Two bonding periods, a liquid staking token, and a 25% jump in STX staking headline the Stacks Q3 2026 ecosystem update

Stacks says its Bitcoin Staking feature has pulled in around 735 BTC across its first two bonding periods on mainnet. That figure arrived in the project’s Q3 2026 ecosystem update, published October 15.

The total came from two separate windows. The first, called the Genesis Bond, opened on September 10, 2026, and contributed 230 BTC.

The second bond opened around October 10, 2026, and drew approximately 505 BTC. Its capacity was roughly 500 BTC, which means it was effectively filled to the brim.

Most of that second round came through a single channel. Around 483 of the roughly 505 BTC in Bond 2 was staked via Stacking DAO’s stBTC, a liquid staking token.

The stBTC route let a large share of Bond 2 stay in circulation as collateral across various decentralized finance applications while those coins kept earning staking yield at the same time.

The yield itself is projected at around 3% APY, paid weekly in BTC.

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Stacks also reported that staking of its native STX token rose over 25% following the PoX-5 hard fork. That upgrade took effect on July 30, 2026. Since then, staked STX climbed from 392 million to 493 million tokens.

PoX stands for Proof of Transfer, the consensus mechanism Stacks has used since 2021. Rather than burning energy like Bitcoin miners, Stacks miners commit BTC to participate in the network. According to the update, those miners have committed over 4,200 BTC since the mechanism launched in 2021. PoX-5 is the latest revision of that system, and the Genesis Bond followed its activation by about six weeks.

Stacks named 21Shares, HashKey Cloud, UTXO Management, and Sypher Capital among the institutions that participated. On the custody side, integrations came from Fireblocks, Fordefi, and Anchorage Digital.

Around 483 of Bond 2’s roughly 505 BTC flowed through stBTC, meaning a single liquid staking provider accounted for the bulk of the second round.