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Q2 2024 Highlights
In the second quarter of 2024, we shipped some major upgrades to Hiro products, including:
- Improved the Stacks Explorer: We rolled out a number of changes to the Stacks Explorer, including launching a new signer dashboard and shipping major performance improvements (50% reduction in page load time). We also updated the way blocks are formatted to account for the changes coming with the Nakamoto upgrade and released a number of other UI updates.
- Overhauled onboarding in the Hiro Platform: We completely changed onboarding and navigation in the Hiro Platform through lots of UI improvements, so devs can more easily leverage the platform features they need. We also rolled out global project validation in the Platform’s contract code preview, helping you identify bugs that span multiple contracts, and we integrated the Hiro Archive directly into the Hiro Platform.
- Upgraded documentation: We rolled out a major upgrade to Hiro documentation, with new design, new navigation, new installation and quickstart guides for every tool, and new reference guides. Take a look and try the new Hiro docs for yourself.
- Contributed to Nakamoto code completion: Along with other entities and developers in the Stacks ecosystem, we contributed to a major milestone for the upcoming Nakamoto upgrade. On July 12th, the Stacks Foundation announced that the upgrade has now reached code complete, and the work will now turn to testing, debugging, and benchmarking. A lot of work went into reaching code complete: 546 files were changed with 120,758 insertions and 29,163 deletions. In that work, vulnerabilities were squashed, regressions were fixed, and multi-sig support in the Stacks network got much better.
- Simplified Chainhook: We made it easier to use Chainhook than ever before. In Q2, we made Chainhook available on Homebrew, Winget, and Snapcraft. We also greatly simplified the Chainhook SDK interface, renaming and clarifying several configuration fields, separating the config files for Stacks and Bitcoin chainhooks, adding helpers for registering chainhooks, and more.
- Launched Clarity Playground: We released a REPL environment where devs can write and test Clarity code in the browser with zero installations. Clarity Playground also makes it easy to share code snippets with other devs, making this a great learning resource for engineers looking to learn Clarity.
- Improved Clarinet: Most Clarity devs rely on Clarinet, and it’s critical that Clarinet stays current with blockchain changes. In Q2, we added support for Nakamoto instantiation, so devs can test their contracts locally, which required packaging up not just Clarity changes, but also API and Explorer changes, so the `clarinet devnet` experience is seamless. We also added the capability to calculate test coverage of boot contracts as well as support for Clarity 3 keywords and functions, which are important for testing ahead of Nakamoto activation.
- Strengthened infrastructure: Our devops team improved ordinals ingestion speed by 10x using “extreme hyperdisks.” We also contributed to migrating Stacks testnet to Bitcoin regtest.
- Added Nakamoto support in the Stacks API: We continued to improve Nakamoto support in the Stacks Blockchain API and added support for all of the Nakamoto changes, including PoX-4, signers, and blocks.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of everything we shipped in Q2. For that, you can check out the changelogs of our various GitHub repositories as well as read our monthly release roundups.
Focus Areas for Q3
Looking ahead to the next quarter, we are putting additional emphasis on security in Q3. One of the core value propositions for building the next generation of the internet on Bitcoin is that it provides a more secure foundation, and we believe that emphasis on security should extend to developer tooling as well:
- Add contract monitoring in the Hiro Platform: We plan to launch contract monitoring to help developers quickly detect suspicious activity in their contracts. We also plan to allow programmatic API access to Chainhook and devnet to foster more robust development and testing environments.
- Introduce mainnet data to Clarinet simnet: We plan to add mainnet data to simnet. This is especially useful for devs who are building on top of already-deployed DeFi protocols or oracles. Instead of populating complex data structures locally, this will enable devs to rely on real-world data when testing their code in simnet, helping devs and white-hats write better tests and proof-of-concepts.
- Improve search in the Stacks Explorer: We are planning to roll out improved search in the Stacks Explorer, enabling you to apply various filters and parameters to search queries for better transparency, significantly enhancing the user experience and information accessibility. We also plan to add holder information for fungible tokens, enabling you to see top holders and how distributed/decentralized different tokens are.
Alongside security, we have two more priorities in Q3 worth calling out here:
- Continue to contribute to the Nakamoto release: Now that Nakamoto is code complete, the next phase of work begins. Along with other entities and Stacks developers, we will contribute to auditing, testing, debugging, and performance tuning before the Nakamoto launch coming later in Q3.
- Launch Runes API: We are launching a new API for Bitcoin Runes, built on top of our Chainhook architecture.
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.
