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Stacks Community Approves SIP-039 (Clarity 5) with Unanimous Support
Hey Stackers, With SIP-039 voted on and passed (unanimously!) by the community as of March 20, we're breaking down the final results following a vote audit period that ran from March 20-26.
Quick Vote Results

Total 'Yes' Votes: 97,497,945 STX

Locked STX: 86.32m
Unlocked STX: 11.17m

Total 'No' Votes: 0 STX

The Stacks network is now activating Epoch 3.4 and Clarity 5, a meaningful upgrade touching security, scalability, and long-term sustainability. Epoch 3.4 activated on testnet yesterday (March 26), with mainnet activation expected in the coming weeks. A "Yes" vote on SIP-039 also constituted approval of Rider SIPs 040 and 042.
Voting Breakdown and Highlights
Block Height Correction
Midway through the voting window, a data mapping error was identified in which the snapshot referenced an incorrect block height. This impacted one voter who held a zero balance at the incorrect height, preventing them from casting their vote. Upon discovery, the snapshot was updated to the correct height, corresponding to the vote window's opening time, and an automated dust transaction fallback was implemented to accurately capture voters with a zero balance at the prior height.

All 47 votes cast before the snapshot update were re-audited. The Ballot.gg team queried each wallet's locked and unlocked STX balances at the corrected block height via the Hiro Stacks Blockchain API and manually reconciled any discrepancies. All re-audited votes remained "Yes — In Favor" with no material movement in voting power.
Audit Methodology
Votes were audited across three methods:
  • For contract votes, all transactions to the SIP-039 ballot contract were fetched, filtered for valid cast-my-vote calls, and deduplicated by wallet (latest vote per address kept).
  • For STX-Dust votes, transfers to the YES/NO dust addresses were pulled and filtered to the valid Bitcoin burn block range (940,145–941,639), with the first vote per sender kept.
  • For BTC-Dust votes, Bitcoin transactions to the burn addresses were fetched via mempool.space and resolved to their corresponding STX stacker addresses using PoX cycle data (cycles 129–130).
In all three cases, each voter's locked and unlocked STX balances were re-fetched at the corrected snapshot height via the Hiro API. Cross-method deduplication was applied with contract votes taking priority — though no address appeared across multiple methods in this poll.
Benefits of Upcoming Upgrades
For everyday users, the most immediate changes are native Passkey support for seamless password-less smart wallet onboarding, and safer DeFi interactions through Originator Mode (SIP-040), which enforces strict asset protections for transaction signers without restricting the complex internal contract movements DeFi requires.

Developers will benefit from a doubled stack depth for more powerful multi-step contract logic, along with Clarity 5 execution improvements (including Rejectable Transactions and MARF compression) to eliminate stuck nonces and improve node efficiency.

The most consequential long-term change comes via SIP-042, which deprecates the at-block function to enable Chain State Pruning, reducing node storage requirements from ~1TB down to a fraction of that and significantly lowering the barrier to running a node.

Learn more about these upgrades via this post or Github:
A final note on the voting process: the block height discrepancies that occurred during this vote have been addressed, and we're working with the Ballot.gg team to build in safeguards that prevent similar issues in future cycles. Strengthening our governance tooling is an ongoing priority, and your feedback is a core part of that process. Reach out anytime at community@stacks.org.