Stacks founder Muneeb Ali eyes early December for sBTC upgrade launch

The founder of Stacks, a blockchain designed to scale bitcoin, hinted that the network's next major upgrade is on the horizon. 

Muneeb Ali, co-creator of Stacks and CEO of Trust Machines, which builds applications on bitcoin and its associated networks, noted in an X post that the network's upcoming sBTC token may be released as early as next month. 

"[Early December] is the target and that seems on-track for sBTC v1 with more upgrades coming to it in [January] and onwards," Ali wrote . 

Stacks bills sBTC as a solution to bitcoin's "write problem," or the difficulty in writing data directly to bitcoin's main chain, a necessity for decentralized finance applications. Stacks' sBTC will "[Enable] smart contracts to programmatically send sBTC to a BTC address, where it can peg it out as BTC," according to Stacks' announcement . 

Put simply, sBTC will provide a competitor to other forms of wrapped bitcoin that enable the token's use in decentralized applications, such as wBTC and cbBTC , which are both offered by centralized custodians. Stacks believes sBTC's novel decentralized two-way peg will unlock value by providing an alternative that's more in line with bitcoin's decentralized philosophy. 

Stacks' sBTC whitepaper refers to wBTC as "...entrusted to a single custodian and hence antithetical to Bitcoin ethos," though its ownership has changed since the whitepaper was published. In contrast, the paper bills sBTC as "a decentralized pegged BTC asset operated by a fully permissionless, decentralized, dynamic set of participants with a clear economic incentive to operate the peg properly." 

"Bitcoin rails can be upgraded through Layer-2s...There can be all sorts of use cases that are deployed there and the capital can be more productive — it will make bitcoin more valuable," Ali told The Block in an interview in March of this year.