Hey Blockstackers!

Today we’re proud to announce the release of our public Stacks testnet! The Stacks testnet represents a significant milestone on the path to releasing the Stacks token system—most of the token infrastructure is written and working. You can access the testnet at testnet.blockstack.org.

On the Stacks testnet, developers can experiment with:

Sending and receiving Stacks tokens

Buying names and namespaces with Stacks tokens

Registering subdomains

Using our new Blockstack command-line tool

The testnet is made of fully functional Blockstack Core nodes, and lets you do all the same things you would do on mainnet. The differences are that it uses testnet tokens (the testnet website can give them to you), and the block time is 1 minute instead of 10 minutes.

If you’re a developer or power user who wants an early glimpse of the token system, go grab the new CLI tool and start hacking! If you find any bugs, please let us know.