How to use Stacks
This is a guide on how to use the Stacks ecosystem. After reading this, you’ll be ready to start using decentralized apps for things such as DeFi and NFTs built on the Stacks protocol.
For an introduction to the Stacks project, click here
For our favourite assets built on Stacks, click here
Access
Centralized exchanges
First, you’re going to need some STX tokens, the native token of the Stacks protocol. Eventually, you’ll be able to use your bitcoins directly on Stacks. In the meantime, however, you can get your STX at the major exchanges Binance, KuCoin, Crypto.com and Gate.io. Click here for a complete overview of the exchanges offering $STX.
Wallet
Once you have acquired some STX, you will need to send them to a personal wallet. Hardware wallets are generally the safest and Ledger supports the Stacks protocol.
If you want to actively use the Stacks ecosystem, you’ll need a hot wallet. The Hiro wallet, named after and produced by the company behind Stacks, is currently the best Stacks wallet on the market.
There are two versions of the Hiro wallet, one extension that works with browsers such as Chrome and Brave and one desktop wallet. There are important differences.
Through the browser extension, you can connect to Stacks dapps and use DeFi and trade NFTs, which you can’t do with the desktop version.
However, you can use the most valuable feature of STX through the desktop version, which is earning Bitcoin by staking STX, a process called Stacking. There are two options for this. The first is to Stack by yourself, for which a minimum of 90,000 STX are required.
For those who don’t $150k+ to Stack, you can join a pool to Stack together. You can do this directly from your desktop wallet and the STX technically doesn’t leave your wallet but you delegate them. There are several pools with different requirements and you can find them here.
Always make absolutely sure that you and you alone have access to your wallet’s private key and/or your seed phrase (12/24 words, also called mnemonic password) This is the key to unlock your wallet. We recommend writing your keys down twice and storing the documents securely or storing the keys in an encrypted, secure password management system.
Using the ecosystem
Stacks ecosystem assets
Now that you have STX in your wallet, you can start using the dapps of the Stacks ecosystem. You are still quite early to the party and there are only a couple of dapps you can use at the moment, although many more are on the way.
Currently, you can trade NFTs via the STXNFT and StacksArt marketplaces, dip your toes into Stacks DeFi with Arkadiko and Stackswap or buy and stake Miami and New York’s CityCoins.
As always in this still experimental stage of blockchain technology, caution is required as DeFi dapps on Stacks are still in an early stage and bugs and exploits can occur.
To discover our favourite projects on Stacks, click here
Ecosystem insights
Currently, the infrastructure for Stacks insights is still under development. The tokens and NFTs can’t be found on popular websites such as Coingecko or Coinmarketcap yet.
This requires some deeper digging. On this website, you can find an overview of several interesting projects building on Stacks.
On this website, you can see the transactions, unique wallets and fees of the Stacks protocol.
Another way to track the Stacks ecosystem is by looking directly into what’s happening on-chain with the blockchain explorer. When you click on “transactions”, you can see exactly what people are buying, selling and minting.
Decentralized exchanges
Stackswap the first decentralized exchange on Stacks and offers all tokens available in the ecosystem. Arkadiko is a lending and collateralized loan protocol with a DEX feature with a more limited offering, but interesting rewards for providing liquidity.
