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 December and a preview of what we’ll be working on in January:
Release Roundup
Blockchain
- Supporting the ecosystem working group, we helped release Neon (0.2) milestone for Nakamoto. This release comes with two separate testnet environments, one with the existing Clarity VM and one with the new WASM-based VM. Learn more here.
- In the Clarity WASM workstream, we contributed to work that supports builtins like <code-rich-text>map<code-rich-text>, <code-rich-text>fold<code-rich-text> and <code-rich-text>filter<code-rich-text>. With this work complete, the focus now turns to testing and performance. Learn more here.
- Pyth price feeds are also now fully supported on Stacks, bringing accurate data from over 400 chains to Stacks.
- We also updated both Chainhook and Ordhook to support Ordinals Jubilee. Jubilee is a recent upgrade to Bitcoin Ordinals that fixes the issue of cursed inscriptions and impacts the <code-rich-text>inscription number<code-rich-text> of ordinals moving forward.
Visibility, Verification, & Insights
- We added transaction fee stats, so you can now see summaries of fee priorities to understand what’s happening in the mempool (and how high of fees you should pay to prioritize your transaction getting through).
- We also added filters to mempool transactions, you can easily sort by transaction type.
- The Hiro Explorer also now supports the Neon testnet, including the ability to handle Nakamoto’s new transaction types.
Smart Contracts
- We released v2.1.0 of Clarinet, which comes with a new <code-rich-text>getBlockTime<code-rich-text> function in Simnet for time sensitive contracts, a remove command for new contracts, a number of bug fixes, and more.
- We also launched a Nakamoto preview release for Clarinet, which lets you test your apps against a local devnet that supports PoX-4 as well as the WASM VM.
Frontend
- We prepped Stacks.js for Neon, enabling you to use Stacks.js packages when interacting with the Neon testnet.
- We also patched a number of bugs and added a few quality of life improvements, such as a new helper to narrow down the type of generic Clarity values and tweaked rate limit logic for Gaia dump and restore functions.
API Infrastructure
- We released a number of improvements to the Stacks Blockchain API that dramatically improve block ingestion time (reduced block ingestion time between 50-75%).
- We also added a dedicated endpoint <code-rich-text>/extended/v2/burn-blocks/:height_or_hash/blocks<code-rich-text>, which returns Stacks blocks confirmed by a specific Bitcoin block, as well as a new “problematic” transaction status for dropped transactions in the mempool.
- We added Jubilee support to the Ordinals API. To accommodate both Jubilee and protocols built on top of the original ordinals protocol (such as BRC-20), we now offer data from both Jubilee and BRC-20 standards regarding inscription_number.
Hosted Developer Experience
- In December, we focused primarily on platform stability, addressing technical debt, and automation test improvements, so that we can proactively catch any problem that may impact end-user developer experiences.
- After many different approaches of sleuthing and troubleshooting, we determined the root cause of a contract deployment failure using Leather Wallet, which significantly hindered several developers from using the platform for contract deployments at the recent London hackathon.
Docs
- We completed the first 3 coding challenges in a new series called Hiro Hacks. These projects now live in our docs and are a way for you to sharpen your coding skills and level up as a Stacks developer.
Looking Ahead to January
It’s the first month of the new year! Here are our biggest priorities as we kick off 2024:
- Supporting work towards Argon: December’s Neon testnet launch is an important step towards the Nakamoto release in April, but there’s more to be done. We will continue to support the blockchain ecosystem working group as we make headway on the next release (codenamed Argon) and work on signer integration, adding multiple miners and signers, and testing across the board.
- API Portal in the Hiro Platform: We’re gearing up for the release of a new feature in the Hiro Platform, a self service portal through which you can request and manage your API keys.
Beyond that we’ll of course have lots of work and upgrades to the suite of Hiro products, so keep an eye out for new updates.
Learn More
For a full list of releases and improvements by product, please view the following links:
