Big news this week, apart from the launch of the latest stable release of the network of course, is a new a data type we’re working on to go with our Transaction type, as @dirvine explains.
This will be a Pointer type that always points to the current value. It will use Transaction type to preserve history. In this way we can have infinitely growable true transaction types that are CRDT compliant and easy to always find the HEAD of. It’s a great first use of the Transaction type. and after listening to the community we feel this will offer the best of both worlds and preserve the perpetual data network we all work for.
These types are alongside a ScratchPad type and Chunk where the former allows a lazy unmanaged blob for devs to have app config data, account types and more and the latter being our store of bytes of all kinds, but mostly files.
In our Client API the team have been working on filesystem types that build on these that should allow us to build whole computers in the network type approaches. This is where you can walk up to any computer running Autonomi, log in, see all your data and then log out again, without trace.
On this last stage we do need to look more at in memory filesystems like fuse etc. but we will get there. Given the rich variety of data types though, we feel that apps will be not only be possible, but also truly decentralised and always available with full history of all data. So apps, websites and more should all now be a much more realistic and easy to provide promise. It is now we really need to (a) provide these data types (b) let you folk build on them and feedback to us.
This is the time we have all been waiting for an API that hides all networking and makes the data types clean, clear and available to you. Thank you all again for your patience and perseverance in working with us on this one. As you know the network has taken most of our time, but we are now focused on this API/SDK and delivering a compelling and well documented initial app building experience. Again, thanks.
Latest stable release
Make sure you reset all your nodes to the latest stable release for the testnet (instructions here). And remember If you run nodes consistently this week, next week, and the week after, you will have access to 100% of the 1 million token reward pool. We’ll explain more on the Stages session later.
Prizes and merch!
This week Discord Stages has been moved to today Thursday 19th December, 9pm GMT to follow the Network release. This will give the community the opportunity to ask any questions to the team or raise any feedback post the release. And also, as this will be our last stages before the end of the year, we thought it would be good fun to host a small quiz for the latter part of the event, for those that want to stay and take part - with some Autonomi and network tech questions with prizes and merch for our winners. Looking forward to seeing as many of you there as possible! 
This is our last update this year. Have fun everyone 
, thanks for all that you do, and see you on the other side!
General progress
@chriso has been the engine driving the creation and implementation of the latest version of the network, while @shu continues to improve our monitoring. This week he has been looking at a proof of concept to ensure a single Telegraf Elasticsearch service can support multiple applications, e.g. nginx, ant, antnodes, etc, frontend and backend. Also as a POC, he integrated MaxMind GeoIP database to convert IP locations into latitude/longitude locations both for ELK and Grafana.
@rusty.spork has been updating the documentation and preparing for the latest net, and he’s always about here and on Discord to field your comments and queries.
On payments and transactions, @qi_ma dug deep into gas fee reduction by tweaking the client code and data payments, and resolved an issue where uploads were failing due to a lack of quotes from nodes. He also ensured the Launchpad works with the new stable release.
Lajos worked on profiling the gas usage of different versions of the payment function in the smart contract, and together with @qi_ma selected the optimal version. He also unit-tested the pricing formula in the smart contract.
As well as supporting the infrastructure upgrades, @roland tested the uploaders for upscaling, and with other team members investigated an issue where we found they were stalling.
Ermine was on the stalling uploaders too. He also worked on refactoring some automation tasks for Client API to support Windows in CI/CD.
Dave’s nearly here
And we know you’re all waiting for Dave. Dave (GUI client app) has had a bit of work done, as we explained a couple of weeks ago and in his buffed up mark 2.0 form, he’s looking especially fine and is very nearly here, thanks to @mick.vandijke and @bzee.
Mick also raised a PR with a few CLI wallet command additions, changes and fixes, and Benno put in some changes for usability. Plus he removed registers from user data. Registers are now deprecated, but they will still be usable until the TGE.
is an actual decentralized DB - not merely distributed; hence a truly revolutionary step forward in design. Having an API that can take advantage of this fully decentralized DB will change how apps work - dramatically increasing security and scalability.
