Highlights and News:

Stacks Token Sale Is The First SEC-Qualified in US History

On July 10th, we were honored to announce that Blockstack PBC’s token offering was qualified by the SEC under Regulation A+. This is the first time in U.S. history that a crypto token offering has received SEC qualification. We wanted to open our token offering to the general public, without excluding the US so we worked with US regulators to figure out a legal framework for our offering. Now other projects may potentially be able to use our legal framework as an example. We believe this is a huge step forward for decentralized applications, internet security, and privacy.

If you’re considering purchasing Stacks tokens, visit stackstoken.com.

App Growth

Q2 saw overall app growth accelerate, from 86 apps at the beginning of the Quarter to 165 by the end, 76 of which successfully took part in the App Mining program. Many notable apps created came out of the first-ever Can’t Be Evil contest we hosted with Product Hunt, Lightning Network, DevPost, and Dapp.com. Meet the winners here and sign up for Part 2 of the contest here.

Blockstack’s Asian Strategic Round: Driving the Next Era of Computing

We’re excited to announce that the Hashkey Group and SNZ are leading a strategic investment round. They will support Blockstack’s growth across key Asian markets such as Greater China, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia. This strategic round is part of our Reg S offering as disclosed in the offering circular. Both Hashkey Group and SNZ were instrumental in the early success of crypto projects like Ethereum, not only in China but broadly in Asia. We are also excited to welcome IOSG Ventures, Fenbushi Capital, Fundamental Labs, Spartan Group, and Tembusu Partners as investors and ecosystem building partners. → More

App Mining Plans to Pay Blockstack Developers $1,000,000 in STX per Month

Over App Mining’s 8-month run, the number of apps in the program has increased nearly 10x to over 150 and developers created password managers, productivity tools, content creation platforms, and more. This success drove us to invest further by increasing the monthly payouts which we intend to ultimately increase 10x from today’s amount of $100,000 for a target of $1,000,000 per month in STX in May 2020. → More

Blockstack Technical Whitepaper V2

We published the Blockstack Whitepaper 2.0 which builds on two years of R&D work and peer-reviewed research. The whitepaper lays out technical architecture updates and presents two new components: (a) the design of the Stacks blockchain and consensus mechanism, and (b) a new smart contract language that optimizes for predictability and security.

The Blockstack Whitepaper 2.0 is now available in multiple languages for our global community:

Introduction of Clarity, a language for predictable smart contracts

We were excited to introduce the Clarity smart contract language that optimizes for predictability and security. Clarity is currently in developer preview. We’re seeking feedback from our developer community and welcome any bug reports and pull requests. To get started, check out the documentation and the SDK.

Revealed: The Blockstack 2019 Summit in San Francisco

Hear from Neal Stephenson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Snow Crash, The Diamond Age, Cryptonomicon, and more, as well as angel investor and entrepreneur, Naval Ravikant as they plunge into the metaverse as featured speakers at the Blockstack 2019 Summit. Join fellow community members to learn what’s new, what’s next, and what others in the Blockstack community are working on. → Register

Stacks Token Economics: Improved Mining Algorithm & Minting Schedule

In the last two years, there has been a lot of progress in the maturing field of token economics. Given the new technical updates in our Blockstack Whitepaper 2.0, we felt it was the appropriate time to take a deep dive on the Stacks token economics model. We sought out relevant experts and performed a full economic audit of our distribution model. The relevant details of the new adaptive mint and burn mechanism, changes to token economics, and community feedback during the comment period is available on the forum here.

Q2 Technical Updates and Developer Success Highlights

There were a number of big updates to Blockstack developer tools and beyond, summarized here. Highlights include: the introduction of the Clarity smart contract language, continued work on the Stacks Blockchain V2, improvements to the blockstack.js codebase and SDKs for Android and iOS, improved platform reliability, introduction of end-to-end test automation for the Blockstack Explorer, an upgraded automation test suite for the Blockstack Browser, Blockstack Explorer performance improvements, release of version 3.0 of the Stacks wallet, and redesigned Blockstack.org and Stackstoken.com.

App Mining Improvements

In Q2, our team focused on solving reviewer and policy challenges while working with our community of App Miners. A full list of program changes is available in the App Mining repo, including these high-impact improvements from Q2:

Partnered with Awario , the new awareness app reviewer.

Allowed App Miners to define specific target-users for TryMyUI testing.

Increased to 10 user testing sessions for the TryMyUI scores.

Paused voting on the investor community reviewer , Democracy Earth.

Added an audit period so the community can help verify rankings.

Community events

The Blockstack team met over 3,500 developers this quarter (over 500 more than last quarter) at various events including 26 meetups, 16 conferences, 11 webinars, 2 international AMAs and participated in 30 hackathons. Members of the team spoke at Consensus, Token Summit, Digital Asset Summit, CogX, Fluidity, Internet Identity Workshop in SF, Paris Blockchain Week and attended zCon in Croatia, among many others. We partnered with Major League Hacking for a 23 school hackathon tour and beyond that, we participated in 7 notable hackathons such at Stanford’s Treehacks hackathon and Bitcoin Games. → Full Recap