Marketplaces
A marketplace is the chain a smart product lives on - what it has to supply, what it charges, and which facts stop being true the moment there is a second one.
Most of this site describes the protocol as an interface: Concepts is the model, SDK, UI and API are the surfaces you call. This section is the other half - an implementation of that interface on one specific marketplace, and the facts that stop being true the moment there is a second one.
Stacks is currently the only supported marketplace. Saying so plainly is better than a directory that implies otherwise: there is one occupant, and the section exists because the boundary is real, not because it is populated.
What a marketplace is
A marketplace is a chain a smart product can be placed on. The protocol sends it commands and receives its events, and it should be interchangeable.
The honest gloss is a venue. It supplies settlement, finality, and a permanent home for the thing you made. You rent space in it, in its own currency, and what you make there is yours.
A marketplace is not an audience, and no part of this section should be read as promising one. Nobody discovers your work by browsing a chain. Discovery is the apps - a page is found on grammata, a letter on On The Record - and the marketplace underneath is the part a reader never has to think about. Picking one is a choice about cost, finality and permanence, never about who will see it.
What one has to supply
| Requirement | Why | Stacks today |
|---|---|---|
| Programmable contracts | A smart product IS a contract - numbered instances, revenue splits executed on mint | Clarity |
| An event stream we can subscribe to | The protocol is event-driven; without push we would have to poll a chain | Chainhooks |
| A native token | What the venue charges to create, and the gas underneath it | STX |
| A wrapped Bitcoin | Collecting settles in money, and money is bitcoin | sBTC |
| Stable addressing | Identity, ownership and payout all key on an address | c32 principals |
The first two are hard requirements. The rest are properties every credible chain has in some form, and their shape is what differs.
What you pay, and in what
Two axes, two currencies, and they answer different questions:
- Creating is priced in the marketplace's own native token. You are paying the venue, so you pay in the venue's currency. On Stacks that is STX, and the create fee and the gas underneath it are the same asset - so an app can quote one number rather than a price plus a hedge.
- Collecting is priced in sBTC, in sats, on every marketplace. You are being paid, and what you are paid is money.
You pay the venue in the venue's currency, and you get paid in money.
There is no protocol-issued unit spanning the two, and there deliberately will not be. Rising Tide shipped one - "credits" - and retired it on 2026-08-26: a unit a person holds a balance of is scrip, and scrip requires an issuer holding a reserve. A protocol meant to be forked cannot be that issuer. The full argument, including what a portable unit would have bought, is on Payment Currency.
What would be lost or reshaped per marketplace
Worth stating honestly rather than implying the abstraction is free:
| Ports unchanged | Reshapes | Does not port | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Money | one sat is one sat - every chain's wrapped bitcoin is over the same asset | the peg's trust model, which a person is owed at the withdrawal step | - |
| Create fee | the shape - a fee on App, in the venue's base unit | the token, the decimals, the amount | - |
| Addresses | the role in the model | format, validation, error copy | - |
| Finality | that reorgs are handled | the finality model, and the reversal logic tuned to it | Bitcoin-anchored assumptions |
| Contracts | capability composition as a model | - | the emission backend. Clarity is not Solidity |
The last row is the scoping fork worth knowing about: multi-marketplace event ingestion is far more tractable than multi-marketplace product creation, because the second needs a whole second contract-generation backend.
The test for whether something belongs in this section: if a fact only holds on one marketplace, it lives under that marketplace. Address format, contract language, confirmation latency, native token, and which wrapped Bitcoin a balance is held in are all per-marketplace. The revenue model, the capability system, the payment-currency policy and every SDK signature are not.
Supported
- Stacks - Clarity contracts, Chainhooks, c32 addresses, sBTC and STX
Not yet
Nothing. Multi-marketplace ingestion is designed but unbuilt, and multi-marketplace contract generation is a much larger question than event ingestion - the capability system emits Clarity, and a second chain with a different contract language needs a second emission backend rather than an adapter.