The Stacks ecosystem has seen tremendous growth over the last few months and we’re excited that Hiros tools were a part of that: Stackers recently reached the threshold of locking $1 billion for POX, Hiro is now seeing more than 250 million monthly API requests, and the Stacks Accelerator just saw its first class graduate.
With hypergrowth comes some growing pains. As we wrote in August and September, we saw the Stacks network experiencing mempool congestion, and as mentioned in the last update, Hiro chose to focus on three workstreams to help solve the problem, alongside other members of the community: facilitate a healthy fee market; profile/benchmark current performance to shed light on the biggest bottlenecks in the current codebase; and explore the feasibility of Clarity cost-voting as a non consensus-breaking solution.
Here’s an update on where we are today with these workstreams:
- Clarity cost-voting: We assessed the feasibility and concluded it was not a viable option in this situation (for a more detailed explanation, see SIP-012, section “A Note on Bypassing SIP-006”)
- Fee markets: New fee estimation in the Stacks blockchain has been implemented and is available in a release candidate. This provides a new endpoint that can be consumed by clients. We will incorporate this into both Hiro wallets in the coming weeks (here’s a preview of the integration in the Hiro Web Wallet).
- Profiling/Benchmarking: Hiro scaled up our internal infrastructure and added a new read-only mode to the Stacks Blockchain API for better horizontal scalability. While there are bottlenecks at the blockchain level, Hiro’s products have helped mitigate some of that impact and generally kept up with the higher traffic. Hiro engineers also led the Clarity Benchmarking project and proposed new cost limits for Clarity functions. We also identified an opportunity to speed up the MARF (the on-disk data structure used by Stacks blockchain).
With help and support from many of you in the community, we took all the learnings from our workstreams into a concrete proposal for a costs-only network-upgrade, described in SIP-012.
Stacks core developers currently estimate that the technical work required to execute the upgrade should complete and be available in a new release by November 22nd, and the actual network-upgrade could happen the week of November 29th.
Looking forward, as Muneeb outlined in his post and as discussed in this blog by the Stacks Foundation, we anticipate multiple scaling solutions with different (and explicit) trade-offs to come online early next year. This will allow developers and users to choose the right solution for their workloads. One approach, called appchains, is already live on the Stacks testnet (read the full interview about appchains)! Hiro is exploring another approach called “subnets”: we plan to share more information about that later this quarter and hope to have a prototype on testnet in early Q1.
In the meantime, we encourage developers to use the cost-tracking feature in Clarinet. If you’re using the Hiro Web Wallet, you can try to replace-by-fee (RBF) your pending transactions (more details in this post). Finally, if you’re an exchange or integrator who is hitting any API issues or with running API yourself at scale, give us feedback (comment below or find us on Discord, in the dev-general channel). We can help!
Thank you again for your patience and support as we work through this together.