Two joyous announcements this week. One you know about already - the listing of eMaid on a new exchange, BitMart. @AJ_MS and @JimCollinson have been pulling out all the stops to get this up and running, and so far so good, with the caveat that some US users report having issues. We’re looking at that right now.
The other fantastic bit of news is the arrival of a new MaidSafer 
. Jason brings a raft of valuable experience to bear, he’s a great fit for the team and is already making himself useful. We’ll let him introduce himself below.
Yes, we know you’re bored uploading the same old files – and failing to upload megalithic LLMs. We’re working hard to bring you new toys to play with, including faucet-less trials and large file capabilities. In the meantime though, while it’s rough around the edges and grumpy under duress and perhaps a little dull, the testnet is at least pretty stable and has provided some valuable learnings.
We also realise the faucet has been a pain. Basically what’s happening is performance bottlenecks leading to slower than expected operations, the wallet not handling these slow operations properly, throwing errors, and unconfirmed transactions then leading to problems. So the root cause is small chunks not being verified fast enough, and that’s what we’re digging into now.
And we are now encrypting all data via self encryption. Thanks to all who engaged in the discussion around that.
Special thanks to Thomas Markiewicz for his improvements to our sn_registers crate.
Welcome Jason
Hello everyone, My name is Jason and I’m from South Wales, UK. I’ve been writing back-end code and developing systems for a while. Either in Kotlin, Java, or Rust.
When I’m not busy I enjoy playing online games (Mostly Dayz, or Lethal Company at the moment). I’ve worked in many countries in the past, such as Germany, Switzerland, and China. It’s nice to be back home here in the UK, but I really didn’t miss the weather. 
It’s great to be part of the MaidSafe team and I really look forward to developing a lot of neat features for you all in the future!
General progress
Qi_ma has been churning out PRs as per usual, notable among them one to refactor the client upload flow. This has been refactored to make it more parallelized, for which early testing has shown improvements under load. Another one improves the performance of chunk verification queries.
In associated work, @roland made some improvements to prevent the wallet skipping over unconfirmed transactions, part of fixing faucet server failures, and a PR to speed up downloads, reporting an impressive (up to) 2X improvement.
@anselme was busy debugging issues with concurrent register writes, and digging into alternative security approaches balancing lightweight gossip protocols against having all nodes build a DAG to check everything. The optimal approach will lie somewhere between these two.
Together with @chriso, @bzee has been working on testnet-deploy, debugging some Ansible errors and getting RPC working properly. It still needs a bit of polish but they have been able to up a testnet without any errors. The idea is to make it all remotely manageable, including the ability to do seamless upgrades.
@bochaco submitted a PR to support building and signing transfers to a watch-only wallet, taking the encoded unsigned transfer into an offline hot-wallet to sign it, and finally returning to the watch-only wallet to broadcast the signed transfer to the network. He’s now working on CLI commands to support this functionality.
@Jason_Paul has dived straight in, improving the documentation and making the testnet setup use platform-agnostic commands.
@JimCollinson and @AJ_MS have been toiling away on the BitMart exchange listing, for eMaid and are pretty pleased with the way it’s gone so far.
@Joshuef and @qi_ma have been looking at performance bottlenecks as nodes fill up. As well as general slowing down of the network, these are implicated in the faucet failures. Josh also submitted a PR to improve the public/private data functionality introduced in the last testnet.
And on @mav’s suggestion, @dirvine has revisited the self-encryption design and removed the minimum chunk size, so now even very small files will be encrypted in chunks. David’s also been tinkering with his little community of LLMs. World domination is surely just around the corner (or “soon”).
Useful Links
Feel free to reply below with links to translations of this dev update and moderators will add them here:
Russian ; 
German ; 
Spanish ; 
French; 
Bulgarian
As an open source project, we’re always looking for feedback, comments and community contributions - so don’t be shy, join in and let’s create the Safe Network together!
I took too long to write this post! 
