Block Production

Block production is a key concept to understand how Stacks operates under the hood. This section walks through the three main actions that need to happen for the Stacks network to operate.

1

Mining

Miners are responsible for building and proposing new blocks on the Stacks chain.

2

Signing

Signing is the process used to validate blocks before they join the chain. A signer is a signer-manager contract bound to one signer key, and a block joins the chain only once signers carrying enough weight have signed it.

3

Staking

Staking is where that weight comes from. You lock STX in your own account and name an existing signer-manager contract; the stake you add becomes part of that manager's weight, and you earn Bitcoin-denominated rewards for it. Staking takes one of two mutually exclusive paths per account: STX-only, or a protocol bond pairing native BTC or sBTC with an STX lock.

Three roles cooperate in Stacks block production: miners build and propose new blocks, signers validate and sign them, and stakers back the signers by locking STX to a signer-manager.

Signers here are not sBTC signers. The signers on this page validate Stacks blocks under PoX-5. The sBTC signers are a separate set with their own keys in their own contract, and they do not have to be Stacks signers. Their threshold signing requires more than 50% of the signer keys. The one connection is that the sBTC bridge is how miner-committed BTC becomes the sBTC paid out as staking rewards.

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Core Roles: Miner vs Staker vs Signer

Role	Primary Function	What They Do	Rewards	Where They Operate
Miner	Produce Stacks blocks	Sends BTC in PoX to compete for the right to write the next block and earn STX	Earns STX block rewards + fees	Bitcoin (for bids) + Stacks
Staker	Secure the network via PoX	Locks STX in their own account and names a signer-manager contract	Earns Bitcoin-denominated rewards funded by miner BTC, as sBTC by default or native BTC by election	Stacks (the STX never leaves their account)
Signer	Validate and finalize blocks	A signer-manager contract bound to one signer key signs blocks; its weight is proportional to the STX staked through it	Receives per-staker settled rewards from pox-5 for distribution, and may take a fee set in the contract	Stacks

The relationship between Stakers and Signers

As you read through the Staking section, you may find stakers and signers mentioned in the same breath. Under PoX-5 the relationship is precise:

• Stakers are not signers → signing is done by the key granted to the signer-manager contract they stake to, and running that signer is the manager operator's job
• Every signer is backed by staked STX → to be in the signer set, a signer-manager must have at least 50,000 STX staked to it in aggregate, and its weight grows with the stake it represents