The New Wave Of Web 3.0 dApps on Stacks 2.0
September 2021
In 2013, the world was introduced to a framework that painted an early picture of the incoming phase of applications as the internet began transforming. This framework was with the General Theory of Decentralized Applications by David Johnston, and those new application types would be dApps (decentralized applications).
Fast forward to 2016 when Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea co-founded Blockstack, now knows as Stacks (STX). In 2021, the Stacks Foundation released the Stacks 2.0 Whitepaper, building on years of R&D. Stacks enables dApps and smart contracts on top of Bitcoin and reinforces BTC as the center of gravity throughout the crypto ecosystem. Stacks is a Layer-1 protocol with a novel consensus mechanism called Proof-of-Transfer (PoX) that rewards users for mining and holding STX. Stacks leverages the inherent security of Bitcoin’s Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism but remains highly scalable by allowing an effectively unlimited number of transactions to be confirmed with each Bitcoin block.
Stacks’ Clarity development language also offers key improvements over Solidity. Clarity is decidable due to being intentionally Turing-incomplete; contract outputs can be verified pre-execution. Clarity is truly trustless for the end-user as 100% of Stacks smart contracts have readable source code.
With any good blockchain comes an even more robust ecosystem. Enter the Stacks Accelerator and Managing Partner, Trevor Owens. The accelerator was set up to invest in teams building dApps & digital infrastructure on Bitcoin through the Stacks blockchain. Trevor, whose background is as a long-time global entrepreneur who created a company in the lean startup space working with Eric Reis to multiple SaaS products, then exited a company and finding himself as an early advisor to the founders of Stacks.
Sharing our passion for dApps and the broader decentralized landscape, Trevor and I sat down to discuss the accelerator and preview the upcoming September demo day events.
“I think that people are gonna be blown away. I’ve been blown away on a regular basis throughout running this first program.” — Trevor Owens
Kyle: How do NFTs (non-fungible tokens) apply to and present an exciting opportunity when building applications on the Stacks blockchain?
Trevor (TO): I think it comes down to where you sit on the spectrum in terms of how confident you are in a system like Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and what the longevity of that system is going to be. When it comes to Bitcoin, it’s so reliable. There’s no owner or leader behind Bitcoin. Nobody knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is; he’s probably passed away or long gone. It’s a leaderless, decentralized blockchain. That’s what gives countries and governments the confidence like El Salvador to adopt Bitcoin. When you think about NFT’s and the potential, we invested in a company called BlockTech that is working with the Pakistani government and major universities to make [academic] degrees into NFT’s and on top of the Stacks and Bitcoin blockchains.
We’ve seen how much money is being spent by the Ethereum community on NFT’s. The Bitcoin community of Bitcoin holders is three times the size of the capital of Ethereum. Those in the community would love to have their own profile pics, and they’d love to have their own piece of art that they can spend their Bitcoin on, which they know is also backed by Bitcoin. We’re expecting that for every type of NFT you can see in Ethereum, and you’re also going to see it on Stacks. On top of Bitcoin, we’re even developing a bridge that people can bring over their assets from Ethereum. They can put on Bitcoin if they would like to, or they can access additional liquidity.
We just invested in a gaming company where we see a massive opportunity for Play-to-Earn gaming on top of Bitcoin. With the success of Axie Infinity trailblazing this model and less than a million users but doing a billion in economic value. And on top of Bitcoin, we’re bringing, you know, something that is more of a high production value, almost triple A level game to the Bitcoin blockchain. There’s a lot of people who love gaming, and I’m sure within the Bitcoin space. The opportunities for NFT’s in Bitcoin, based on the capital alone, are about three times the size of Ethereum.
I would love to invest in art in gaming, and they would love to have their assets, real estate, government assets, and diplomas back to the Bitcoin blockchain, where they can essentially view it for the rest of their time.
Kyle: With investing in 25 companies, what we can expect at the upcoming demo day events?
TO: Demo Day will be taking place on September 9th & 10th, with the first day focused on decentralized finance (DeFi), where we have some fascinating projects. Think about all the Bitcoin just sitting there that people aren’t able to earn a yield on. Through Stacks, they can now earn yield in a truly trustless way without their Bitcoin, really ever leaving their wallet through some of the technology that’s being developed. We also have Arkadiko developing the first stablecoin on Stacks, where you generate a yield. Then we have ALEX, which is building trustless borrowing & lending on we also have several different indexes, DEXs, and more.
On the 10th, we have both NFT’s and Web 3.0 applications with many companies who are just entirely disrupting the traditional models of Web 2.0. We have a company Sigle who is doing decentralized blogging where they can plug DeFi protocols right into their blogging platform so that writers can earn more money and intros a model where instead of you paying a writer to subscribe to their private newsletter, you can pay them with your yield of Bitcoin, or you can pay them with the yield that you’d get from different DeFi protocols. We have another company, Seek (Seekster), providing this great marketplace for gig workers throughout Southeast Asia. The critical thing is that they’re plugging DeFi into the back end, providing all those Southeast Asia a crypto bank account allowing them to build their credit score and access DeFi leapfrogging the traditional finance markets. We have a ton of other great companies.
Kyle: What are your bold industry predictions for the last few months of 2021?
TO: If you look back to 2017, the ICO boom, there was a lot of speculation, but this year, it became natural for everybody, you know a little bit probably towards the end of last year to you know with DeFi with NFT’s what you have seen with the Beeple sale, the whole game has changed. This was the year that. It’s like when Google wrote the program that beat the world champion in Go using artificial intelligence. This is the year for cryptocurrency. It’s gaining a lot of steam and inevitable at this point. Being able to get access to the companies that are going to be the first who are building these advanced Web 3.0 decentralized applications on top of Bitcoin is a massive opportunity for any investor of any size. Whether you’re an angel or seed investor, you want to be at our demo day because these are the first group of companies tackling this blue ocean opportunity. It’s a magical time that we’ll look back on as THE year we all made it.
Here are Trevor’s favorite book recommendations:
- The Lean Enterprise, by Trevor Owens
- How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
- The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries
- A.I. Superpowers, by Kai-Fu Lee
About Stacks Accelerator: Building the best community for founders, mentors, and investors in Web 3.0. We invest in teams that have found an easy way to do something difficult and in founders who are unafraid to tackle big problems. Our teams are focused on high-stakes use cases for Stacks and building the digital infrastructure that will define the coming decades. The program is led by Trevor Owens, founder of the Lean Startup Machine, and backed by the Stacks Ecosystem. Trevor was one of the first advisors to Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea when they first started Stacks in 2014.
Write’s note: The above interview has been edited and reduced in summary for this article.
