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Q1 2024 Highlights
We saw major adoption of Hiro tools, and it’s awesome to see such powerful signals of growth from our community. Just look at these numbers from Q1:
- 262M requests/month for the Stacks Blockchain API
- 107M requests/month for the Ordinals API
- 1.4M views on the Stacks Explorer, created by 153K users
- >100K Stacks.js downloads/month
- 55K views on the Ordinals Explorer, created by 7,500 users
- 2,000 Clarinet downloads/month
As for what we shipped to support all of these product users, here are the highlights from the first quarter of 2024:
- Readied Hiro tooling for Nakamoto: We prepared all Hiro tooling for Nakamoto, which involved major changes to the Stacks Explorer, adding support for new transaction types and objects in the APIs and Stacks.js, adding Nakamoto support to Clarinet devnet, and more. See a full list of changes here.
- Revamped the Hiro Platform: In Q1, we interviewed users of the Hiro Platform to understand how they used it and how we can improve it. With those findings, we’ve started rolling out a lot of changes. We launched an API portal, where you can manage and generate API keys. We added better devnet functionality and interactivity for contract building and rapid feedback loops. We added a new contract code preview, so you can validate your code before you even open VS Code. Early traction suggests these changes have been popular, with monthly active users growing 86% from Q4 to Q1.
- Contributed to the Nakamoto launch: We, alongside other individuals and entities, made open source contributions to the public ecosystem working group on the Stacks’ Nakamoto release, a network upgrade that will bring fast blocks and Bitcoin finality to Stacks. Nakamoto’s testnet launched in March, and mainnet rollout began earlier this week on April 22nd. A LOT of work went into this release: 427 file changes, 84,743 line insertions, and 16,117 line deletions. The working group also added extensive testing to Stacks, including fuzzing, mutation testing, property testing, stateful testing, E2E testing, and functional testing. The working group also ran multiple performance tests and profiling and improved block processing times by 40%.
- Hardened Hiro infrastructure: Most DevOps work happens behind the scenes, but it takes a lot of effort to make sure Hiro tooling is scalable and resilient. In Q1, that effort included launching a new API gateway and API load testing with K6, cost optimizations, improved alert notifications, better infrastructure for Ordhook, Gaia analysis, push-button restores, and more. Our DevOps team also maintained multiple versions of the Nakamoto testnets.
- Improved reliability of our event-streaming services: We shortened scan time for both Chainhook and Ordhook, and made both tools more reliable. In Ordhook’s case, we also reduced reindexing time from 3-4 weeks to 7 days, and in Chainhook’s, we added the option to serve Prometheus metrics for better observability and troubleshooting.
- Rewrote parts of Hiro docs: We created new overview pages for all of our tooling to better orient developers and steer them to what they need. We also rolled out several new guides for different features and began work on a prototype of an entirely new Hiro docs experience, an experience that we hope to show you in Q2.
Q2 Focus Areas
We are moving with purpose into the summer and will be focusing on these areas:
- Continued contributions to the Nakamoto release: The Nakamoto mainnet rollout has begun, and fast blocks and Bitcoin finality will come to Stacks mainnet with Nakamoto’s activation. In the coming weeks, we will continue to contribute to the public ecosystem working group that is focused on shipping this upgrade, which will follow in a second network upgrade a few months later.
- Overhauling Hiro docs: We are in the process of reimagining what a great docs experience looks like and are rebuilding Hiro docs from the ground up. In Q2, we hope to show that work to you and introduce better docs that require less context switching and unblock you quickly, so you can focus on building.
- Offering new developer journeys in the Hiro Platform: In Q2, we plan to launch Improved and independent developer journeys in the Hiro Platform, so developers can easily discover the various platform features that are important to them instead of statically progressing through the platform in a rigid manner. At each step in their journey, developers will find helpful guardrails and tight feedback loops in a DevEx that will help them gain confidence and scale their project on Stacks in a predictable way.
- Supporting the BRC-20 protocol: We are members of the Layer1 Foundation and contribute to the governance of BRC-20. We will continue that work in Q2 and offer support for any protocol changes in Hiro products, including Ordhook and the Ordinals API.
- Adding Runes support: The team is evaluating the technical design of Bitcoin runes, and we plan to add runes support to the Ordinals API in Q2.
Get in Touch
On top of the priorities mentioned above, we will continue to support all of our products and the needs of the developers in the Stacks community. If you have any questions or feedback for us, please reach out to us on the HIRO DEVELOPER TOOLS channels on Discord.
