Learning Xahau: HookOnV2, NamedHooks, and Transaction Simulation. More Control Over When and How Hooks Fire.

Welcome to Learning Xahau, a series of articles dedicated to helping developers, builders, and blockchain enthusiasts better understand the Xahau ecosystem. Whether you're just getting started or already building advanced applications, these posts will explore Xahau's features, architecture, and best practices through practical examples and real-world use cases. If you've been building with Hooks on Xahau, you know the basic loop: write a C program, compile it to WebAssembly, install it on an account, and it fires automatically when that account is involved in a transaction. Simple and powerful, but until the 2026.6.21 major release, there were some friction points that made real-world hook architectures more complicated than they needed to be. This release ships three improvements that directly address those friction points: HookOnV2 : split the single HookOn bitmask into separate HookOnIncoming and HookOnOutgoing controls NamedHooks : assign a human-readable name to each hook slot, so senders can choose which hook to activate Simulate RPC : preview a transaction including all hook executions without spending fees or changing ledger state None of these require rewriting your hook logic. They are configuration and tooling improvements at the SetHook and transaction level. But they fundamentally change what you can build cleanly. All code in this article targets the Xahau Testnet ( wss://xahau-test.net ) and requires xahau.js 4.1.1 or later. Clone the companion repository: git clone https://github.com/Ekiserrepe/learningxahau20260621.git cd learningxahau20260621 npm install Copy .env.example to .env and fill in the seeds used across these examples: cp .env.example .env HUB_SEED = # account that installs the directional hook (07, 08, 09) NAMED_HUB_SEED= # account that installs and owns the named hooks (10, 11, 13, 14) SENDER_SEED = # account that sends payments targeting a named hook (12, 14) All accounts need testnet funds from the Xahau Testnet Faucet . HookOnV2: Di