bitcoin L1. There are two ways in: self-custodial staking or pooled staking . 21Shares is joining Bitcoin Staking on Stacks . The issuer of the world's largest suite of crypto ETPs will stake its own Bitcoin treasury in the inaugural institutional cohort. STX is now live on Bullish , one of the largest venues in the world for BTC spot volume. Institutions across 50+ jurisdictions can now access STX where they already trade Bitcoin. HashKey Cloud is expanding its partnership with the Stacks ecosystem. Asia's No. 1 staking provider will be both a Bitcoin Staking launch partner and an sBTC signer. 👀 Other Tasty Content stBTC and Zest's Levered Vault went live and demand was instant: 150 BTC minted in under 24 hours , with both caps now full. More opens with the next bond, so join the waitlist . Curious how much your BTC could earn? Check out the new Bitcoin Staking yield calculator . The DeFi incentive program kicks off next week with the Genesis Bond, rewarding activity across Zest and Bitflow . The Stacks Vibe Index is live, a real time sentiment dashboard pulling from a dozen Stacks communities. Meet the new sBTC signers

fabohax: Congrats, really interesting work. I’ve been working on drafting BCYX, which touches a related privacy space but from a different angle: GitHub - bcyx-protocol/docs: BCYX Documentation · GitHub From what I understand, Stacks Shield is more focused on private payments and shielded assets directly on Stacks , while BCYX is more about privacy-preserving cross-chain coordination and selective disclosure between different participants and networks. Both seem to share some similar primitives around commitments, nullifiers and ZK proofs, but the scope is quite different. One thing I’m also curious about: do you see any role for TEEs here, maybe for proving or coordination on resource-constrained clients, while keeping ZK as the actual verification layer? Nice work, looking forward to seeing how it evolves. Thanks, really appreciate this. I took a look at the BCYX direction, and I think the distinction you made is pretty accurate. Stacks Shield is currently focused on the private payment layer on Stacks shielded notes, asset-bound commitments, nullifiers, Merkle membership and zkSNARK proofs for STX and SIP-10 assets such as sBTC and USDCx. BCYX seems to be approaching privacy from a broader cross-chain coordination and selective-disclosure perspective, so there is definitely some interesting overlap in the underlying primitives while solving different problems. On TEEs , I do think there could be a role for them, particularly around coordination, proving infrastructure, or

Stacks Shield security log This is a short log of the security work on Stacks Shield over the past week. I run these as internal reviews and write them up so the record stays public. Stacks Shield is a proof of concept privacy protocol on Stacks. It lets people hold and move STX and SIP-10 tokens like sBTC and USDCx as shielded notes instead of transparent balances, using zero-knowledge proofs. What the review covered I went through the eleven Clarity contracts, the ten Noir circuits, and the SDK cryptography, tracing value and authority flows against a shielded-pool checklist. What it found One critical issue. The Merkle tree’s new root was not bound by any proof, so a leaf-adding operation could advertise a root that was never actually computed. On a shielded pool that is a path to draining funds. This one is fixed. One high issue that is still open, and I want to be plain about it. The zkVerify aggregation root is posted on chain by an authorized relayer, and the only on-chain check today is that the publisher is authorized. That makes root publication a trusted role, not a trustless one. It runs through a small dedicated relayer set rather than the deployer key, and the real fix is a threshold scheme where several independent operators co-sign each root. Until that ships, I do not call root publication trustless. Two minor issues, both fixed, and one informational note about a key-derivation step that I will change at the next version bump. What shipped The critical fix i

Bond Staking with Esbee DAO is now live: https://www.esbee-dao.org/ You can deposit during the next 3-4 days.

Follow-up: sections 5 and 6 I can’t edit the original post, so here are the two placeholders filled in with updates from the builders. Clarity WASM (from Brice) Progress continues with Clarity Wasm. The new Clarity 6 function implementations are complete and pending review. We’ve started replaying real blocks again and updated the stacks-core tests to adapt them for the clarity wasm build. This process should help expose any remaining bugs that have not yet been caught by tests and fuzzing. Clarinet (from Hugo) The current focus is making sure teams can build and test pox-5 and Bitcoin bonds integrations using Clarinet. That means making simnet and devnet easy to work with for these flows, so a builder can exercise stacking, bonds, and signer interactions locally before touching testnet. If you are building on pox-5 and hit friction in Clarinet, ping Hugo directly or drop it in this thread. See you on the 15th.

The Bond Staker and Esbee DAO 1. The Landscape: PoX-5 and Protocol Bonds PoX-5 is the Stacks protocol upgrade that introduces Bitcoin Staking — a mechanism whereby BTC-holders can earn yield from the Stacks Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) rewards without surrendering custody of their bitcoin. It was activated at Bitcoin block 960,230 (Epoch 4.0), and the genesis bond will start earning at block 966,350. The core instrument is the protocol bond : a six-month, dual-asset commitment consisting of: BTC leg : a timelock on Bitcoin L1, held under the user’s own keys, or an sBTC lock on Stacks STX leg : an STX lock inside the pox-5 Clarity contract on Stacks, gating participation and determining signing weight. The two legs are cryptographically linked: the Bitcoin script on L1 commits to a hash of the participant’s Stacks principal, and pox-5 refuses to register a bond it cannot match to a confirmed L1 UTXO. For sBTC locks, the link is encoded in Clarity. Rewards flow weekly into sBTC (via the sBTC auto-bridge) and can be claimed as sBTC or Bitcoin L1. Based on the protocol, we build a smart contract that can take part in Bond Staking and a UI for a group of users to manage such a contract. All work is published on GitHub - fastpool/sbtc-pool-bond-staker: Staker contract that participates in pox-5 bonds as a sBTC pool · GitHub and GitHub - fastpool/esbee-dao: Esbee DAO website · GitHub 2. The Bond Staker: A Pooled Staker Contract The sbtc-pool-bond-staker is a contract suite that lets mult

The Bond Staker and Esbee DAO 1. The Landscape: PoX-5 and Protocol Bonds PoX-5 is the Stacks protocol upgrade that introduces Bitcoin Staking — a mechanism whereby BTC-holders can earn yield from the Stacks Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) rewards without surrendering custody of their bitcoin. It was activated at Bitcoin block 960,230 (Epoch 4.0), and the genesis bond will start earning at block 966,350. The core instrument is the protocol bond : a six-month, dual-asset commitment consisting of: BTC leg : a timelock on Bitcoin L1, held under the user’s own keys, or an sBTC lock on Stacks STX leg : an STX lock inside the pox-5 Clarity contract on Stacks, gating participation and determining signing weight. The two legs are cryptographically linked: the Bitcoin script on L1 commits to a hash of the participant’s Stacks principal, and pox-5 refuses to register a bond it cannot match to a confirmed L1 UTXO. For sBTC locks, the link is encoded in Clarity. Rewards flow weekly into sBTC (via the sBTC auto-bridge) and can be claimed as sBTC or Bitcoin L1. Based on the protocol, we build a smart contract that can take part in Bond Staking and a UI for a group of users to manage such a contract. All work is published on GitHub - fastpool/sbtc-pool-bond-staker: Staker contract that participates in pox-5 bonds as a sBTC pool · GitHub and GitHub - fastpool/esbee-dao: Esbee DAO website · GitHub 2. The Bond Staker: A Pooled Staker Contract The sbtc-pool-bond-staker is a contract suite that lets mult

Clarity Working Group – September 1, 2026 (async edition) Good morning frens. I missed this morning’s session and I apologize to the group. Rather than skip the cadence, here is an async update compiled from the builders directly. TL;DR BTC bonds have their inaugural activation in a few days. This is the moment pox-5 was built for: miners commit BTC, stakers lock BTC on L1, and the protocol sells its emission for Bitcoin. Teams are lining up sBTC staking products on top of it: native staking with Friedger’s Esbee DAO, and liquid staking with stBTC at StackingDAO. Friedger has been working on formal verification of the Esbee DAO code using Jude’s tool. On my side: USDCx bridge integration straight into passkey smart wallets, faster 2FA activation via a central registry, and hybrid execution on Jing. Updates from Brice (Clarity WASM) and Hugo (Clarinet) to follow in this thread. 1. BTC bonds – inaugural activation This is the big one. BTC bonds go live on pox-5, likely in cycle 143, with the 6-month lockup commitment we walked through in the July 21 session. Activation is days away. Why it matters: it changes what stacking is. Miners commit BTC, stakers lock BTC on L1 and earn on sBTC, signers sign, and the yield flows on-chain through the pox-5 contract rather than through off-chain operator trust. If you run a signer or a pool, the FastPool signer manager guide remains the best reference for standardizing your policies before bonds go live. 2. sBTC staking products lining up

Surprise! We stay hustling on Friday’s and went ahead pushed out the forum upgrade - the blip was near instant so hoping none of you noticed the cutover. We’re still tinkering with a few little things, but I was stoked to partner with the Stacks Foundation to bring a nice face lift to our beloved forum. Beyond the visual update, we also worked with mods to do a little cleanup to hide obsolete posts from indexes, as we’ve experienced some funky recommendations from LLMs based on ancient history. These posts are still searchable here and available on the same/original direct links, but they will no longer be indexed by the robots to confuse them or humans! You’ll also find you can now login with X, find the Stacks.co header extended here to make everything feel closer to one experience, and enjoy dark mode. Holler with any bugs you may find as you go along, enjoy! Note for mods: You may have to reenable 2-factor after this, it is required for all ‘staff’

We’ll be doing scheduled forum maintenance and updates on Monday, August 31, between 6:00 and 9:00 PM PST. Expect brief downtime during that window. 2 posts - 2 participants Read full topic