The Rust team has announced version 1.68.0, which includes support for the new "sparse" registry protocol that has been stabilized as part of this version. This protocol allows Cargo to fetch package metadata via simple HTTP GET requests that return JSON for only the packages that the client requests, resulting in improved speed and reliability for builds. The sparse protocol was introduced to address issues with the previous Git-based transport, which had resource-intensive requirements and expected repositories to maintain a clean history. With this change, registries can handle larger sets of packages without maintaining long-lived state, and HTTP caching techniques can be used to further improve performance. Cloudsmith is supporting this new protocol, and customers are recommended to migrate to the new beta implementation as soon as possible to see these benefits. The sparse protocol will become the default for crates.io in the 1.70.0 release later this year.