Stacks miners batch users' transactions and receive fees from users (supply-side fees). Miners submit transactions to Bitcoin, paying a share of the transaction fees to Bitcoin miners.

Stacks is an smart contract platform for creating decentralized applications on Bitcoin (a blockchain). Stacks was founded by Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea, and launched in 2021.

STX tokenholders own and govern the protocol. They currently do not take a cut of the total transaction fees paid by users (revenue). Stacks' investors include IOSG Ventures, The Spartan Group, Hashkey Exchange, etc.

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Blockchains (L2)

Stacks

# Stacks Block time Methodology

## 1. Overview

Stacks block time measures the average time interval between consecutive blocks on the Stacks blockchain, aggregated daily. This metric tracks network performance and consensus efficiency. Stacks underwent a significant change with the Nakamoto upgrade, transitioning from Bitcoin-anchored block times (~10 minutes) to independent block production (~5-10 seconds). The calculation analyzes raw Stacks block data to compute time differences between consecutive blocks, then averages these intervals by day to provide a daily block time metric in milliseconds.

## 2. Data sources

- **Stacks blockchain block data**: Raw Stacks block records including block timestamps and block heights (numbers)
- **Block metadata**: Block headers containing timing information and sequential ordering data

## 3. Step-by-step calculation

### Component A: Block timestamp extraction
- **Purpose**: Retrieves fundamental block timing data from the Stacks blockchain
- **Logic**: Extracts `block_timestamp` and `block_number` (height) fields from raw Stacks block data. The `block_timestamp` represents when each block was produced, while `block_number` provides the sequential block height used for ordering.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` (block production time) and `block_number` (sequential block height)

### Component B: Consecutive block pairing
- **Purpose**: Pairs each block with its immediately preceding block to enable time difference calculation
- **Logic**: Uses a LAG window function ordered by `block_number` ascending to retrieve the timestamp of the previous block for each current block. This creates pairs of consecutive blocks with their respective timestamps.
- **Key fields**: `block_timestamp` (current block time), `previous_timestamp` (preceding block time), `block_number` (for ordering)

### Component C: Block time interval calculation
- **Purpose**: Computes the actual time difference between consecutive blocks
- **Logic**: Calculates the millisecond difference between `block_timestamp` and `previous_timestamp` for each block pair. Excludes the first block since it has no preceding block (null `previous_timestamp`). Groups results by day using timestamp truncation to day boundaries.
- **Key fields**: `block_time` (interval in milliseconds), `timestamp` (truncated to day)

### Final aggregation
- **Combining components**: Groups all block time intervals by day and calculates the average `block_time` for each day
- **Currency conversion**: Not applicable for time-based metrics
- **Time aggregation**: Daily boundaries determined by truncating block timestamps to day level
- **Final calculation**: Average of all block time intervals within each day, producing a daily average block time in milliseconds. Results include standard metadata fields: `chain_id` as 'stacks', `market_sector_id` as 'blockchains_l2', `business_segment_id` as 'blockchain', and null `product_id`. The finalization process applies standardized formatting and optionally fills missing days with zeros.

*This methodology was automatically generated by Token Terminal's methodology analyzer.*

avg(block_timestamp - previous_block_timestamp)

StacksSTX

Block time

Block time

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