What makes a Stacks app

A Stacks app is any app that makes use of one or many of the features found within the Stacks Ecosystem. Roughly speaking however, authentication is the primary element that all Stacks apps share. After that, the app could implement many or none of the remaining features, and still be a Stacks app.

Authentication#

Authentication is the mechanism by which users can attest they are who they say they are. Originally, in Stacks 1.0, users would authenticate via a hosted application called the Blockstack Browser. The browser was more of a wallet than a browser. With Stacks 2.0, all users of the network have some kind of wallet: Hiro's web wallet, desktop wallet, or Xverse, the mobile wallet. These wallets all hold the private key for the user, and apps request information from the wallet.

Stacks authentication is when an application requests the public key(s) from the users wallet. If the wallet is a software-only wallet (meaning there is no hardware device associated with it), then the authentication response from the wallet will also include an appPrivateKey. This private key is derived from the accounts primary private key, combined with some information about the app requesting it (domain name).

Transaction signing#

Following authentication, the next most common functionality that a Stacks app will implement is transaction signing. Transactions on Stacks are the base unit of participation, just as with any blockchain. A transaction is some payload of data that is signed by a public/private key pair, and then broadcast to the network, and eventually mined in a block. There is a fix set of transaction types on Stacks:

• STX token transfer
• Contract deploy
• Contract call
• Coinbase
• Poison-microblock

An application on Stacks can construct the base elements of a given transaction that is then sent to a wallet to be signed and ultimately broadcast to the network. Typically apps never sign the transactions themselves, as Stacks apps should not handle private keys.

Message signing#

Similar to transaction signing, apps can request that arbitrary messages be signed. This functionality has many, many use cases.

Gaia#

Gaia is a semi-decentralized, privacy-focused storage solution, where apps can allow for users to encrypt and store data for a given application.