Hedera launched the previewnet in June 2020 to provide early access to Hedera codebase features and functionality, prior to their release on the Hedera testnet and mainnet. We’ve seen a number of developers tinker around on previewnet but hoped to increase that metric by improving the previewnet experience for developers.
Through feedback received, the core team has decided to make a change in conjunction with today’s previewnet upgrade to make a best-effort to preserve the previewnet state during a release cycle. With this change, we hope even more developers take advantage of the opportunity to try out upcoming features on Hedera.
Please keep in mind that previewnet is running a codebase still under active development. It’s not always stable and accounts / data can still be lost when the network codebase is upgraded.
In the past, the previewnet state was reset every pre-release and patch release deployed during a release cycle; due to previewnet being inherently less stable and running a codebase that’s still under development, these upgrades happened adhoc. This made it difficult for application developers to try upcoming features — it was uncertain when their application’s state would be purged and they would have to rebuild.
Moving forward, the team has decided to perform best-effort upgrades of the existing state during every pre-release and patch release deployed to the previewnet during a release cycle. This means that you’ll now have more time to test new features on previewnet without having to rebuild your application at an irregular cadence.
We’re always looking for feedback from developers building on Hedera. Of course, if you have an ecosystem standard proposal or changes you’d like to see in the open source Hedera Services codebase, we encourage you to submit a HIP. If you’re looking to provide any incremental feedback on the developer experience, please check out the #developer-feedback channel in the Hedera developer discord.