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<p>These three affiliated entities drive the advancement of the Blockstack mission.
In this section, you learn about the mechanisms each entity uses to advance the
overall mission.</p>
<h2id="blockstack-public-benefit-corp-pbc">Blockstack Public Benefit Corp (PBC)</h2>
<p>Blockstack Public Benefit Corp. (PBC) started development of the Blockstack
platform in 2014 and launched an alpha of the platform in early 2017. The
platform’s development philosophy followed two simple principles. First, create
backend facilities that allow blockchain applications to be both performant and
scalable. Second, provide simple, familiar development interfaces to blockchain
technology. The result of this effort is a technology platform that allows
developers to:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Build a blockchain application in any Javascript framework. The platform does not require learning a new programming language or extending an existing application stack.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Use well-defined REST endpoints that simplify and encapsulate the blockchain backend. The Blockstack Javascript API reduces blockchain-backed applications to familiar <codeclass="highlighter-rouge">GET</code> and <codeclass="highlighter-rouge">PUT</code> operations.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Access the Blockstack’s Naming System (BNS). The system has over 70K users that can immediately start using your application.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Scale quickly to large, performant production systems. Blockstack’s GAIA storage system gives fast, scalable performance on a level comparable to Amazon S3, Google Drive, or Azure.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Using Blockstack’s technology developers can start building immediately on the
blockchain with the knowledge you have today. You won’t need to spend time or
effort developing expertise in specialized languages or technologies.</p>
<p>Through the 2017 Blockstack token offering, Blockstack Token LLC created the
Stacks token. This year’s hard fork is an especially exciting milestone for the ecosystem because it distributes the first Stacks tokens to existing purchasers and recipients. This hard fork launches the Stacks blockchain v1, and enables the following two features for the Blockstack network:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>Registration of all digital assets and smart contracts for registering digital assets with the Stacks token.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>A genesis block that distributes Stacks tokens to existing purchasers.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>A full technical description of the upgrade is available on <ahref="https://forum.blockstack.org/t/blockstack-annual-hard-fork-2018/6518"target="\blank">the Blockstack forum</a>.</p>
<p>In future upgrades and hard forks, the blockchain will expand to introduce a new
scalable consensus algorithm to increase the number of transactions it can
process. This consensus algorithm is planned to be introduced in additional
hard forks in 2019.</p>
<p>Addtionally, a future Stacks blockchain will support truly decentralized mobile
applications by removing the need to trust a remote Blockstack Core node.
Instead, it will be possible for light clients to calculate the economic weight
of different Stacks blockchain forks, and identify the fork with the most
economic activity. Today, light clients rely on other trusted sources for fork
selection and cannot make that decision independently. For mobile apps this
enables functionality like looking up names without having to rely on a remote
Blockstack Core node.</p>
<p>Finally, Blockstack currently supports relatively simple smart contracts that
are used to register digital assets on the network. The Stacks blockchain v2
will support general-purpose smart contracts written in a non-Turing-complete
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