The last quarter of 2022 saw a surge in BTC addresses, with 97,000 new BNS names being created in the quarter alone. An analysis by BitcoinCasinos.com shows this accounted for about 70% of all BNS registrations last year.
According to the research lead at the site, this surge is responsible for the increased usage of the Stacks Network. Edith Reads said, “Q4 was a tremendous season for Stacks Network. Network usage grew tremendously, which we attribute to the race to register three and four-letter BNS names.”
Registration of BNS names grew by 318% QoQ, increasing the daily active users and addresses on Stacks Network by 76% and 42%, respectively. Because Stacks addresses can only support one registered BNS name, users have to create new addresses to register more BNS names.
Q4’22 Proved Crucial for Stack Network’s Growth
The young chain launched in 2021 registered growth in various other key metrics during the last few months of 2022.
Despite the market’s turbulence amid FTX’s crash, Stack’s daily active user base grew by 76%, bringing about 600,000 transactions in the last quarter only. Average daily transactions increased by 43% year-over-year.
Notably, smart contracts action on the network was relatively high in 2022. A report by Electric Capital placed Stacks as a top 30 project for developers. The deployed smart contracts had a compound annual growth rate of 19.2%. According to Ms Reads, the increased developer activity on the network was a healthy indicator of the overall ecosystem.
Another key metric that increased was the number of miners. A 14% growth rate saw the rise in number to an average of 7.5 miners per month.
Stacks Network Gearing up for More Upgrades
On December 16th, the project’s community approved the Stacks 2.1 upgrade, which will be effected within the first quarter of 2023. The upgrade comes with several improvements to the network, including; the ability to send Stack assets to BTC addresses, more accessible access to decentralized mining pools, and continuous stacking for users without missing a reward cycle.
The Stacks working group also released a whitepaper proposing sBTC, a two-way bitcoin peg system. sBTC will become the world’s first decentralized non-custodial peg that lets smart contracts write back on the Bitcoin blockchain.
The Stacks Network aims to create a Bitcoin layer for smart contracts and uses a unique Proof of Transfer (PoX) consensus mechanism. It uses Bitcoin’s PoW as a settlement layer and runs parallel to it. Miners lock up BTC to mine a Stacks block and receive STX rewards, while eligible stackers receive BTC yields.
