Scaling Bitcoin: Stacks

This is the third part of a Bitcoin research series, where we will be exploring the technical details and growth of scaling solutions built atop the Bitcoin blockchain. The previous parts in this series can be found here:

In this piece, we focus on Stacks, a Layer 1 chain that aims to bring smart contracts with more diverse functionalities without significantly sacrificing the battle-tested store-of-value proposition of Bitcoin. This is done via a novel consensus model known as Proof-of-Transfer, a modified version of Proof-of-Burn, where the digital asset of the base chain is burnt as a cost to vouch for the validity of the secondary chain. Aside from that, Stacks uses a new non-Turing-complete programming language, Clarity, which reduces some risks of smart contract exploits.