Glossary
Stacks
A Bitcoin-anchored smart-contract layer whose blocks settle to Bitcoin and whose contracts can read native Bitcoin state via the Clarity language.
Stacks is a smart-contract chain that anchors to Bitcoin: each Stacks block commits its hash to a Bitcoin transaction, and Stacks miners pay BTC to participate in the protocol's Proof-of-Transfer consensus.
Contracts are written in Clarity, a decidable, non-Turing-complete language designed to be easy to reason about. The Nakamoto upgrade (2024) added fast confirmations and the sBTC bridge — a federated peg of BTC into Stacks for use in its DeFi ecosystem.