• Stacks (STX) price has surged 16% in the last 24 hours, hitting levels last seen in March.
• The Bitcoin layer for smart contracts saw a huge spike in inscriptions, with a single block recording over 10k transactions.

Stacks (STX), a smart contracts enabled layer 2 network looking to unlock the Bitcoin economy, has surged by more than 16% in the past 24 hours.

According to market data from CoinGecko, the price of Stacks rose as high as $1.19 across major exchanges. The STX market cap rose to above $1.7 billion, and the last time STX traded at these levels was in March this year.

As observed across the crypto market today, Stacks’ price spike defied the broader losses experienced across altcoins, with Bitcoin (BTC) also hovering near $41k.

STX price soars amid inscriptions craze

The past few weeks have witnessed a new frenzy in inscriptions, the metadata embedded onto satoshis (sats), Bitcoin’s smallest unit. The popularity of these inscribed texts, images and other metadata (NFTs on Bitcoin) has jumped amid BTC’s price surge.

For Stacks, there was a massive spike in transactions in 24 hours on Sunday and early Monday, with a single block recording over 10k transactions. On-chain data showed block 132,377 on the L2 reached 10,371 transactions, the highest ever number of transactions in a single Stacks block.

Muneeb Ali, the co-founder of Stacks noted that Bitcoin degens’ heavy minting, resulting in blocks with eight to ten times more transactions.

GM to the Bitcoin degens who did heavy mints on Stacks L2 yesterday.

It was great to see blocks with 8x-10x more transactions. The bulk of throughput improvements will go live with the Nakamoto release and WASM.

— muneeb.btc (@muneeb) December 18, 2023

Other than smart contracts, NFT capabilities and DeFi opportunities, Stacks’s L2 solution allows for increased transaction speed and reduced fees.