Something a bit different this week and an opportunity to get up to date with all the developments in the network and how they fit together. JPL has been badgering us all for info over the past few weeks, but all in a good cause as the Primer has now been updated! He explains the main changes below.
General Progress
New Hire: We have appointed a finance person now. Andrew James, from Troon of all places! Andrew will be heavily fintech/onboarding focussed after a short period sorting out all the mess our CEO has probably made of the accounts in the last few months 
This will release David again to get a focus again on the technology which he tells us “he cannot wait to focus once more”, as admin for him is “a living hell”. Everyone to their own! The only downside is that Andrew is on a 3 month notice period, but we hope that can be reduced.
@lionel.faber has been looking to speed up the CI process by using an AWS EC2 instance to build the entire sn_repo, uploading the artefacts to S3 and then downloading it in all the parallel builds so the GitHub Action machines need no compilation. It should speed CI up significantly at a low cost thanks since AWS bills the instances per second and does not charge for instances that have been powered off.
@chriso is also digging into testnet improvements and release the process. The CLI merge is still a little too buggy for primetime just yet.
Back in the Labs, @danda and David Rusu have been looking further into ring signatures and how they might combine with a Rust BLS cryptography library blstrs and commitments.
And in the bug squishing department, @bochaco, @yogesh and @qi_ma are sifting through Anti-Entropy and the node joining process, with some DKG messaging issues being pinpointed just today, which look like they could be solved by a sprinkle of AE, so we’ll be diving in there next.
Safe Network Primer
The Safe Network Primer has been updated 
and boy did it need doing. The last serious update was just over a year ago but so much has changed since then. In putting it together I’ve been struck by all the simplifications that have happened. It just feels a lot more streamlined and cohesive now, and from the point of view of its biographer, a fair bit easier to understand - although some parts still give me a headache.
If you follow the Thursday updates you’ll be familiar with many of these changes already, but the original idea of the Primer was to have everything in one place and to strip out a lot of the heavier stuff so that non-techies and semi-techies could understand how it all fits together. A lot of the early heavy lifting was done by @anon40790172 and subsequent updates have been a lighter load as a result of his hard work.
So, what’s changed?
Well you can read for yourself at primer.safenetwork.org, but in summary:
CRDTs were just a twinkle in @dirvine’s eye at the time of the last update, but now they are a fundamental part of the Network and crucial in achieving consistency without requiring a heavy-duty, network wide algorithm. Using CRDTs has enabled a shift to Register and Multimap data types, which are a lot simpler and more flexible than their predecessors.
Another part of the process of maintaining consistency and stability is Anti-Entropy, which ensures that a section is stable before changes are made within it. This is fundamental to every operation, and fortunately it lends itself to pretty pictures too, so AE has a chapter of its own.
Then we have DBCs. These have been covered in great depth in previous updates, and are still a work in progress, so the Primer gives an overview of what they are and what they can do. I suspect they will merit a chapter of their own in a future update.
In combination, AE and DBCs have precipitated a change from ‘pay on GET’ to ‘pay on PUT’. Nodes are now paid for storing data rather than delivering it.
The Node Age chapter has also been updated. This is something the team has been working on recently and a few processes have been altered as a result of experiments.
And then there’s Safe credentials. While not part of the core network, a good UX will be an absolutely crucial ingredient if the Network is to take off. @JimCollinson covered current plans in some depth last week, so the Primer just covers the core concept of n-of-k credentials. Once again, this will need its own chapter once the plans are implemented.
A couple of things have been removed too. First, the authentication process is being rejigged and is likely to look rather different from the old authenticator, but it’s early days and rather than add to confusion, I shelved that part for now. Second, the chapter on the API was hopelessly out of date, and trying to understand the new one was too much for my semi-techie head, so that can come later.
As ever, there will be typos, there will be mistakes, there will be badly written wibble. @StephenC has done a sterling job of typo-riddance, but there will be more. There always are. If you spot any, let me know.
Thanks to the team, for their help and explanations. It’s been fun and I’ve been overawed to see how closely everyone works together and how quickly ideas take shape, but now I need to go and lie down.
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!
