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Stacks (STX) is enjoying a premium price boost today with a jump of 14% over the past 24 hours. According to data from CoinMarketCap, STX is worth $1.27 at the time of writing, atop growth of 76.24% over the past seven days.
Stacks has been making headlines recently, not just as a token with positive price action year to date but for its strong focus to turn Bitcoin (BTC) into a smart contract and a decentralized finance (DeFi)-centric ecosystem. Dubbed the Bitcoin Layer for smart contracts, Stacks enables decentralized applications to use Bitcoin as an asset and settle transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain.
In a bid to foster its core agenda, the Stacks protocol unveiled its latest upgrade, dubbed Stacks 2.1. According to the protocol, the new upgrade will strengthen the connection to Bitcoin with enhanced stacking improvements, better bridges and decentralized mining, as well as new clarity functions.
🚨 #Stacks 2.1 Activated 🚨
— stacks.btc (@Stacks) March 19, 2023
Strengthening The Connection to #Bitcoin
⭐️ Stacking Improvements
⭐️ New Clarity Functions
⭐️ Better Bridges
⭐️ Decentralized Mining
⭐️ #Bitcoin-native Assets
Find out more 👇 1/7
"Stacks 2.1 introduces several improvements to Stacking that will eliminate inefficient or confusing aspects of Stacking, the PoX reward & security mechanism. For example: continuous Stacking allows for Stackers to avoid missing a reward cycle in between Stacking their $STX," Stacks said in a tweet highlighting the benefits of the new upgrade.
Bitcoin as DeFi hub
In a bid to build and bolster the capacity of Bitcoin as the world's largest blockchain protocol, networks like Stacks are challenged to add a smart contract utility to it. While the Stacks model is different from others like that of the Rootstock Infrastructure Framework, it is arguably the most widespread and recognized protocol pushing DeFi on the Bitcoin agenda.
Bitcoin is considered the most secure and decentralized blockchain network in the world, and Stacks is doing all it can to build on this premise to bring more linked utilities to the protocol.