Stacks price and where to buy STX

What is Stacks?

Stacks is a layer for smart contracts on top of Bitcoin: its blocks are anchored to Bitcoin blocks, and its miners spend bitcoin to mine STX. STX holders can lock their coins, a process called stacking, to earn bitcoin.

How to buy Stacks, step by step

1. Pick an exchange. STX is listed on four of the five exchanges we track. Compare fees, funding options and whether it serves your country in our exchange reviews.
2. Create and verify your account. Regulated exchanges ask for identity documents before you can deposit fiat.
3. Fund the account. A bank transfer or a stablecoin deposit usually costs far less than a card payment.
4. Buy STX. Use the STX/USDT or STX/USD market, and check the cheapest venue in the table above first.
5. Decide where to keep it. On the exchange is simplest, but the exchange then holds your coins. STX runs on the Stacks network; withdraw only to a Stacks address.

Where to buy Stacks at the best price

The cheapest venue right now is marked in the table above. Add its trading fee before comparing: on STX the venues disagree by about 0.18 percent on average, so on a small purchase the fee and the funding method usually matter more.

• The price on that venue. Each row shows the gap to our composite.
• The trading fee. Our fee comparison lists spot fees side by side.
• How you fund the account. A bank transfer or stablecoin deposit is usually far cheaper than a card payment, which often costs several percent.

Why the Stacks price differs between exchanges

In our minute-by-minute measurement the gap between the highest and lowest venue averaged about 0.18 percent, against about 0.025 percent for Bitcoin. It went above half a percent in about 18 minutes out of every thousand, and reached about 1.8 percent at its widest.

Just under half of the STX spot volume we track trades on a single venue. The spread figure at the top of this page is the live measurement; our guide on why crypto prices differ between exchanges explains the mechanism.

What moves the Stacks price

The wider crypto market, and in STX’s case its own news too. In our hourly composite, STX moved with Bitcoin at a correlation of about 0.45, where 1 would mean identical moves, and its moves were about three times the size of Bitcoin’s.

STX-specific drivers come on top: activity in Bitcoin applications, stacking rewards and leverage. The funding rates on this page show whether leveraged traders are paying to be long or short right now.

Pros and cons of Stacks

Pros

• Smart contracts anchored to Bitcoin.
• Stacking pays rewards in bitcoin.

Cons

• It trades on four of the five exchanges we track.
• One of the wider price gaps between exchanges we track, about seven times Bitcoin’s.
• It trades far below its all-time high of about $3.86.

Stacks’s highest price

Stacks’s all-time high is about $3.86 on volume-weighted data. The chart above shows the last 30 days of our composite, and the STX to USD converter applies the live price to any amount.