What is blockstack

This project's history started in 2013, the year Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea established Blockstack. This company's mission was to fix the fundamental issues that plague today's online and mobile apps. Muneeb and Ryan presented their idea to the YCombinator accelerator in the summer of 2014, and they also completed a round of seed fundraising with Union Square Ventures (USV), Naval Ravikant, SV Angel, and others. As a result of these early investments and efforts in blockchain technology, the initial version of Blockstack was released in 2017, complete with a dApps explorer (Blockstack Browser) and a distributed storage system. As a result, by the end of 2017, the firm had also acquired two further rounds of funding, including a Series A headed by USV, with participation from Lux Capital, Digital Currency Group, and others, as well as a token offering.

With the fresh round of funding secured, Blockstack released a testnet or testnet for its blockchain (dubbed Stacks) in Q2018 XNUMX, followed by the official launch of the mainnet Stack v1 in October of the same year. Tokens were also delivered to the first investors that participated in the token purchase round as part of this release.

The team also demonstrated a preliminary version of its App Mining software, which included 38 registered applications. App Mining is a Blockstack technique that incentivizes projects and developers to build on the Stacks network by rewarding monthly active users with STX. In its first year, the number of Blockstack-based applications that participated grew to approximately 300. After getting more than 500 registered projects, App mining is now on pause.

Because Blockstack is a second layer protocol, it does not store information directly within the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing for a clean boundary between the network's interactivity and the apps on Blockstack. On the other side, this implies that Blockstack is reliant on a full operational architecture separate from the Bitcoin blockchain, and these components are what allow Blockstack to execute its dApps. However, the present Blockstack operational structure altered dramatically when version 2 was released in 2021.