Marketing
We started off this week with a bang at a fantastic meet up in Glasgow on Monday evening. A huge thank you to all that came and a bigger thanks to @DavidMc0 who set up the entire event. We started off the night with @Jean-Philippe giving an overview of the projects he’s working on, followed by a Q&A then plenty of lively discussions on how SAFE will change our relationship with data. We can’t wait for another one already, so keep your eyes peeled for the next date!
Also this week, we’re delighted to announce that our very own UX mastermind @jimcollinson will be speaking at the SAFE Brighton meet up 
. It’s been incredible to see the community so engaged with his work so we would suggest you take advantage of this fantastic opportunity to hear him in person and of course, it’s the perfect occasion to ask all and any questions. Register and sign up details are here.
Another week so of course…another Tweetstorm. Please give it some love and RT and of course send any suggestions of stories our way!
AND…we’re not done. As development speeds up, one of the aspects we’re keen to support is community contributions as our libraries receive more interest. So, we’ve been investigating the GitHub Sponsors program, which lets us sponsor developers and those of you who help with documentation and other non-technical parts of the Network on a monthly basis. Everyone who contributes to an open-source project is eligible to become a sponsored developer, you just need to sign up to the waitlist to be part of the next beta phase.
Interested? Good! Head over here to find out more and pop your name down on the waitlist.
One more thing worth mentioning. We’ve been squirreling away in the background, looking at ways we can become more succinct visually when presenting ourselves to the world. Why is this important? There’s a whole field around brand identity and the use of visual cues that are part of creating strong brands. It’s often an undervalued part of marketing. So by starting to really hone in on our brand and paying attention to how we visually, and tonally, communicate with the world, we’re setting ourselves up in good stead for launch. Working in collaboration with UX, we’re in the final stretch of getting these agreed so you’ll start seeing this roll out soon. It’s not a rebrand or a 180-degree shift. Instead, it’s small, yet fundamental, nuances that will start to bring some consistency to SAFE marketing materials. So things like YouTube bookends and Medium headers, as well as social images have been considered. Whilst we’re not going to retrospectively apply all these, you’ll start to see these changes in some of the newer content we’ll be pushing out.
SAFE CLI
This last week we made really good progress in finalising the integration of the CLI with the safe_client_libs API. Even though that may sound trivial, this put the CLI project in an excellent position as this shows the features we’ve been developing so far can effectively work with the SAFE Network and the new data types as originally envisioned. Today we merged the last PR we had for the integration effort. The integration of CLI with SCL also means we can now use all the available commands we have in CLI with the mock-network feature, and using our safe_auth CLI for authorising the CLI application by using the $ safe auth command.
We have already started and also made good progress on the first PR (#160) in relation to the NRS features, the other main goal of the current milestone, which is focused on allowing users to create public names and link websites to them using the CLI. We are now full steam ahead with finalising this PR as well as the rest of the planned NRS features, like not only being able to create public names and NRS containers, but also add, remove and update the linked websites/files from there, or fetching them and rendering their content using NRS-URLs with paths.
Lastly, we had to make some minor changes to the CLI UX making some args optional as they are not really required based on how the real SCL API work with Keys and coin balances. For example, when querying the balance of a Key we only need the secret key and therefore providing the Key’s XOR-URL is now totally optional. We will be also working on making the necessary updates to the CLI User Guide.
SAFE Browser
In the last weeks we’ve been reducing time spent on the desktop SAFE Browser for now, with most staff resources being assigned to other projects like the “SAFE Network App” and CLI development.
We’ll continue to offer patch releases as make sense, and so, just as a wee reminder for any who may have missed it, last week we made available our latest Browser patch release v0.14.1.
Mock interface
It’s been yet another intense week for the SAFE Client Libs team. The experimental work on the Safecoin API was merged into the stable branch and handed over to the SAFE CLI team for integration. With this, the client API is mostly stabilized and all remaining changes are mostly internal to Client Libs.
Speaking of internals, we’ve updates the MDataInfo struct to use the new Mutable Data types. This enabled the team to migrate internal components such as access containers, the root config directory etc. to the new data types. Additionally, the deduction of PUTs has been replaced with Safecoin debits for mutation operations. With this, we will soon be ready to completely deprecate the legacy data types and their API for a smooth transition to Vault integration.
Along with the usual improvements and bug-fixes, an additional change has been made where apps cannot send requests for client-specific operations such as manipulating authenticated keys or deleting unpublished data. Previously, this was prevented only at the vaults. Now, the API doesn’t give users the feasibility to send such requests and even if they do (by changing the always open-sourced code) vaults will just drop the requests.
The team also spent some time planning the integration of quic-p2p in SAFE Client Libs. We have an initial plan in place and implementation will be starting soon once the team wraps up a few tasks in the currently active milestone.
Vaults
Following last week’s completion of Immutable Data handling, we’ve turned our attention to Mutable and Append-Only Data. Both are now done, or nearly done, with the final PRs in the pipeline. At this point, it’s mostly about making sure we catch all corner cases in the tests. During the implementation of these data types, some improvements flowed back tosafe-nd to make sure the API is ergonomic to use.
Finally, handling of authorisation keys for apps is also implemented and with this we are very close to completing phase 1 , and soon we can test the implementation against SAFE Client Libs.
Secure Message Delivery
A few initial issues in the SMD project are now addressed in an open PR, which will get merged soon. This opens the road to more concurrent work on this project.
The PR also contains a small “BLS emulation” layer. Our initial plan for SMD depended on BLS being in place, but it’s not complete yet and we don’t want to rush it. This approach enables us to stick to the plan as much as possible, and when we actually integrate BLS, we will be able to replace the BLS emulation with the actual threshold_crypto crate.
We also completed some additional cleanups. The main one simplifying our routing logic to keep the message signing group the same: always all the elders.
Integration of quic-p2p into Routing
Quic-p2p has caught up with the mock-quic-p2p changes we made to accommodate Routing’s needs. This lets us update the dependency in Routing and restore CI builds of production code that were temporarily suspended. With this, all the issues in the project are closed and the integration of quic-p2p into Routing is complete
BLS cryptography
Work continues on implementing our DKG (Distributed Key Generation, the way our peers generate their secret and public keys).
We agreed on the plan for the feature mentioned last week: allowing not-yet-full members of a section to participate in the DKG. We updated the project plan, and started with the implementation. The first part is in a PR raised and awaiting a final review. Once the related work is complete, we will have what is needed to start integration of the DKG process into the membership changes flows in Routing.
and here’s my own mini update from yesterday:
With just one change, the mock vault file is now called 
