Stacks released its third-quarter ecosystem report revealing that 735 BTC entered the Bitcoin staking system across the first two lock-up cycles. Following the PoX-5 hard fork, STX staking participation increased by over 25%, rising from 392 million to 493 million tokens. The second lock-up cycle saw deposits more than double to 505 BTC after Bond 1 attracted 230 BTC from participants including 21shares, HashKey Cloud, UTXO Management, and Sypher Capital. Zest Protocol recorded significant activity with total value locked exceeding $80 million and deposits surpassing $122 million, while 800 BTC were deployed as collateral. Looking ahead, Stacks plans to launch self-custodial lending backed by staked Bitcoin in Q4 alongside new Earn vaults and expanded stBTC integration. The network is also scheduled for the Epoch 4.1 upgrade in early December, which will introduce improvements to the Clarity smart contract language.