Grayscale announced the creation of Stacks and Near trusts yesterday, marking the first time Grayscale has created a new cryptocurrency trust since 2024. Grayscale stated that Stacks will help bring smart contracts and decentralized applications (dApps) to the Bitcoin ecosystem, which will increase institutional interest.

Stacks is a Bitcoin layer2 project founded in 2017, and the initial version was completely hooked up to the Bitcoin UTXO mechanism, with transaction speed completely synchronized with Bitcoin, but with poor user experience. The latest Nakamoto upgrade plan is set to be fully launched in August, bringing transaction speeds of around 10 seconds, greatly improving the interactive experience of the Stacks ecosystem.