As many of you will know, @bux is speaking at Consensus at the end of May, after which we can expect many more to join our beta testing. It’s a massive opportunity to assemble a broad, and resilient Beta Network, through rapidly growing our community of node operators and assembling a network that can create a big splash for launch.
Our beta testers will be a critical element in the first stages of this, helping build capacity and deliver Autonomi to people all over the world. It’s no small thing and therefore it’s only right that those participating should be directly rewarded for their effort, their time, and their computer resources.
So we’ve devised a Beta Rewards Program that will deliver some generous rewards, really juice up our marketing reach, and should be just a little bit fun!
You can get into the details in the announcement post, but in brief, we’ll be recruiting testers in waves, and the earlier you join the more you stand to benefit. Testing will be gamified and the higher you rank in terms of earning the greater your reward when the network goes live.
And not only that, when we swell the ranks of participants to key targets, rewards will double for everyone, and then double again!
Data will be seeded to the Network by Autonomi and our partners, and there will be no faucet. The first wave will be 175 testers [STOP PRESS this milestone has just been reached 
] so if you haven’t signed up yet make sure you do so soon, you must get in to wave two.
In the background, we are working on ways to track rewards anonymously (Discord ID aside) and how to check against the system being gamed. This will involve @bux’s favourite thing— DAGs—and she’s so pleased about that.
And we’re even more pleased about the way hole punching has performed. Cyberspace is looking like a Swiss cheese. Gracias puncheros 
General progress
In order to build on the successes of hole punching @bzee has been back at AutoNat to see if it’s possible to integrate the AutoNAT server capability into existing nodes. This can be done with TCP, but he hasn’t got it working with Quic yet.
Chris has made some more improvements and fixes to the node manager and is now turning his attention to getting node manager services working in user mode.
@roland is busy working on some UX improvements that will allow people to participate in the Beta without any command line chops required. Look out for the first iteration of that soon!
@jimcollinson, @bux and @andrew are working through the node and rewards product planning flows, and @qi_ma and @joshuef have been focused on how we audit the rewards in beta nodes, and prevent gaming of the system.
Josh also merged the mnemonic code for generating wallet seed phrases and worked with Qi and Roland on the spend flow. He and @roland also worked closely on the new TUI.
@Qi_ma continued refining reward tracking for beta testing. He also raised a PR for reward notification.
surfs up 
.