Big news this week is the start of the Impossible Futures (IF) Backing Phase. We’re delighted to reveal the 12 apps that have made it to this stage. Congratulations to Autonomi Browser Extension, Autonomi Community Token, AutVid, Colony, Friends, IMIM, Mutant, Pirate Radio, Queeni AI Assistant, REGRU, Ryyn and SOMA and huge thanks to all the other contenders too. 
In the Backing Phase community supporters can lock ANT and assign Pledge Points to the apps they believe in. It pays to get your backing in early as you will increase your share of the rewards pool if the app you’re supporting deploys successfully. More here.
The team has been working on various changes to improve upload performance and consistency, seeing a reduction in quoting and chunk proof errors leading to a much higher success rate. These changes are going to be part of the updated networking client, which is being merged and will enter testing next week. We are looking to get this out to the Alpha net as part of the next release, within the next 2 weeks.
In an X Spaces on Wednesday, @bux, @anselme and @jimcollinson spoke more about the visionary thinking and philosophical roots of Autonomi, including what’s it gonna take to flip the table, to put people, not corporations, in control of the data and democratise access to AI and agentic systems - and why @bux would back an Irvine over an Altman any day of the week. You can catch the session here – no X account required.
Thanks @zettawatt for the PR requesting a scratchpad_update_public function. We hope the team’s answers were satisfactory.
@zettawatt also launched a community proposal to form an Autonomi Developer Council, which is a positive move.
In other community news, @traktion pushed a new v0.5.0 release of AntTP (Serving Autonomi data over HTTP) including Clap for CLI argument parsing, allowing named arguments in any order for improved flexibility, improved documentation and bug fixes.
@happybeing released ScratchChat, a peer-to-peer chat for Autonomi in a standard web browser using the dweb REST API.
@safemedia uploaded AutoBoy a Gameboy Emulator that uses @happybeing’s dweb – yet another fantastic example of everything coming together. Check it out!
General progress
As well as sharing some thoughtful contributions on X, @anselme has been digging into how we can re-integrate RPC as well as working with @qi_ma on payments from upload using libp2p req/res which provides error management capabilities that we were not available with Kad requests. Moving from Kad requests (no error management) to req/res would improve our flows without requiring big changes, although backward compatibility could be an issue.
@qi_ma also looked at the issue where the current flow of quote all, pay all then upload all risks the user having to spend extra should the upload fail. He raised a PR to change the quote-pay-upload flow, with a rolling window on chunks uploaded.
@mick.vandijke and Qi investigated an issue reported by @bytes, in which transactions were failing causing a waste of gas fees. The cause was probably insufficient Eth to pay for the worst-case gas fee scenario. Mick is working on a PR that will address this situation, among other things. Mick also worked on updating the gas fee preset PR and discussed quote expiration logic. Plus he tinkered with the IF project backing for better responsiveness on mobile devices, reward pool adjustment, contract / links updates.
Lajos worked on the token lock contract for the project refund, and automating the eMaid/Maid airdrop process to be deployable and automatic. He has also been working on the preparation and deployment of Phase 2 IF contract.
Meanwhile Ermine continued his explorations of the timeout for NAT detection in Launchpad to improve error handling. This is currently being tested under different scenarios. He also added a 3 minute timeout functionality for NAT detection, setting the relay option as default if NAT detection is not successful.
@roland refactored some of the reachability check PR code to accommodate more changes in the bootstrap process. He raised a PR for the deployer to make the client provisioning idempotent.
More PRs were incoming from @bzee who is working on the Node.js API, including one to fix the release GitHub CI flow for self encryption and replace Yarn with built-in npm for ease of use, another to apply Cargo fixes for Clippy, and a third that makes MAX_CHUNK_SIZE a proper const.
@shu updated all dashboards to the latest Grafana version, and migrated our standalone Grafana setup to a high availability Grafana setup, as well as looking at setting up a carrier-grade NAT (CGNAT, or double NAT) environment to test our connectivity capabilities.
And @vphongph has been doing QA work on all PRs as well as tracking the differences between the Rust and Python APIs.
