The most important news to communicate this week, for those that haven’t heard, is the winding down of the Bittrex exchange. After 4th December only withdrawals from Bittrex will be possible. Anyone who has MAID on Bittrex needs to take it off the exchange sooner rather than later and store their tokens in an Omni-compatible wallet.
Alternatives for Omni-MAID trading are now limited to HitBTC, but @swissprivatebanker has kindly assured us that his company Altcoinomy will continue to convert MAID to eth-compatible eMaid for the foreseeable future, for those who want to continue to trade. 
See this topic for more info about the conversion process.
Rest assured that both MAID and eMAID will be swappable 1:1 with Safe Network Tokens (SNT) after the Safe Network has launched.
Other news is that the latest testnet seems to have solved some problems and unearthed others in a one-step-forward-one-step-back kinda style. It appears that nodes are not properly discovering the whole network, specifically having a poorer knowledge of their closest neighbours, which seems to lead to them assuming more responsibility for more data than they should. This hasn’t happened with smaller in-house tests, so it looks like something that emerges with scale. Anyway, deerstalkers 
are on, magnifying glasses are out, and it shouldn’t be too long before we can launch a version 2.
General progress
@anselme has implemented PaymentQuote, simplifying the payment process and getting rid of client side price race conditions. This will allow for further simplifications on the client side for upload retries which are currently quite complex. He’s now finalising the client-side code to match.
@joshuef made some changes to reduce unhandled NetworkEvents, which should also reduce gossip noise.
Also on Gossip, @qi_ma raised a PR to avoid the swarm_driver throwing up gossip messages unnecessarily.
And @bochaco is experimenting with increasing the GossipSub heartbeat interval to 5 sec from 1 sec. This should reduce the royalties network traffic a bit.
@Joshuef spotted that clients are unnecessarily participating in gossip, and so put a stop to this idle chatter in order to reduce traffic. Gossiping is now disabled for clients by default via a toggle.
Josh also made some tweaks to improve the success rate of large file uploads, added a CLI flag so users can configure batch sizes, and enabled TCP port reuse to tackle potential bottlenecks.
On the sn_testnet_deploy module @roland raised a PR to rsync logs from VMs to local machine which should drastically reduce the time it takes to sync logs from testnets. Meanwhile @chriso refactored the node_manager to provide a start command, and has now got the install and start commands working on Windows as well as macOS and Linux.
@bzee has been looking at the scope of RPC commands for starting and stopping nodes, fetching information on status and the like, and how these integrate with OS services. He continues to look at Sybil attacks and defences in a libp2p context
And @anselme and @roland have been considering the implications for man-in-the-middle and DDoS attacks of quorum settings for validating nodes in the context of transactions. Short version is: we’re pretty sure such attacks will be extremely hard to pull off with any setting, but obviously we want to make sure all the bases are covered before beta.
On metrics, Roland raised a PR to enable faucet logging, and Qi merged one that collects the swarm_driver handler statistics.
Finally, on outreach Anselme has been looking further at potential on-ramps for SNT, and @jimcollinson has been working on pitches to exchanges and potential partners when that glorious time comes.
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