Stacks Labs, the developer of the bitcoin layer 2 network Stacks, applied the SIP-034 upgrade and expanded the network's decentralised finance (DeFi) processing capacity by up to 30 times, The Block reported on March 17.

The upgrade was approved through a governance vote in November last year. It has been activated on the mainnet, allowing developers to use it in real-time applications.

The existing Stacks network was structured to halt all processing once it hit certain resource limits during block creation. After SIP-034, only the specific resource that exceeds its limit is reset, allowing remaining capacity to process additional transactions.

Alex Housh (알렉스 후스), product lead at Stacks Labs, said, "Previously, if even a single resource limit was exceeded, the entire network stopped, but now block producers can use the remaining capacity to continue additional processing."

The improvement does not apply equally to all applications, but Stacks said it expected it to be particularly effective in supporting complex DeFi structures.

Stacks said the upgrade does not directly affect the tokenomics of the STX token, but it assessed that increased network activity could raise long-term value.

Stacks is a bitcoin layer 2 network co-founded by Muneeb Ali (뮈닙 알리). It provides smart contracts and scalability and supports DeFi applications.