Focus Areas for Q2 2025

In Q1, we expanded free API access and shipped powerful infra support for builders through new paid API plans. We also rolled out a fee estimator in the Stacks API that dramatically lowered suggested transaction fees on Stacks, and a new version of Stacks Connect that removed dependencies and greatly improved its developer experience. Read on to learn more about Q1’s highlights as well as our priorities in Q2, including a redesigned Explorer, new API architecture, and more.

Story details

Type

Product update

Topic(s)

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Hiro

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Product

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Published

April 17, 2025

Author(s)

Hiro Team

Contents

Q1 2025 Highlights

With the successful Nakamoto upgrade and launch of sBTC in Q4, 2025 marks a new era for the Stacks ecosystem. In just a few short months, we’ve seen a major impact on network activity.

We saw $160M in synthetic BTC enter the Stacks ecosystem to max out the second sBTC cap with 2,000 BTC being bridged to Stacks in less than 24 hours:

Stablecoin supply has increased 75% in Q1:

We’ve also seen this network activity play out in a notable increase in monthly requests to the Stacks Blockchain API:

To meet the growing demands of the ecosystem, at Hiro we focused on our devtools and how they need to evolve to support a rapidly improving Stacks ecosystem. To that end, we shipped some major releases that set the foundation of Hiro’s direction for 2025.

Let’s take a closer look at a couple highlights:

Expanded API access: We want to provide you with reliable infrastructure that can scale alongside your needs, and last week we launched new powerful paid plans that offer higher API rate limits, dedicated support channels, and SLAs, so we can be your infrastructure partner at every stage of your growth.
Rich app templates: Alongside these new account plans, we’ve launched new rich app templates, so you can spin up and deploy a fullstack app in less than 5 minutes and accelerate your app development on Stacks. We're also made the platform a Git-first experience, connecting every single platform account to a GitHub repo, which helps the platform integrate into your existing workflows and CI/CD pipeline
Native fee estimation in the Stacks API: We launched a new fee estimator that drastically improves the accuracy of suggested transaction fees. In most cases, “more accurate = way cheaper”, and this feature provides an immediate improvement to devs and users alike. And you can see that play out directly in the data, where transaction volume has stayed constant, but fees have sharply dropped:

Better devex, fewer dependencies in Stacks Connect: We shipped a major release of Stacks Connect, which streamlines your app code and makes it much easier for wallets to add new functionality.
Major features in Clarinet: We’ve added several new features to Clarinet to empower you to build Clarity smart contracts locally, including a Clarity formatter that makes you code cleaner and more readable, sBTC support in devnet so you can test against the fastest-growing asset on Stacks, and the ability to use mainnet data in unit tests.
sBTC faucet: Along with sBTC support in Clarinet simnet and devnet, we’ve also launched a testnet sBTC faucet in the Hiro Platform, so you can easily access test sBTC and harden your app’s sBTC integration on testnet.
Cookbook recipes in docs: We’ve added a new cookbook to documentation, a collection of “recipes” that feature reusable code snippets for all kinds of basic functions. All you have to do is copy, paste, and customize as needed.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything we shipped in Q1. For that, you can check out the changelogs of our various GitHub repositories as well as read our monthly release roundups.