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You can watch replays of both Demo Days on the Stacks Youtube channel:
Day 1: DeFi & Fintech
Day 2: NFTs & Web 3.0
As important as demo day is to the individual teams, we think it’s also a milestone event for the entire Stacks community — seeing the launch of a fleet of powerful new decentralized applications built on Bitcoin through Stacks is tangible proof of the ecosystem’s health and growth potential.
Since watching demo day and the community’s reaction, we’ve been mulling over four takeaways:
- Investors are flocking to the Stacks ecosystem.
- The number and variety of developers building on Stacks is rapidly increasing.
- Developers choose Stacks, because developers choose Bitcoin.
- Hiro’s developer tools are being leveraged to ensure confidence when building a decentralized project.
Investment in the Stacks Ecosystem Grows
A significant number of companies at demo day said they had 50-100% of their rounds subscribed; the idea of building on Bitcoin through Stacks seems to be resonating with seed stage investors. That’s not to mention all the traction they’ll see in the coming weeks: There were 300+ people in the demo day audience, and we recognized several seed stage funds and angel investors. Investors understand this is an opportunity to be an early adopter in a flourishing ecosystem, and believe in the incredible potential of having decentralized applications anchored to the security of Bitcoin. The blockchain industry is still nascent, and the time to deploy capital is now.
Builders Want to Build on Stacks
It’s been only nine months since mainnet launched, and before then, fully expressive smart contracts were not possible. And yet in such a short time period, we’ve seen an eruption of developer activity, demo day being one more proof point. Passionate developers are launching powerful applications, and an audience of hungry users is ready to try it out. Like we saw from the Accelerator startups, the most experienced Stacks developers are collaborating, mentoring newcomers, and sharing resources to enrich the community. Everyday the ecosystem is solving interesting engineering challenges, and it’s resulted in technical achievements like token standards, microblock streams, and analytic dashboards.
Developers Choose Stacks Because Developers Choose Bitcoin
Throughout demo day, teams emphasized the Stacks’ unique connection to the Bitcoin main chain as a core reason why they’re betting on the Stacks ecosystem. Stacks’ use of proof of transfer to extend security capabilities make it a trusted network to host an application. Not only does Stacks significantly reduce attack vectors by using Bitcoin in consensus, but it also gains unprecedented purview into Bitcoin’s transaction history. This allows for some novel interaction between the two chains, and unlocks the world of Bitcoin DeFi. This is a big part of the reason why Hiro has bet on Stacks.
Hiro’s Developer Tools Provide a Competitive Advantage
We learned that a significant number of demo day startups are using Hiro’s developer tools to ensure confidence when building a decentralized project. Throughout the three-month program, these companies used Hiro products to speed up coding, streamline transaction processing, enable authentication, query blockchain history, and a host of other crypto superpowers.
Ready to Build Your Own Stacks Project?
Excited about the potential of the Stacks ecosystem? You can start building today with Hiro’s developer tools:
Clarinet can help you avoid commonly made smart contract mistakes, the Clarity for VSCode extension offers integral autocomplete features, and the Hiro Web Wallet is how users will actively interact with your app. Got questions? Come talk to us in the dev-general channel in Discord.
