Release Roundup - November 2023

In November, we shipped cloud-readied devnet in the Hiro Platform, a major release that lets you iterate on your code locally before deployment on a public network. We also released v2.0.0 (and v2.0.1) of the Ordinals API, which brings major improvements to inscription ingestion and more. We also published an open source API toolkit to simplify and streamline your API development. Let’s get into it.

Type
Product update
Topic(s)
Product
Hiro
Published
December 7, 2023
Author(s)
Team
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Contents

Release roundups are organized into primary themes related to the development experience. From core protocol contributions all the way to docs improvements, let’s take a look at what we shipped in November and a preview of what we’ll be working on in December:

Release Roundup

Blockchain

  • We made progress in both the Nakamoto and Clarity WASM working groups as part of the Nakamoto upgrade coming in H1 2024. In particular, we supported work on the Nakamoto coordinator and stacker signature validation. Learn more here.
  • In the Clarity WASM workstream, we’ve now implemented 94% of expressions, made major progress on clarinet integration, and added code coverage and successfully replayed the genesis block in the A/B tester. Learn more here.
  • We also released a number of updates to Ordhook, including several bug fixes and a refactoring.

Visibility, Verification, & Insights

  • We revamped the infrastructure of the Stacks Explorer, and released major upgrades to the core libraries. This work cut 20,000+ lines of code! In the process, we also introduced error boundaries, component-level error UI, and lazy loading/code splitting across all Explorer pages, making it wicked fast to use.

Smart Contracts 

  • We also improved Clarinet’s code coverage, removing some deprecated code in the process, and fixed a number of bugs.

Frontend 

API Infrastructure 

  • We released v2.0.1 of the Ordinals API, which brings big performance improvements for inscription ingestion, BRC-20 processing, and Bitcoin re-org handling, as well as a few bug fixes for increased API endpoint speed.
  • We released the API Toolkit, an open source collection of tools to streamline API development, including Postgres management tools, shutdown handlers, server versioning tools, and more.
  • Lastly, we rolled out changes to our API rate limits to provide a better dev experience and offer the broadest possible access to our tools that we can.

Hosted Developer Experience 

  • We launched devnet in the Hiro Platform, a major release that enables you to rapidly prototype your code and iterate in a customizable testing environment before deploying on testnet or mainnet.
  • We also added support for Clarinet 2.0 while giving you the independence to use both Clarinet 1.x or 2.x. To use Clarinet 1.x, you can open the Terminal window from the VS Code editor, and type `clarinet1` commands & subcommands supported by this version.
  • And because Clarinet 2.x and unit-testing are now improved by Node replacing Deno through the Clarinet SDK, you can install any npm package (not necessarily Clarinet-related) in the VS Code pods via the `npm install` command. So get hacking, and test your smart contracts using the Clarinet SDK and JavaScript!

Docs

  • We revamped the docs sidebar to improve discovery and information hierarchy in our documentation.
  • We also prepped the launch of Hiro Hacks, a series of coding challenges, which are now live!

Looking Ahead to December

As we enter the final month of 2023, there are a few areas of work we are prioritizing, including:

  • Supporting a controlled testnet launch: We will continue to support the blockchain ecosystem working group as we progress towards the controlled testnet launch of Nakamoto at the end of the month. This is an important development milestone for the Stacks network upgrade (called “Nakamoto”) coming to mainnet in H1 2024.
  • Support Clarity WASM developer release: As part of the Nakamoto upgrade, we are also involved with the ecosystem working group developing the Clarity WASM, a critical piece of infrastructure that will enable faster blocks on Stacks. We plan to support the developer release of the Clarity WASM with Clarinet support in December.
  • Engaging devs through Hiro Hacks: We want to offer a great onboarding experience to devs who use our tools. To that end, we are launching Hiro Hacks in December, a series of coding challenges to engage our developer community and empower them to use our tools. We are dropping new Hacks for the first 3 weekends of December with BTC prizes. Learn more here.

Beyond that we’ll of course have lots of work and upgrades to the suite of Hiro products, so keep an eye here as they ship!

Learn More

For a full list of releases and improvements by product, please view the following links:

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