Today we’re excited to release the Blockstack Token Whitepaper — a deep dive into the Blockstack Token, including how it works and the impact it will have on growing the Blockstack ecosystem.







This whitepaper details a substantial upgrade for the Blockstack network — one that introduces components and mechanisms designed to contribute to the long-term success and sustainable growth of the ecosystem. The most notable of these are the following:

Incentive mechanisms for the decentralized application platform to overcome the “two-sided market” problem where neither developers nor users have an incentive to participate, at scale, unless the other participates first. Systems of governance that (a) ensure that no single entity can control the network/protocol and (b) enable stakeholders of the network to vote on protocol upgrades. Newly enabled features like (a) support for enabling truly independent mobile clients that don’t need to trust a third party (b) support for advanced namespace operations like namespace auctioning, atomic swaps and more.

The power of token systems stems from their ability to create decentralized, global economies that can efficiently allocate scarce digital resources and incentivize behaviors that contribute to the overall success of the platform. And that’s exactly what we’ve designed with the Blockstack token.

What makes the Blockstack token protocol unique is it’s capability to massively incentivize both developers to build applications and users to join the platform and start using those applications. That’s because Blockstack’s three part mining system provides rewards to developers, users, and cryptocurrency holders.

Each Blockstack token is known as a stack, and you can earn stacks in the following ways:

Proof-of-burn mining: Cryptocurrency holders can get mining rewards by sacrificing or “burning” a certain amount of Bitcoin. App-rewards mining: Developers can get mining rewards by building an application that people like and getting votes from the network’s app raters. Web-of-trust mining: Users can get mining rewards in the early days of the network by performing an identity verification with a trusted party.

You can learn more about the Blockstack token by reading the full Blockstack Token whitepaper.

This whitepaper represents a call for feedback from the community. It is meant to be a living, breathing document and start a conversation about how the system could be improved. So if you have thoughts and want to help, we’d love to hear from you on forum.blockstack.org and chat.blockstack.org.

The Blockstack token is specifically designed to put tokens in the hands of users and developers and to achieve as wide of a distribution as possible, from the mining system to the token sale, which we’ll be releasing more details about in the coming weeks. This will include dates, mechanics and instructions for participation.

Thousands of you have been waiting on our token updates mailing list and we appreciate your patience. For those of you who haven’t yet subscribed for updates, you can join our mailing list here. Stay vigilant of fake announcements and stay tuned for more details.

Warning: Don’t trust any announcement unless you can verify it across blockstack.org,

github.com/blockstack, @blockstack on Twitter (previously @blockstackorg), and the personal Twitter accounts of @ryaneshea and @muneeb.

Disclaimer: The Blockstack Tokens are a crypto asset that is currently being developed by Blockstack Token LLC, a Delaware limited liability company, whose website can be found at www.blockstack.com. This post does not constitute an offer or sale of Blockstack Tokens (“the Tokens”) or any other mechanism for purchasing the Tokens (such as, without limitation, a fund holding the Tokens or a simple agreement for future tokens related to the Tokens). Any offer or sale of the Tokens or any related instrument will occur only based on definitive offering documents for the Tokens or the applicable instrument.