Big news this week is that we received more than 60 applications for the Impossible Futures (IF) challenge which is a tremendous response. The range of applications was super diverse across the three themes of Entertainment, Knowledge and Infrastructure. We have set up a special invite-only Discord channel to support our pioneers and builders for those who made it through the initial stage, phase 1.
As @jimcollinson and @Gill_McLaughlin explained on Stages on Wednesday, builders will need to fill out a Google Sheet for each application submitted and create a page to showcase the app to the community. We’ll be turning on the previews for app builders’ profile pages shortly.
The Alpha net is ready, and @rusty.spork will be distributing tokens shortly. For builders, we will make sure you get your tokens that you need for testing on Alpha.
For the community, the voting process begins on May 7th and lasts for a week. Each vote will cost less than one ANT and voters receive one ANT back if their chosen project advances to the final 12. The cost of a vote will increase towards the end of the process to encourage early voting.
In phase 2, the final 12 will compete for prizes and backing by the community, and backers will get their Ant back along with any Backing Awards 12 months (+ 1 day) after the day they backed the app.
We put out a new version of Autonomi on Tuesday. We needed to synchronise API and other updates on the Alpha network (to be used with IF) and the production network, so please (and apologies for the lack of a changelog – time was tight) upgrade your nodes ASAP. Also, there’s an update on emissions payouts here.
What else? Oh, @seneca wrote a detailed update on plans for Project Decorum, the social network he and @bzee have been working on for a long time, as they’ve waited for the network to reach a stable state.
Plus @champii released an update (v0.3.0) for MutAnt (mutable private storage), with a focus on making it more robust and user-friendly.
@happybeing produced a new version (v0.4.3) of his decentralised website publishing framework dweb which now allows web apps to create and update public scratchpads. Thanks too for the bug report on pointers @happybeing. This is now fixed.
@traktion pushed v0.4.5 of AntTP (Serving Autonomi data over HTTP), which includes the latest v0.4.4 autonomi libs and refactors to replace stream! macro with an implementation of futures::stream trait instead. This improves readability and maintainability of the code (more to come).
And @loziniak offered a community token proposal, laying the groundwork for a project that would allow anyone to issue tokens on Autonomi.
Finally @dirvine has been dispensing nuggets of wisdom over on our YouTube channel, including on defying conformity for a better future. Have a watch and give him a like!
General progress
@anselme has been digging into our churn tests and managed to get rid of the not enough quotes issue we’ve been seeing. We still have a few missing data errors in the churn test but all other tests are green. We are getting really close to being able to upgrade the whole client side networking stack.
@chriso has been on the latest release in which we introduced features that will be in both the production and Alpha networks
Together with @anselme, Ermine continues to dig into the relationship between libp2p-quic and Quinn. The connection between these is where we are still seeing a fair few errors.
Lajos worked on testing some edge cases with the Impossible Futures maths, setting up some complex variations.
@Mick.vandijke and Qi have been investigating a churn failure with regard to the refactored client. Qi put in a fix.
@qi_ma also created a PR to set the default chunk_batch_size to 1. Upload/download tests against the Alpha network have shown this increases the success rate, especially for users with a poor connection. Users can tweak the batch_size variable for better performance, if their connection allows. Qi also raised a PR to utilise our new ELK-08 monitoring stack that @shu has been working on.
@roland worked on auto NAT detection and tracking connection errors. He also created a PR to supply network ID to Alpha net clients
Finally, @shu continues to work on the ELK monitoring stack including making improvements to its performance and efficiency.
Amazing update!
Things are really flying in all areas. 
