Valuation summary for this round (discounted to today): STX current price $0.3759 (verified at 2026-10-06 23:59 +0800); opening a new position is not currently recommended. Bear-case valuation: $0.1005; base-case valuation: $0.268; bull-case valuation: $0.7327; current weighted valuation: $0.31069; weighted valuation one year from now (2027-10-06): $0.37284. Recommended entry price ranges: watch zone $0.25–$0.28, core zone $0.19–$0.22, panic zone $0.12–$0.15 (entries must meet the conditions in the main text; if the fundamentals thesis is invalidated, cancel any remaining tranches).
Data cutoff: October 6, 2026, 23:59 Beijing time. See the opening section for the market price verification time; quarterly cash balance, initial payment, and order book each retain their respective measurement times. The valuations above are arithmetic outputs of a conditional model; the number of decimal places does not imply that market prices can be predicted accurately.
My view: the product has already worked, but the token still needs to prove that growth can outpace costs.
STX has verifiable BTC pairable capacity, consensus, and gas usage. But currently, with early-network demand being priced as options, the fee base and complete follow-on execution records are still weak. Since the current price is higher than the conditional weighted fair value, I do not recommend building a position yet. The first BTC staking cycle already has real principal and actual payments; it isn’t only based on cooperation announcements. For the next cycle, more principal is also being prepared to go into liquid staking and borrowing applications. Still, STX demand growth, miners’ bidding, and reward payments are interdependent, and issuance remains an important support for this loop. Calling the rewards “Bitcoin yield” doesn’t automatically make it independent exogenous income relative to the STX price.
This round’s conditional weighted fair value is about $0.311, which is about 17.3% lower than the current price of $0.3759. Conversely, the current price is about 21.0% higher than this fair value. This is not a prediction that “the price must fall,” but rather my pricing of current evidence and兑现风险. If real capital, fees, and exit capability continue to grow, the valuation can rise; if it’s only more certificate collateralization of the same principal, the growth appearance may not necessarily improve the token logic.
Stacks is an independent execution layer associated with Bitcoin. STX bears transaction and contract execution fees, consensus-related locking, and the paired capacity for Bitcoin staking. sBTC is Bitcoin’s representation on Stacks, and stBTC is a liquid certificate of a staking position in the pool. Their rights, custody, and exit risks differ; they cannot be treated as the same asset just because all revolve around Bitcoin.
Where does the real demand come from, and why does it need STX?
The first phase went into production on September 10. In the two-week sample through September 24, 230 BTC were paired with 3.57 million STX, and 0.28 BTC rewards have been received. Four institutions actually participated, demonstrating that the path from miner capital to staking payments has already been proven. However, it is still insufficient to prove stable six-month payments, institutional follow-on participation, or large-scale user retention.
The native Bitcoin route locks BTC into a time lock on the Bitcoin chain. Participants retain the keys needed to retrieve principal upon normal expiry, plus an STX amount roughly equal to 5% of the BTC value. STX provides capacity for about six months and is locked during that time; it does not claim residual STX-only rewards. The demand it brings has economic rationale, but it depends on the real participation amount and the pairing ratio, and it is also constrained by capacity and distribution rules. Locking STX by holders does not mean the token is permanently destroyed.
For the second phase, most capacity is planned to be assigned to liquid staking, with StackingDAO taking the main allocation; Xverse and 21Shares also participate. The deployment deadline is determined by Bitcoin block 970450, with startup around October 10. An earlier plan listed a total capacity of 500 BTC, and the latest方案 does not re-list that total. Therefore, 500 BTC can only be used as reference for the earlier plan, not written as funds already deposited or already running at full capacity.
This route makes BTC become sBTC first, and then form transferable stBTC. Holders can use certificates as collateral for borrowing, and the staking position continues to compete for rewards. This is the practical product direction for improving capital efficiency, but it may also cause the same principal to appear in multiple statistical positions such as staking, certificates, and borrowing. To verify the quality of growth, you should observe net inflows of BTC, the actual amount of STX pairing, borrowing balances, and payments. Looking only at the total TVL can easily overestimate capital increases.
The source, distribution, and reverse loop of rewards
Miners pay BTC; competition for STX issuance rewards and transaction fees occurs. These BTC are first used to fund the target yield of pairing bonds. The remaining portion is then distributed 85% to STX-only participants and 15% to accumulate reserves. About 3% is the target annualized return; it is not guaranteed. Over six months, computed using about 25,200 Bitcoin blocks and 24 weekly distributions, the target cumulative yield is about 1.44%, and you also shouldn’t treat annualized figures as the realized six-month ratio directly.
The current 30-day baseline chain fee is about $53.7k; simple annualization is about $654k. This is not income already collected over the past year. In the application layer, Bitflow’s concurrent fees are about $236.3k and Zest V2 about $227k; these belong to their respective business line items. You cannot add them all mechanically as STX-holder income, and you definitely can’t mechanically sum them with baseline chain fees for valuation. Fees still go through different allocation paths such as miners, applications, and pools. Normal STX holders do not automatically have rights to all these cash flows.
The mainnet has entered PoX-5. Nodes show the current activation stage, corresponding contracts, and version 4.0.4. The base reward has been restored to 1000 STX per Bitcoin block, and the original staircase down schedule has been removed. This is a tentative rule for the launch phase; PoX-6 should be re-evaluated later. It does not cancel any additional issuance in the treasury.
At the target block speed, one base annual reward corresponds to about 52.56 million STX, which at the current price is roughly $20 million—clearly higher than the annualized baseline-chain fees mentioned above. This comparison does not treat STX issuance as a dollar expenditure; it instead indicates that the miners’ economic value they are pursuing currently relies mainly on issuance rewards. Rising coin price can support higher BTC bids; falling coin price can compress reward coverage and new capacity. If STX demand from new staking is insufficient to offset issuance and selling, the loop can run in reverse.
The reserve setup needs especially careful interpretation. In the PoX-5 launch phase, reserves only accumulate; normal spending entry points are not yet open. Using them requires a consensus change, not the operations team transferring funds at any time. A multi-sig for reward distribution can pause, but it cannot redirect rewards; pausing itself still affects users. You can’t write “accumulated reserves” as cash that is immediately available and can guarantee rewards.
Supply, unlocking, and the treasury—four sets of numbers must be kept separate.
This round uses a more up-to-date PoX node supply figure of about 1.87226 billion STX; the slower supply query still stays at older blocks. The supply page shows that everything has been unlocked, but the on-chain treasury contract still has time-release constraints, and PoX also records about 448.33 million STX locked. Therefore, the unlock figure from this interface cannot represent that all tokens can be sold immediately. Total issuance, claimable amounts, staking lockups, and final freely circulating supply must be separated.
The treasury方案 starts with minting 200 million STX: 100 million is immediately available, and the other 100 million is released by 1/24 every 4,383 Bitcoin blocks. Another ~300 million are issued gradually based on tenure. Currently the additional issuance is in the tenure stage of 1140 STX; after block 1,012,860 it increases to 1705 STX. There are further tiers after that; you can’t use an overview figure like “about 2%” to replace the complete supply.
Using round block 970188 as the baseline, the time-release pool has reached period 14, with about 41.6667 million remaining not yet expired. Here, “tenure” refers to the miner block-production tenure that is highly tied to Bitcoin height. Below, based on 144 Bitcoin blocks per day, and assuming each height has a corresponding tenure and that current rules remain unchanged, I project new issuance and the expiry pressure on the existing pools.
In the 30-day stress path, miners’ base new issuance is about 4.32 million STX, the treasury adds about 4.92 million STX, totaling about 9.24 million STX. Separately, about 4.17 million issued tokens expire. Expanded to 90 days: new issuance by miners and the treasury are about 12.96 million and 14.77 million STX, totaling about 27.73 million STX, and the already-issued pool additionally expires by 12.5 million.
In the 180-day path, the two types of new issuance are about 25.92 million and 29.55 million STX respectively, totaling about 55.47 million STX, with another 25 million expiring existing tokens. In the one-year path, new issuance is about 52.56 million and 65.50 million STX respectively, totaling about 118.1 million STX, with another 41.67 million expiring tokens that were minted long ago.
The above expiry amounts for existing pools correspond to tokens minted long ago and should not be added again into the total issuance denominator. Under the future one-year model, total issuance is about 1.99033 billion STX and the incremental amount is about 6.31% of the current total issuance. Actual block speeds, whether effective tenure forms, future governance decisions, and any secondary locks for private sales can all change tradable flow. This is not a deterministic calendar unlock promise.
The treasury contract balance is approximately 63.4047 million STX, of which the unreleased portion that is still not yet expired—calculated by the code and this round’s block height—is about 41.6667 million STX. Of the balance at that time, the portion that could be claimed is about 21.7380 million STX. The mainnet read-only status has been confirmed. The initial payment address recorded in the code is still the current beneficiary; that address balance is about 6.8582 million STX. Combined, the two addresses total about 70.2628 million STX, accounting for about 3.75% of the node supply. This is only a snapshot of two treasury-related addresses; it is not the entire treasury, all assets of the manager, or a complete “whale” proportion.
The ownership behind the main current beneficiaries and the custodianship at exchanges, as well as each-by-each OTC secondary lock, cannot be fully traced through. I also won’t use the initial allocation ratios to pretend they represent today’s top-ten holder percentages. With the current price, a strict fixed FDV upper bound also can’t be reliably given, because the initial 1000 STX base issuance in the launch phase had no preset down-timing day, and it may be modified later; the “2050 prediction” in the interface should not be treated as a current hard upper limit. About $704 million is the total issuance market-cap figure for this round’s issuance basis; it must not be confused with freely circulating market cap or a determined FDV.
Team, capital, and competitive advantages—ultimately it still needs to land on usage.
Muneeb Ali took over as CEO of Stacks Labs at the end of September; the former interim CEO became an advisor. The founders have long-term partnerships with institutional channels; the product already has custody, a wallet, and early participants, giving it more execution foundation than a pure concept project. However, “institutional usage, infrastructure support, and equity or token investments” are different things. A partner list cannot prove that those institutions are accumulating STX, nor does it replace the need for product retention.
In the quarterly capital disclosure, the fair value of liquid assets on September 15 was about $15.3 million, including 58.6 million STX. Quarterly expenditures were about $4.5 million in fiat and 8.4 million STX; the latter’s valuation at the time was about $1.75 million. In addition, about $6.6 million was in DeFi liquidity and market making, with some expectation of flowing back before year-end. These figures involve different times and asset boundaries, so they cannot be directly added up as cash that can be paid today. If quarterly expenditures were simply carried forward, the implied annual value consumption would be about $25 million; that is just a stress reference, not an already approved annual budget.
Supply can support R&D and distribution, but token holders cannot thereby claim rights to the treasury’s remaining assets. The treasury payee can be changed by the existing authorized party; a commitment to not participate in proposal voting is also different from code-level prohibition. Concentrating resources can improve coordination efficiency, while also increasing operational judgment risks, budget risks, and governance/control risks.
The competitive edge is connecting Bitcoin time locks, STX capacity, and existing smart-contract applications. Pure BTC self-custody has lower costs, and borrowing and other collateralization routes may provide different return-and-risk combinations, so users are not required to choose STX. Under the current professional definitions, Stacks DeFi TVL is about $96.14 million and Rootstock about $84.86 million—suggesting this is still a relatively small ecosystem. Their gas, token rights, and asset accounting differ; you can’t force the same valuation multiple just because TVL is close. A real moat should be reflected in reliable follow-on work, transferable costs, developer tooling, distribution, and actual fees—not in the name “Bitcoin L2.”
For governance: after completing a full index and verifying the related original text for this round, the treasury, Clarity 6, and PoX-5方案 have been Ratified. Mainnet activation has other node evidence. The collateral position interface standard is still Accepted. The improved staking draft remains Draft in the index, but some improvements have been absorbed by PoX-5; you can’t directly equate the index status with whether functionality is actually executed. Drafts still need to be distinguished from standard proposals and real adoption—e.g., BTC address display, multi-agent coordination, privacy NFT metadata, agent registration, and contract icon recognition. There isn’t enough basis to count them as new revenue or automatic profit-sharing. PoX-6 also has no determined activation date.
Security risks come before returns.
Native BTC time locks, the sBTC bridge, and liquidity pools are three different layers of risk. In the native path, normal expiry and withdrawal back to the participant relies on participants’ own keys; early exit requires a joint signature and forfeiting unallocated rewards, and STX remains locked until expiry. Entering the sBTC or stBTC pool adds risks around the signature set, pool contract, certificate pricing, and borrowing liquidation. Protection of native principal cannot be extended to guarantee the safety of all pool assets.
In the mainnet read-only status shown in this round, sBTC currently has 11 signers and requires 8 signatures—about 72.73%. This corrects the old figures of 53% or roughly 70% shown on the webpage, but it does not prove that the 11 slots are completely independent final controllers. Signer rotation, infrastructure failures, and joint control should continue to be monitored.
Historically there have been micro-stalls; the new version handled related issues. Before upgrading, there was also the discovery and fixing of the risk of chain-wide stalls with high severity. There is already an independent audit directory and an ongoing security plan, but in this round there was no per-item re-execution of all remediation verification. You can’t interpret “there has been an audit” as risks going to zero. BTC settlement finality also doesn’t replace permission security for bridges and applications.
The most severe loss path is something going wrong with sBTC funds or pool assets; next is a pause in rewards, then STX price drops leading to a contraction in miner economics, reduced capacity, and eventual liquidation after liquid certificates are pledged again. Reserves and rewards will also involve sBTC automatic bridging. If the Bitcoin has been stolen, a Stacks-side hard fork by itself cannot retrieve it. These risks must be subtracted first in any valuation and participation assumptions.
How I value it, and what would cause the valuation to change.
I haven’t multiplied small-scale current fees by a high multiple to justify the entire market cap, and I also haven’t written off Stacks to zero overall just because confirmed dividends are few. STX may still earn service-like or monetary-premium gains from gas, consensus locking, and BTC capacity demand. The real question is how much that premium should cost.
In this round, the model uses one year later economic TVL times the network value premium multiple, then divides by the model of total issuance at the end of the period under the conditional basis. “Economic TVL” should, as much as possible, remove amplification caused by price increases and the same principal being repeatedly cycled through borrowing. It is not net assets that token holders can redeem, and the multiple is not a cash-flow multiple. This model can provide a range for discussion, with reliability lower than mature cash-flow valuation.
In the pessimistic path, I assume that one year later economic TVL falls to $80 million and I assign only a 3x network value premium, which corresponds to a $240 million market cap. Based on the end-of-period supply, the token price one year later would be about $0.1206, discounted to today about $0.1005; I assign this path a 30% weight.
The base path requires continued growth in real usage. Economic TVL reaches $160 million and a 4x premium is used, corresponding to a $640 million market cap. One year later the coin price would be about $0.3216, discounted to today about $0.2680, with a 50% weight. This requires new principal, payments, and fees to improve together—not just pushing up the USD TVL via higher coin price.
In the optimistic path, economic TVL reaches $350 million and can support a 5x premium, corresponding to a $1.75 billion market cap. One year later the coin price would be about $0.8793, discounted to today about $0.7327, with a 20% weight. It requires multi-period expansion, deep exits, and fewer dependencies on subsidies to be simultaneously realized—so it is not suitable as the main path.
All three paths share the supply-pressure assumption of about 1.99033 billion STX. The price one year later is computed from the market cap and supply at that time; the current price is then obtained by dividing by 1.20, representing my required 20% annual risk return. 30%, 50%, and 20% are my subjective probabilities, not statistically measured event rates. The three are mutually exclusive: if bridge permanent loss or rule breaks occur, my judgment would fall outside this model, so you can’t assume a pessimistic price guarantees a floor.
The current total-issuance market-cap/TVL is about 7.32x. I choose a lower 3x to 5x as a discount for value capture, issuance, early payment samples, and governance risk. I can’t force precise comparability with other chains using different gas mechanisms, and I also can’t package this subjective multiple as an industry law. The pessimistic path requires capital use to weaken; the base path needs true principal and fees to keep being generated after the second phase; the optimistic path requires multi-period expansion, deeper exits, and synchronized reduction in subsidy dependence—so it can’t rely only on coin price to lift USD TVL.
The recalculation method is: 80 million × 3, 160 million × 4, 350 million × 5, each divided by about 1.99033 billion STX, and then divided by 1.20. Weighted by the three probabilities, the price today is about $0.311 and about $0.373 one year later. The treasury assets are not included as holder equity, and the BTC-locked capital is not added again on top of TVL.
The most sensitive factors are TVL quality and the premium multiple. If base TVL decreases or increases by 25%, the current base price becomes approximately $0.201 or $0.335. Changing the 4x premium to 3x or 5x also results in approximately $0.201 or $0.335. If end-period supply increases by another 10% while everything else stays the same, the price drops by about 9.1%.
How to handle the current price and what to verify next.
Around $0.3759, I choose to wait. I won’t chase STX for the target BTC yield, nor will I ignore exit requirements just to increase staking lockups. The three future tiers are all observation plans; hitting the price level does not automatically trigger a buy:
- Observation Zone $0.25—$0.28: deploy 20% of the total planned amount for this coin, provided that the actual deployment and payments in phase two can be verified, sBTC redemptions have no anomalies, and any new capital is not amplified by repeated borrowing statistics.
- Core Zone $0.19—$0.22: add 50%, cumulative 70%, provided that at least two consecutive weekly payments are normal, economic TVL does not fall below $80 million, and there are no new deteriorations in issuance, the treasury, or permissions.
- Panic Zone $0.12—$0.15: only add 30% (cumulative 100%) if the market faces liquidity shocks while fundamentals remain intact. If the bridge, payments, supply rules, or withdrawable capital fail, cancel the remaining tiers.
All these ratios are based on STX’s own estimated total amount, and tiers remain unallocated until reached. Before executing, the depth needs to be refreshed. In this round, the previously verified single-spot order book depth of about 19.4k and 22.6k USDT on one side was around 1% depth at that time, and it does not support assuming large orders can easily enter and exit. A single order should not exceed 5% of the 1% counterparty depth at that time, rather than relying on today’s screenshot to guarantee future execution.
Existing positions should keep exit-capable liquidity, and I won’t lock all STX for six months just to pursue a yield target. Currently I’m not increasing. If sBTC redemption fails, two consecutive payment anomalies occur, a reward pause requires an urgent consensus, or if supply permissions change, first cancel any unexecuted tiers and reduce holdings based on your own pre-determined risk budget. You can’t rely on averaging down costs to hide a failure.
First verify block 970450 and the phase-two inflow around October 10, the STX pairing, and the first week’s payments. Then track for four to eight weeks to remove effects from price and loop-driven capital, chain fees, and reward coverage. Verify fund return and expenditures by year-end, and verify the rollovers when the first phase expires. Signatures, treasury claim permissions, OTC locks, and actual issuance still need to be completed; only with improved evidence should the valuation be adjusted upward.