We were hoping to have a testnet ready for you today, but there are still a few tweaks to go in around the launcher and faucet. But soon. Really soon.
Talking of soon, in the Roadmap we promised to unveil a fresh white paper and new branding next week, and we will deliver. The white paper is all there bar the i-dotting and t-crossing, and we’re really looking forward to sharing our new public face to the world. Thanks for all the encouraging chat here and in discourse. We have to agree with @safemoon here about the need to separate ourselves from the crowd, and this is our big marketing focus right now.
Thanks to @happybeing for his many helpful contributions and suggestions about the API, registers and provision for static sites. Do check them out if you haven’t already here, here and here. We appreciate you’re someone who really wants to get moving on the app development side, Mark, and we promise we’ll get onto that as soon as we possibly can.
Folder synching is now ticked off the list, as are Omni swap functionality, and churn improvements, some or all of which should make it into the next testnest, together with bad node detection.
With help from the team @mav is now looking at security hardening the wallet, and mnemonics for secure account management as well as backup and restore.
And in case you missed it, proof that @bux has being doing her technical homework. 
PR corner
Many thanks to @mav for his continuing work on token disbursement and the wallet. The mnemonic (12-24 words) he’s working on now will be incorporated into a future safe wallet backup/restore command. It’s much simpler to safely store a 24 word mnemonic than it is to store a 64 character key. For newcomers, Mav was the author of a widely used tool for BIP39, a standard way to restore crypto wallets using a mnemonic, so there’s no-one better to have on board.
And a high five 
to @loziniak for his work on making logging errors public.
General progress
@chriso has almost completed a service management PR and grueling node manager refactor, essential because the code had grown unwieldy. He added upgrade commands for the faucet and daemon. The node manager module is now much more manageable and will be added to the network deployer. On a separate note, the team decided to abandon working on a separate alpha channel as it was creating more complications that it solved.
On folder syncing and account packets (user credentials for accessing data and services) @bochaco’s tests are coming back positive, including for previous sticking point empty directories. File and directory mutations and syncing and merging changes to and from the network are all working, which is a great step forward.
@jason_paul raised PRs #1429 #1430 #1436 to refactor the iterate upload and chunks to upload code for improved readability, to rationalise the code base and make it easier to isolate bugs.
@qi_ma delivered an excellent presentation to the rest of the team explaining the finer points of Kademlia. He also investigated and fixed a CI failure.
Meanwhile, @roland has been experimenting with controlled churn on a live network so we can control the rate that nodes arrive and leave, also working on the repay different payee functionality to make it generic and fixing issues with the deployer.
@anselme made good progress in spend DAG verification and error reporting, testing locally with sn_auditor to identify and fix issues and bugs. He also rebased spend, and fixed DAG collection errors so we identify double spends easily.
@bzee has been diving into how CashNotes are stored on disk, as well as looking at @mav’s work on wallet mnemonics. Plus his Wasm efforts continue to bear fruit, adding WebSockets as a transport choice along with Quic, UDP, TCP et al. Wasm, as well as allowing people to run apps in browsers, will likely play a role in the interface for applications written in non-Rust languages.
And @jimcollinson and @andrew.james have been finalising the new white paper, which will be given a sneak peek tomorrow.
but be warned I have some new hardware 
.
. 
.
for me each week.