Crypto Asset Built To Boost Bitcoin Utility Surges 44% in Just One Week

A Bitcoin (BTC)-focused crypto asset has drafted off BTC’s price pump and surged by more than 44% in the past seven days.

Stacks (STX) is a layer-1 blockchain that aims to boost the utility of Bitcoin by enabling smart contracts, decentralized finance (DeFi) activity, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and other applications to be built on the flagship cryptocurrency.

STX is trading around $0.778 at time of writing, up from $0.54 one week ago. The 41st-ranked crypto asset by market cap is down by more than 4% in the past 24 hours, however.

Stacks has likely surfed on Bitcoin’s overall momentum. Last Thursday, BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, submitted a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) application to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

No US Bitcoin spot ETF applications have ever been approved thus far, despite submissions from Grayscale, VanEck, and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, though the SEC did greenlight the launch of two Bitcoin futures ETFs in October 2021.

BTC is up around 20% since the BlackRock news broke and is trading at $30,002 at time of writing.

Stacks also updated its Twitter followers this week on the project’s ongoing development, including the engineer Igor Sylvester sharing an alpha for the testnet of sBTC, Stacks’ trustless two-way Bitcoin peg system.

Generated Image: Midjourney