Contents
Release roundups are organized into a few categories spanning the breadth of the developer experience. From core protocol contributions all the way to the Hiro Platform in the cloud, let’s take a look at what we shipped in February and a preview of what we’ll be working on in March:
Release Roundup
Hiro Platform
- In February, we focused on user research to understand how we might improve the platform onboarding and UX experience. We found developers liked the Clarinet integration and the simplified contract/chainhook management and monitoring, but they expressed a desire for tighter feedback loops in their development cycles. In the coming months, we will be applying these learnings and redesigning the platform experience.
- We also shipped several UX improvements to the platform and improved the platform’s infrastructure and test coverage.
DevTools
Clarinet
- We released v2.3.0 of Clarinet, which includes handling deployment plans in simnet, improving the contract deployment comparison of the Clarity interpreter vs Clarity WASM, and enabling Clarity WASM in <code-rich-text>clarinet check<code-rich-text>.
Stacks.js
- We added a few tweaks to Stacks.js in February, including adding a helper function for generating a new <code-rich-text>signer-sig<code-rich-text> parameter of the PoX-4 contract, changed <code-rich-text>CL.prettyPrint<code-rich-text> so that it sorts properties in a tuple, and released a few other patches.
Chainhook
- We released v1.3.0 of Chainhook, which adds the option to serve Prometheus metrics for Chainhook. This is helpful for devs from an observability standpoint to help monitor and troubleshoot their Chainhook service running in their infrastructure. We also fixed a bug related to how <code-rich-text>start_block<code-rich-text> and <code-rich-text>end_block<code-rich-text> were configured in a predicate. This bug could cause Chainhook to use a massive amount of memory and possibly crash the Chainhook service.
Ordhook
- We improved the consistency of Ordhook, fixed some bugs, and are now fully matching the ordinals protocol specification.
API Services
Stacks Blockchain API
- We released a number of fixes for the Stacks Blockchain API, including better reporting for invalid path requests, showing the status endpoint in /extended, and we also did more prep work on the pre-release of the Nakamoto-compatible blockchain API.
Ordinals API
- We released v3.0.0 of the Ordinals API, which includes a graceful shutdown after finishing a block replay, adding an Ordhook debug server, and we added <code-rich-text>metadata<code-rich-text> and <code-rich-text>parent<code-rich-text> columns to inscription tables. This release also includes several bug fixes.
Blockchain
- We continued to be one of the many contributors to the working group on the upcoming Nakamoto release. In February, the working group made progress towards the next major milestone, codenamed “Argon” which will culminate in a public testnet in mid March—and meanwhile devs can now access the pre-launch testnet. As part of this group, we made contributions to block proposals and validation, the PoX-4 Clarity features, the DKG and signer workstreams, and more.
Blockchain Explorers
- In the Stacks Explorer, we shipped several new features, including UI and UX changes to keep consistency and help usability, a new mempool header, and adding nonce info to address pages.
Looking Ahead to March
Here are our biggest priorities in March:
- Supporting work towards Nakamoto testnet: The biggest priority in the Stacks ecosystem is getting the Nakamoto public testnet online in March, and the pre-launch testnet is now live. We look forward to being one of many contributors in the blockchain public working group progressing towards that goal. Learn more about the timeline to Nakamoto here.
- Preparing Hiro products for Nakamoto: As we get closer to the launch of Nakamoto, we also plan to ready all Hiro products for the blockchain changes that come as part of this release.
- Streamlined onboarding to the Hiro Platform: Based on February’s product research, we are redesigning onboarding to the Hiro Platform to more intuitively guide developers to the platform tools they need. In addition, we are looking at ways to securely and programmatically access the hosted devnet and Chainhook APIs in the Hiro Platform, which will create much faster feedback loops.
- Docs improvements: We plan on rolling out a number of big changes to Hiro documentation in March to make it easier to navigate docs, discover tools and features, and find exactly what it is that you’re looking for.
Beyond that we’ll of course have lots of work and upgrades to the suite of Hiro products, so keep an eye out for new updates.
Learn More
For a full list of releases and improvements by product, please view the following links:
