Stacks Token Soars 130% on the Week Amid Bitcoin NFT Hype

STX, the native token powering the Bitcoin-adjacent Stacks blockchain, has gained 19% overnight, according to data from CoinGecko.

At press time, STX is changing hands at roughly $0.70, slightly lower from its 180-day high of $0.75, reached earlier today.

On a weekly note, STX is up a whopping 132%. The weekly gains not only handed hefty profits to short-term holders but also helped the coin regain its billion-dollar market capitalization.

 NFT Revolution

Bitcoin NFTs Are Emerging on Stacks. Can They Thrive?

Ethereum owns the largest cut of the booming NFT market, which produced $10.67 billion worth of transaction volume in Q3 2021 alone. Solana has recently emerged as an alternative, plus Flow and Polygon have a share of the action. But what about Bitcoin NFTs? You might be thinking: Are those even possible? Bitcoin doesn’t have the smart contract capabilities of Ethereum and other networks, so it cannot run the code needed to operate NFTs, DeFi protocols, and decentralized apps. Not natively, at l...

Despite the week’s positive rally, STX is still down 78% from its historical all-time high of $3.39 in December 2021.

Launched in 2017, Stacks is built on top of Bitcoin, allowing developers to build and deploy smart contracts secured by the original blockchain network.

In simpler terms, Stacks operates much like Ethereum with a link to the Bitcoin blockchain through proof-of-transfer (PoX) consensus. According to Stacks, “PoX uses the proof of work cryptocurrency of an established blockchain to secure a new blockchain.”

Stacks sees uptick in activity

A likely driver behind the recent pump in STX may have been the steady growth of NFT network activity on the Stacks blockchain.

The hype around Ordinals, a newly launched Bitcoin-based NFT project, may have also had a positive impact on the network’s overall activity as investors hunt down more exposure to the NFTs-on-Bitcoin narrative.

 NFT Revolution

Ordinals Gain Momentum With 76,000 NFTs Minted to Bitcoin

Despite pushback from Bitcoin purists, Ordinals—the NFT-like project on the Bitcoin blockchain—shows no signs of slowing, as over 76,400 inscriptions have been created to date. The number of Ordinals spiked on February 9, 2023, exceeding 20,800 inscriptions for the day, according to data from Dune. Launched last month, Ordinals is the latest project aiming to bring NFTs into the Bitcoin ecosystem. Counterparty, launched in 2014, was the first project that introduced non-fungible tokens to Bitco...

Per data from Stacks on Chain, in February, with a week to go, the network has processed 3.36 million transactions, a 223% surge compared to the network’s 1.13 million transactions last month.

During the same period, there was a clear spike in the number of transactions on the Stacks network’s mempool, indicating increasing network demand per data from Stacks on Chain.

Mempool is a pending transaction queue where new blockchain transactions are stored before being validated and added to the blockchain.

As for Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has dropped 0.1% over the past 24 hours but has risen a whopping 13.5% over the week.