Hey Stackers, SIP-044 and SIP-045 have both passed with near-unanimous support, clearing the path for Stacks Epoch 4.0 and Bitcoin Staking. As with every SIP vote, an independent audit was run before publishing final results, and both polls check out exactly against the numbers Ballot.gg displayed.

All results were  independently re-verified directly from the Stacks and Bitcoin blockchains. A standalone audit script rebuilds each tally from all three vote channels, direct contract votes, STX dust votes, and BTC dust votes, weights each voter by their STX balance at the snapshot block, and cross-checks the contract layer against the smart contract's own on-chain get-results. That cross-check matched to the exact STX on both polls.

Two scripts, cloned from the proven SIP-039 audit used for the Clarity 5 vote, were run against our QuickNode Stacks node. They're fully reproducible: anyone can re-run them against public chain data and get the same numbers.

SIP-045 received one Bitcoin dust vote from a 20M-STX stacker who voted through both the STX and BTC channels, so Ballot.gg's headline count counts that wallet twice. Counting each wallet once, the unique voting power is 181,488,504 STX. The outcome, 100% YES, is identical either way.

This lines up with the independent, wallet-deduplicated breakdown published by the Zero Authority SIP tracker: 87 unique voters and 181,488,508 STX for, 2 STX against, across contract, STX dust, and BTC dust votes.

You can review the audit script commit here.

SIP-045 specifies PoX-5, Bitcoin Staking: a consensus change that lets participants pair a self-custodial BTC timelock with an STX lock to earn BTC yield, without giving up custody of their coins. It also restores the coinbase block reward to 1,000 STX per Bitcoin block, removing the step-down schedule set by SIP-029, as a provisional rate for the PoX-5 bootstrap phase. Bitcoin Staking rolls out in two phases: this SIP ratifies the first, an Endowment-managed bootstrap (3,000 BTC capacity, 3% target yield at launch) that runs for about a year while the mechanism proves itself before the fully algorithmic, permissionless PoX-6 phase. The hard fork is expected to activate at Bitcoin block 960,230, around July 29, 2026.

SIP-044 activates alongside SIP-045 at Epoch 4.0. It introduces Clarity 6, which adds variadic concat, secp256k1 public key decompression, Ed25519 signature verification, and built-ins for trustlessly verifying Bitcoin transaction outputs on-chain, alongside new with-staking and with-pox Clarity allowances for the PoX-5 model. It also adds a mechanism for miners and signers to jointly flag problematic transactions so fees can still be collected without executing them, and disables the long-unused cost-voting contract, which has sat idle for more than 8 million blocks since Epoch 2.0.

Together, the two SIPs give BTC holders a self-custodial way to earn yield on Stacks, give developers the cryptographic and Bitcoin-verification tools that cross-chain bridges and attestation systems have been asking for, and give stakers a smoother staking experience: no more cooldown cycles when switching signers, and new post-conditions that protect STX from unexpected staking changes.

Learn more about these upgrades via Github:

• SIP-044
• SIP-045

Shortly after voting opened, voters were briefly unable to connect their wallet or cast a vote through the site, due to Ballot.gg's wallet integration relying on a legacy, since-deprecated Stacks wallet API. Voters were pointed to dust voting as a working alternative while the team migrated the site to the current standard wallet-connect flow (SIP-030). That migration is now complete, and Ballot.gg no longer depends on any deprecated wallet APIs.