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Q4 2024 Highlights
Q4 2024 brought monumental milestones to mainnet for the Stacks ecosystem - Hiro was proud to play a contributing part in some of those workstreams. We contributed to the public blockchain working group on shipping the Nakamoto upgrade and on launching sBTC. These represent the biggest protocol changes to Stacks since mainnet launch 4 years ago. The working group also released major performance improvements to increase the throughput of the network.
As a result of those releases, Stacks now has fast blocks, Bitcoin finality, and a programmable Bitcoin asset, unlocking Stacks’ full potential as the leading Bitcoin L2. Alongside that work, core devs also shipped SIP-029 and a number of performance and throughput optimizations for the network.
To keep up with these major ecosystem developments, we continued to innovate with our products, and we shipped several big updates, including:
- Rich data in the Stacks Explorer: We added new pages for Stacks signers and sBTC, detailing signer behavior and sBTC transactions, and we launched UI support for Nakamoto’s fast blocks. We also made some big changes behind the scenes that have improved the Explorer’s performance, including upgrades to the Explorer’s API and UI layers.
- Nakamoto support in Hiro tooling: Alongside Nakamoto support in the Stacks Explorer, we’ve also rolled out Nakamoto support in Hiro APIs, so you can reliably get accurate on-chain information. In addition, we’ve added support for Nakamoto, sBTC, and epoch 3.1 to Clarinet, so you can test your code against the latest version of the Stacks blockchain. To help entities and users better understand the health of the Stacks ecosystem, we released a new API that enables you to monitor the performance and behavior of Stacks signers, including their signing power, latency, and approval/rejection rates. With the new Nakamoto rules in place, this data is critical to track network liveness and performance.
- A better Stacks.js experience: We released the first major update to Stacks.js in years, a release that makes it easier to debug and inspect your code and more intuitive to use. A focus on descriptive strings, improved post condition creation and inspection, better readable Clarity representations, consistent A to B naming, and more.
- Scalable simnet: We released significant performance improvements to simnet in Clarinet, which is particularly useful for CI/CD use cases where devs need to run thousands of Clarinet tests with each change.
- Increased Ordhook speed: We refactored Ordhook to PostgreSQL, increasing indexing speed 7x and making it much easier for you to query the Bitcoin chain for ordinals data.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything we shipped in Q4. For that, you can check out the changelogs of our various GitHub repositories as well as read our monthly release roundups.
Focus Areas for Q1 2025
Looking ahead to the next quarter, we have a lot of exciting developments in the pipeline, some of which have been in the works for months already:
- New major features in Clarinet: We’re adding mainnet data to Clarinet, so you can simulate transactions with real on-chain data, and we also plan to release an opinionated Clarity formatter in Clarinet to improve your productivity and code readability. Alongside those features, we’re working on support for Clarity WASM in Clarinet.
- Native fee estimator in Hiro’s Stacks API: We’re working on an improved, native fee estimator directly in our API that can provide cost estimates for transactions based on mempool behavior.
- Transaction failure data in the Stacks Explorer: We plan on adding more data and context around transaction failures, so you can better understand why a particular transaction failed.
- A new direction for the Hiro Platform: We’ve been heads down working on a new vision of the Hiro Platform, one that better supports local development with a tight integration to GitHub. We’re also planning big improvements for popular platform features like devnet, contract monitoring, chainhooks, and more.
- A cookbook of coding recipes: We’re launching a cookbook in Hiro docs that has useful snippets of code that you can reuse directly in your application.
- Chainhook 2.0: In many ways Chainhook is still an MVP, and in Q2 we plan to address its limitations and transform the tool into a scalable product that is highly available and highly performance, enabling you to more easily index on-chain data.
- A new look for the Stacks Explorer: We’ve been working on a redesign for the Stacks Explorer for several months, and we intend to start showing you that new look in Q1 this year.
- Improved infrastructure: We are working on new infra for our API and indexing services that will introduce a new data layer that can store new on-chain events in real time while also enabling event replay, creating more durable and available API and indexing services.
This list is by no means comprehensive, so stay tuned for other new features and updates in the coming weeks.
Get in Touch
If you have any questions or feedback for us, please reach out to us on the Hiro Developer Tools channels on Discord.
