The Nakamoto Release is an upcoming hard fork on the Stacks network designed to bring several benefits, chief among them are increased transaction throughput and 100% Bitcoin finality. Learn about the Nakamoto Activation sequence here: Nakamoto Activation Sequence.

‍Bitcoin block 840,360 marked the start of the multi-phase Nakamoto mainnet rollout.

With Nakamoto, Stacks block production would no longer be tied to miner elections. Instead, miners produce blocks at a fixed cadence, and the set of PoX Stackers rely on the miner elections to determine when the current miner should stop producing blocks and a new miner should start. This blockchain will only fork if 70% of Stackers approve the fork, and chain reorganization will be as difficult as reorganizing Bitcoin.

The Nakamoto release brings many new capabilities and improvements to the Stacks blockchain by focusing on a set of core advancements: improving transaction speed, enhancing finality guarantees for transactions, mitigating Bitcoin miner MEV (miner extractable value) opportunities that affect PoX, and boosting robustness against chain reorganizations.