V7 Release

[neekolas]

Version 7.0.0 Release Notes

New Features

Improved participant privacy

In prior versions of the SDK, both the topic names and the message headers of DMs indicated the likely participants. Topic names were of the form dm-$address1-$address2. Only the participants in the conversation could verify the authenticity of these messages (they might be invalid messages spoofed by a third party), but a passive attacker could get a reasonable guess as to who was talking to whom and how often.

With V7, we have implemented Negotiated Topics. All identifying metadata has been removed from DMs and the conversation topic name is now a 32-byte random alphanumeric string, such as m-AhUFyewKxM1pxr1JmJJkDK3tDn3gQ0Op. This is accomplished by first sending an encrypted invitation to a well-known topic for all participants in the conversation which includes the randomly generated topic name and encryption key to be used in subsequent communication.

With this change, only the two parties in a DM conversation can know which conversation a given message relates to. Invitations are still publicly associated with known blockchain addresses, although only the participants can decrypt and verify the authenticity of those invitations. As always, message contents are end to end encrypted.

Conversation IDs

A longstanding feature request has been the ability to scope conversations to a particular application or identifier. For example, some developers may want to only display messages coming from their own application and not other apps on the XMTP network. Other developers may want to group messages based on other criteria (for example, an NFT marketplace may want to have messages grouped by NFT ID). Conversation IDs provide the building blocks needed for developers to have multiple conversations with the same blockchain address, grouped by an identifier.

You can learn more about how to use Conversation IDs here.

Conversation Metadata

In addition to conversation IDs, which are used for grouping messages, we also allow you to attach an arbitrary Map<string, string> of metadata to any conversation at the time of creation. Maybe you want to give a conversation a title or header image. Maybe you want to include some more information to link a conversation with an entity in your application.

Metadata is immutable and can only be set the first time conversations.newConversation(...) is run for a unique combination of blockchain address and conversationId.

Migration path

There are now two types of Conversation (ConversationV1 and ConversationV2). The APIs are identical to application developers, but only ConversationV2 receives the privacy benefits outlined above. Applications using SDK Version <7.0.0 can only send/receive messages from ConversationV1.

When client.conversations.newConversation(...) is called, you may receive either a ConversationV1 or ConversationV2 instance depending on the following criteria:

• If a conversationId is specified, we will either find an existing V2 conversation based on the conversation ID/address combination or create a new one if none exist.
• If no conversationId is specified, but there is a pre-existing V1 conversation, we will return that conversation
• If no conversationId is specified and there is no pre-existing V1 conversation, the decision to create a V1 or V2 conversation will depend on whether the address you are attempting to communicate with has ever used a XMTP SDK version of 7.1 or greater. If they have, a V2 conversation will be created. If not, a V1 conversation will be created.

This ensures that both parties will be able to see messages sent from >7.x versions of the SDK whenever possible, even as different applications upgrade at different times.

In a future release we may decide to allow one party to upgrade legacy V1 conversations to V2, once v7 adoption of the SDK is sufficiently high.

Breaking Changes

• The message type exposed to clients has a new name. Anywhere in your code you see import { Message } from '@xmtp/xmtp-js' you will need to replace it with import { DecodedMessage } from '@xmtp/xmtp-js'. The fields available on this new type are compatible with the previous version, so in most cases you will only need to update your import. DecodedMessage has replaced many optional fields from Message with required fields with the same name, so you may be able to remove some null checks from your code.
• client.conversations.list() may now return multiple conversations with the same blockchain address (but different conversation IDs). To get the same results you would receive with the 6.x version of the SDK, replace any instance of const conversations = await client.conversations.list() with

const conversations = (await client.conversations.list()).filter(
  (conversation) => !conversation.context?.conversationId
);

There will be at most one conversation per blockchain address without a conversation ID.

• The LocalStorageStore has been removed. If you have been initializing your SDK with the option { keyStoreType: KeyStoreType.localStorage } you will need to replace it with a different store (such as networkTopicStoreV1)
• The following methods have been removed from the Client class: sendMessage, publishEnvelope, encodeMessage, decodeMessage, streamIntroductionMessages, streamConversationMessages, listMessages, listConversationMessages, listIntroductionMessages. Equivalent functionality can be found using client.conversations.
• In prior versions of the SDK, await client.conversations.newConversation(...) would not perform any network requests and would return almost instantly. In V7 and above that method must check if a pre-existing conversation exists. Because of this change, the method is more expensive/slower. If you are repeatedly creating conversations for the same address using newConversation, you should refactor to re-use the returned conversation instance.

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[mkobetic]

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[mkobetic]

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🎉 This PR is included in version 7.0.0 🎉

The release is available on:

• npm package (@latest dist-tag)
• GitHub release

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