Contents
The role of Signers is relatively new to the Stacks ecosystem. Signers participate in the Stacks network by validating and signing blocks produced by Stacks miners. They contribute to the security of the ecosystem while also enabling fast block times and confirmation speeds.
Today, there are 44 active signers on the Stacks network, and a subset of 15 signers are also responsible for processing sBTC deposits and withdrawals in the initial phase of sBTC’s launch.
While signing is a new role, it is intrinsically tied to stacking, one of the hallmarks of Stack’s Proof of Transfer consensus mechanism. Stacking documentation breaks it down in simple terms.
Stacking and signing are two distinct actions, but they are both necessary in order to perform the other. Signers must stack their STX tokens, and you cannot stack STX without running a signer [or delegating your STX to a signer’s pool].
Given the importance of signers to the network, devs and users alike want the ability to monitor signer performance. Signer monitoring brings better transparency to the ecosystem and allows anyone to check the health and growth of the Stacks network.
Meet the Signer Metrics API
The Signer Metrics API is a new Hiro-hosted API that allows you to monitor the performance and behavior of Stacks signers. Over the past few months, we’ve been hard at work adding new signer-specific endpoints, so you can have reliable and accurate signer analytics.
Today, you can use the Signer Metrics API directly, and you can also see the data from the Signer Metrics API live in the Stacks Explorer today:
What Signer Metrics Are Available
Hiro’s Signer Metrics API provides 8 endpoints that can give you an accurate reflection of signer behavior and performance. Here’s an overview of what signer information you now have available to you:
Signer Performance Metrics
Understanding signer performance and behavior is important for three reasons. First, if you want to delegate your STX to a signer pool, you want to know how reliable they are to make sure you maximize the STX you earn as part of Stacks consensus and delegate to a trustworthy entity.
Second, these metrics help signal network resilience. The more responsive and active the signer, the more stable and strong the Stacks network. These metrics offer transparency and public visibility to a critical role player in Stacks consensus.
And third, the network needs to monitor signer behavior, so that you can monitor the liveness of the sBTC bridge. In the future, these performance data will also be important for punishing bad behavior from signers (by withholding BTC rewards). This planned feature is not currently available in sBTC’s initial launch, but it is scheduled for a future release of sBTC where the bridge will be maintained by a rotating set of signers.
As for what specific signer metrics you have access to, those metrics include:
- Voting power: Voting power is a function of how many locked STX are controlled by a particular signer. This metric gives you a sense of how decentralized the signer set is. If a single signer controls the majority of the voting power, that signer has an undue amount of control over the network and the SBTC bridge in particular.
- STX Stacked: You can see how many locked STX are controlled by each signer, which determines the voting power of the signers.
- Signer latency: The time it takes for a signer to produce a block response after a block is proposed by a miner. This metric helps track signer liveness. If a signer takes too long to respond, the signer will miss the block, and if enough signers miss a block, it won’t be approved, slowing the chain, or even stalling it, since 70% of signers must approve a block in order for it to be appended to the chain.
- Approved/rejected/missing: These datapoints track how many blocks a signer has accepted, rejected, or missed, and can give insight into a signer’s behavior and whether that signer is operating efficiently and/or honestly. For example, these stats could help a signer identify if they are producing invalid blocks due to some bug or issue in their node configuration. From this endpoint, you can also fetch raw counts for each as well as an acceptance rate for the last n blocks.
These metrics can be returned across a number of different parameters, including signer information for:
- Any particular block, series of blocks, or block proposals
- Any particular PoX cycle or series of cycles
- Any particular signer
These various parameters enable you to track things like all signer block responses for a particular block, signer behavior for the last 5 PoX cycles, and more.
See Signer Data Live
As mentioned above, we are already using this information to power the signer page in the Stacks Explorer, so you can see this data in action.
Try the Signer Metrics API
We hope you find this data useful. To get started, check out our documentation, and if you have any questions, you can reach out to the team on the #api channel under the Hiro Developer Tools section on the Stacks Discord.
