Stacks

STX launched in October 2019 at 21 cents. Its price did not budge above a dollar until early 2021, when exchanges finally received the all-clear from Blockstack PBC, the company that invented Stacks. Blockstack PBC (now called Hiro) had waited until it had decentralized the network before listing its token on exchanges.

Luckily for Stacks, that’s right around the time when cryptocurrency prices started to boom. STX rose to highs of $2.70 in April 2021. When the market died down over the summer, STX fell to 60 cents. But in November 2021, when decentralized finance (DeFi) tokens rose again in a second wind, STX hit an all-time high of $3.61. That wind died down by Q2 2022, and STX fell to about 52 cents by June of that year.

The network created 1.32 billion STX when it launched the token in November 2018. About 39% went to investors in various token tales, 8.23% to equity investors in Blockstack and 13.53% to founders. Another 30% went to the company’s treasury, 3% to fund projects within its ecosystem and 5.65% to employees. Many of these tokens were subject to timelocks, but data provider Messari predicts that all the original tokens will be in circulation by 2025.

Stacks originally designed its token distribution to mint and burn tokens periodically. In October 2020, Stacks simplified its economic policy to remove this process entirely, replacing it with a policy that mints new STX each time a block is added to the network, similar to what’s done with Bitcoin.

Under the new schedule, the number of STX minted per block decreases over time. Until 2024, miners will mint 1,000 new STX per block. This will reduce to 500 STX per block from 2025 through 2029, 250 STX per block for 2030-2034, and finally 125 STX per block until the end of time. The new schedule projects that 1.8 billion STX tokens will circulate around its economy by 2050.