PoX-5 public testnet goes live with Bitcoin staking mechanism

The Stacks ecosystem just took a meaningful step toward letting Bitcoin holders earn yield without handing over their keys. The PoX-5 public testnet is now live, giving builders and developers a sandbox to stress-test Bitcoin staking before the protocol’s mainnet hard fork, currently penciled in for around July 29, 2026. PoX stands for Proof of Transfer, a consensus mechanism that has been running on Stacks since January 2021. Miners on Stacks spend BTC to mine blocks, and that BTC gets distributed as rewards to participants who lock up their STX tokens. The system has maintained over 99.9% uptime since launch, distributing more than 4,200 BTC in rewards over its lifetime. PoX-5 builds on that foundation but introduces the ability to stake actual Bitcoin alongside STX. The BTC stays on Bitcoin’s own blockchain, secured by a timelock rather than a custodian. The public testnet phase follows a private testnet that kicked off on July 16, 2026. During that earlier phase, integration partners confirmed the protocol bond lifecycle worked correctly under accelerated conditions. The mainnet activation hinges on a Bitcoin block height target of approximately block 907,740. Two governance pr...