Stacks Bitcoin Staking Bond 2 Fills 500 BTC, STX Up 11%

Stacks Labs says the second round of Stacks Bitcoin Staking is full. In a post dated October 12, it reports that all of Bond 2's capacity, about 500 BTC, has been taken. It also reports more than 6.7 million STX bonded alongside that BTC. The yield is targeting 3% on BTC, paid in BTC. The post stresses that rates are targets and never guaranteed.

Who filled Stacks Bitcoin Staking Bond 2

Most of the Stacks Bitcoin Staking capacity went through StackingDAO, a liquid staking pool on Stacks. Xverse's pool and 21Shares also took part. According to the post, the Stacks Endowment allocated nearly all of the bond to Bitcoin DeFi on purpose. The aim was for staked BTC to move into apps on Stacks and keep earning there.

The Stacks Labs post dated October 12. Source: Stacks blog.

Liquid staking works by giving the staker a token called stBTC in return for staked BTC. The holder keeps earning staking rewards and can pledge stBTC as collateral elsewhere on Stacks. The blog's example is posting it to borrow USDCx, the USDC stablecoin on the network. That is the point of this bond, which the post describes as a way to see how staked BTC behaves when it stays usable.

How Bitcoin staking on Stacks is structured

The first round, called the Genesis Bond, is still running. Stacks Labs lists UTXO Management, 21Shares, HashKey and Sypher Capital as enrolled, and says their BTC rewards have been paid every week since September 17. Up to six bonds can run at the same time, and two are active now.

Each bond in the Stacks Bitcoin Staking program has two routes in. Self-custodial staking is whitelisted for anchor participants, who apply with a minimum of 50 BTC and are not guaranteed approval. Their BTC stays timelocked on Bitcoin under their own custody. The open route goes through pools run by ecosystem partners. Those pools work with sBTC, the Bitcoin-backed asset on Stacks, which is why the post says pooled staking is not fully self-custodial.

The yield itself comes from Proof of Transfer, where miners spend BTC to produce Stacks blocks and earn STX. That spent BTC is then passed along to staking participants. During the bootstrap phase the Stacks Endowment sets the target rates.

What comes next and what the numbers show

Bond 3 is expected to open around November 10. Stacks Labs says it should bring more institutions, and that integrations with custodians including Anchorage are in progress. The confirmed pools for it are StackingDAO, Xverse and Esbee DAO.

StackingDAO's page on DefiLlama, showing the steep rise in value locked this month. Source: DefiLlama.

DefiLlama gives a way to check the growth. It shows StackingDAO's value locked at about $37 million at the end of September. By October 8 the figure had climbed past $80 million, and it was near $86 million on October 13.

The STX token has also moved. Binance's STX/USDT pair traded as high as $0.4614 on October 12 on about $9 million of volume, roughly three times a typical day last week. It was up about 11% over 24 hours at $0.433 on the morning of October 13. The post does not mention price, so this article does not tie the two together, and none of it is investment advice.