Cycle #75

We have received 5.26166854 BTC as rewards.

Hard times to Lock for #75

The last cycle ended with network congestions due to slow miners and many transactions from STX20 activity. It was difficult to get all pool members into the next cycle. However, we managed to lock 43m STX. Some pools missed their final commit transaction and had to skip the cycle. Thanks to our self-service feature, we could lock early and try to add more members while new miners tried to clear the mempool.

Rewards Part 1

The new miners still spend a lot of BTC at the beginning of the cycle and we received 2.56334262 BTC in a few days. These were converted to 69,948.947431 STX in two transactions:

• 2.5318217 BTC (+ 0.03152092 BTC fees) to proxy address: https://mempool.space/tx/6551104635b273fa126b31bfc0a5ab8fc85b966b69b2a88685e225fc890551b0

• 2.5 BTC to STX via aBTC:
  a) BTC to swap pool: https://mempool.space/tx/964d42371029526e50c5a561eb6f6d5e0ed6a8e3336dcc5b7e9824e13631b8b1
  b) swap pool to STX https://explorer.hiro.so/txid/0x0e6af4ab62ef9fa950febf9078ef635e5a9ac62a04b6be49f13640e963b07b0c?chain=mainnet

Then, the first part of rewards were distributed to all pool members but the city coin treasuries. Their share (39,077.611128 STX) is hold in the proxy address until the end of the cycle for technical reasons required by the city coin contracts:

• 30,871.34 STX to pool address: https://explorer.hiro.so/txid/0xb23d45acc99c43f02ae5b1626f56457da78badd71b9f305e1014904bd99c7136?chain=mainnet

Rewards Part 2

For the second part, 2.69832992 BTC were wrapped and swapped.

• 2.64356356 BTC (+ 0.05476636 fees) to proxy address: https://mempool.space/tx/98060c8efbe3b6b2ad5b37445b504e4bd2072bd55670d1945dc5cf6b83935781

• 2.4166159 BTC to STX via aBTC:
  a) BTC to swap pool: https://mempool.space/tx/4a18e72defb7224ab0762b1d9f07b83ddf65d20353e8dfa80bc94de36ae00488
  b) swap pool to STX: https://explorer.hiro.so/txid/0xd9845eff586fac7c3b78fd5f9c2eb01377a501b411af1a6631e34b223d29a6f6?chain=mainnet

Then, the second part of rewards were distributed to all pool members (26,678.919751 STX) but the city coin treasuries and the total rewards were distributed to the city coin treasuries (72,848.370568).

• 99,527.29 STX to pool address: https://explorer.hiro.so/txid/0x705b1b7f0eb20ad138c3cb8acf4969e5bce1c47ad74110e35e46ecae2af9fe82?chain=mainnet

Total Rewards

A total of 130,398.626096 STX were distributed to 1072 pool members and 2 contracts. The distribution was based on 46,068,171.899531 STX (even though only 43,818,567.689086 STX were earning rewards).

Preparing for Nakamoto Release (5% reserve)

This year, the Nakamoto hard fork will bring sBTC. This means that we will replace aBTC with sBTC. The flow will be similar: wrapping to sBTC, then exchanging to STX and distributing.

However, stackers need to do more work eventually, run stacks and a signer node. We are preparing for that and put around 5% of the rewards aside. We started to build up infrastructure and it will allow us to operate Stacks 3.0 signer nodes.

For cycle #75, we sent 0.25 BTC to the reserve. That is around 5% of the consolidated BTC UTXOs (2,5318217 BTC + 2,64356356 BTC).

Wrapping using aBTC

The rewards were wrapped from BTC to aBTC. This worked quite well and fast. It is transparent and minting aBTC happens automagically. You can read more about aBTC at https://docs.alexgo.io/bitcoin-bridge/abtc-a.k.a-alex-btc