Stacks Blockchain

Reference implementation of the Stacks blockchain in Rust.

Stacks is a layer-2 blockchain that uses Bitcoin as a base layer for security and enables decentralized apps and predictable smart contracts using the Clarity language. Stacks implements Proof of Transfer (PoX) mining that anchors to Bitcoin security. Leader election happens at the Bitcoin blockchain and Stacks (STX) miners write new blocks on the separate Stacks blockchain. With PoX there is no need to modify Bitcoin to enable smart contracts and decentralized apps.

Building

1. Download and install Rust

For building on Windows, follow the rustup installer instructions at https://rustup.rs/.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
source $HOME/.cargo/env
rustup component add rustfmt

• When building the main branch, ensure you are using the latest stable release:

rustup update

2. Clone the source repository:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/stacks-network/stacks-core.git
cd stacks-core

3. Build the project

# Fully optimized release build
cargo build --release
# Faster but less optimized build. Necessary if < 16 GB RAM
cargo build --profile release-lite

Note on building: you may set RUSTFLAGS to build binaries for your native cpu:

RUSTFLAGS="-Ctarget-cpu=native"

or uncomment these lines in ./cargo/config.toml:

# [build]
# rustflags = ["-Ctarget-cpu=native"]

Testing

Run the tests:

cargo test testnet  -- --test-threads=1

Run all unit tests in parallel using nextest:

Warning, this typically takes a few minutes

cargo nextest run

On Windows, many tests will fail, mainly due to parallelism. To mitigate the issue you may need to run the tests individually.

Run the testnet

You can observe the state machine in action locally by running:

cargo run --bin stacks-node -- start --config ./sample/conf/testnet-follower-conf.toml

Additional testnet documentation is available here and here

Release Process

The release process for the stacks blockchain is defined here

Further Reading

You can learn more by visiting the Stacks Website and checking out the documentation:

• Stacks docs
• Stacks Improvement Proposals (SIPs)
• Mining
• Profiling
• RPC endpoints
• Event dispatcher

You can also read the technical papers:

• "PoX: Proof of Transfer Mining with Bitcoin", May 2020
• "Stacks 2.0: Apps and Smart Contracts for Bitcoin", Dec 2020

Copyright and License

The code and documentation copyright are attributed to stacks.org.

This code is released under the GPL v3 license, and the docs are released under the Creative Commons license.