Convert between STX and US dollars at the live rate.
$3.86
−96.24% from current
$0.045596
+217.74% from current
Independent editorial ranking. Score is 0–10 across six criteria: Security, Fees, UX, Features, Support, Reputation.
US and EU users who prioritise a spotless security record — no major hack since 2011 — and want a serious pro-grade trading terminal.
Institutions and funds requiring an SEC-registered venue with segregated qualified custody and audited on-chain reserves.
Active spot traders chasing the deepest global liquidity and the widest listing catalogue outside the US perimeter.
Traders who mix spot and on-chain — the Web3 wallet, DEX aggregator and Ethereum L2 X Layer sit inside the same account as CEX pairs.
Long-horizon EU holders who want the oldest continuously-operating exchange (2011) with conservative listings and full MiCA licensing.
Derivatives-first traders who want tighter perp funding and a maker-friendly fee schedule; accept offshore regulatory footprint.
Top coins in the same category, ordered by market cap.
Stacks (STX) is a smart-contract platform that settles its tip under Bitcoin without changing a single line of Bitcoin code. The project started in 2013 as Blockstack, founded by Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea while they were both at Princeton CS. It rebranded to Stacks in 2020, and Stacks 2.0 mainnet went live in January 2021. Hiro Systems is the main developer org behind the protocol today.
A small piece of regulatory history matters here. In 2019 Stacks ran the first SEC-qualified Reg A+ token offering in crypto and raised about $23 million inside the US securities framework, a path almost no other token has taken. That decision shaped how the team approached US institutions and exchanges later.
On the technical side, Stacks runs Clarity smart contracts. Clarity is decidable, which means you can predict exactly what a contract will do before you run it. Contracts ship as source rather than compiled bytecode, so what you read is what executes. The language was purpose-built to avoid the reentrancy and integer-overflow bugs that have drained billions out of Solidity contracts on Ethereum. The dApp ecosystem includes ALEX (DEX), Velar (perpetuals), Bitflow, Arkadiko (CDP lending), and StackingDAO (liquid stacking).
The Stacks price comes from spot and derivatives markets across major exchanges. Live data on this page is aggregated and refreshes every 60 seconds. The reference quote is a volume-weighted average of the venues with the deepest order books: Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, OKX, and Bybit.
What moves STX on any given day:
Live prices stream into the card above. The analysis below uses the levels at page load.
Proof of Transfer (PoX) is the consensus mechanism that ties Stacks to Bitcoin without asking Bitcoin to change. Stacks miners do not burn electricity. They commit BTC. Each Stacks block is won by a miner who sends BTC to a set of addresses controlled by STX holders who locked their tokens for that cycle. The miner who commits the most BTC has the highest probability of producing the next block and earning the STX block reward.
The flip side is what makes the design interesting. The BTC the miners commit does not get burned. It gets paid out to STX holders who have locked ("stacked") their tokens. So Bitcoin's security underwrites Stacks at the same time STX holders earn BTC yield. Two assets, one consensus loop.
Clarity contracts run on top of this. Because contracts are decidable and ship as readable source, auditing a Stacks DeFi protocol is closer to reading a paper than reverse-engineering bytecode. That trade-off is real: Clarity has a smaller dev pool than Solidity, and tooling is younger. But it has avoided the catastrophic exploit class that keeps showing up on EVM chains.
The Nakamoto upgrade activated in August 2024. It rewrote the parts of Stacks that always felt like compromises in version 1, and it did so in two specific ways.
In practice, Nakamoto turned Stacks from "Bitcoin smart contracts but slow" into "Bitcoin smart contracts at modern UX speeds, with Bitcoin-grade finality." It also unlocked sBTC, which had been waiting on this throughput.
sBTC is a 1:1 BTC-backed asset that lives on Stacks. It launched in late 2024, after Nakamoto activated. The mechanism: a threshold-signature signer set holds the underlying BTC, and sBTC gets minted on Stacks against those reserves. Holders can redeem sBTC back into BTC at parity through the same signer set.
What makes sBTC matter is what it lets BTC actually do. Real Bitcoin (not a wrapped IOU custodied by a bridge multisig in another ecosystem) becomes collateral, liquidity, and tradable inventory inside Stacks DeFi. ALEX runs sBTC pools. Arkadiko accepts it as collateral for stablecoin loans. Velar lists perpetuals against it. Stacks now has a credible answer to the question Bitcoiners have been asked for a decade: yes, you can do DeFi with your BTC, and no, you do not have to send it to Ethereum or trust a custodian.
The signer set is the part to watch. It is more decentralised than a multisig bridge but it is not yet trustless the way Bitcoin itself is. Threshold signatures, slashing, and signer rotation are still maturing.
Stacking is the inverse side of Proof of Transfer. STX holders lock their tokens for one or more two-week PoX cycles, and the BTC that miners commit during that cycle gets paid out to them, proportional to their locked stake.
A few practical details:
Buying STX takes minutes. Setting up to stack takes a bit more attention because the wallet that holds your STX is also the wallet that picks the stacking destination.
For longer-term price scenarios that account for sBTC growth and the Bitcoin halving cycle, see our Stacks price forecast.
The Bitcoin L2 category is crowded and the technology is still settling. A few risks specific to STX deserve attention before you size a position.
This page is information, not financial advice. Talk to someone licensed before allocating real capital.
Analysis last updated:
Stacks (STX) trades at $0.144878 with a 24-hour volume of $28.19M and a market capitalization of $268.6M. The asset is currently ranked #137 among all tracked cryptocurrencies.
In the last 24 hours, the STX price has fallen +13.06%. On a seven-day window, Stacks has retraced +11.49%, under sustained selling pressure on both windows. Short-term moves are often amplified by liquidity, news flow, and derivatives positioning, so confirm signals across multiple indicators before acting.
Stacks's all-time high of $3.86 was set on April 1, 2024. The current price sits +96.24% below that peak. Distance from the all-time high is a common reference point when evaluating long recoveries and macro support or resistance.
Buying Stacks (STX) is a five-step routine once you have picked the right venue and pair. The steps below mirror what most investors do today.
You can also use the Stacks converter above to estimate how much STX you would get for a given dollar amount before placing the order.
Whether Stacks is a good investment depends on your goals, time horizon, and tolerance for volatility. Like all cryptocurrencies, STX carries real market risk: prices can rise or fall sharply in a day, and past performance is not a reliable indicator of future returns.
This page provides data and analysis for educational purposes only. It is not financial advice. Always do your own research, diversify, and never invest more than you can afford to lose.
