This week was particularly special for Clerk: our team finally met in person!

We raised our initial seed funding as just 2 founders in March 2020, right as the pandemic was spreading across the globe. We've grown to 16 since then, but we hadn't met in person until this week's retreat in Greece. It was thrilling for the team to finally meet each other in person.

"Authentication v2"

This week also marked a major milestone for Clerk as we launched the beta for "Authentication v2."

This is a brand new approach to how developers authenticate their end-users in their backend. We set out to resolve the biggest concerns and most frequent challenges raised by our early customers, namely:

• Authentication now uses short-lived JWTs instead of requiring a network request to Clerk, significantly speeding up the process
• For cross-origin architectures, the authentication token is now passed through the Authorization header to simplify Cross-Origin Resource Sharing settings
• Clerk now works with applications that are rendered server-side
• Clerk now works with backends hosted on the naked domain

Our own website has been running Authentication v2 for the past month and we're excited to open the beta to everyone. To get started, follow the guide here.

Soon, all new applications built on Clerk will default to Authentication v2.

Photo credit: Mark Pitsilos, Clerk engineer and photographer extraordinaire