Update on Hiro’s work towards network scalability

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:

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.

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Nice, thanks for the update!

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