This release adds mempool support to Hardhat, with two possible mechanisms for mining transactions: automining (the current behavior) and interval mining. You can also disable both mechanisms and mine new blocks programmatically. Check the docs to learn more.
Besides that:
- Starting now, Hardhat will warn you if you are using an unsupported version of solc. This doesn't mean that you can't use those versions, only that some Hardhat features, like stack traces, might not work correctly.
- Ropsten forking now has cache support, if you fork from a block that is at least 100 blocks old.
- A bug around the
eth_getStorageAtwas fixed (thanks @fubhy!)