Some good news to kick off with: Roland and Benno have succeeded in getting nodes and clients working from behind NAT firewalls with Quic so we’re definitely getting there in terms of nodes from home. Some aspects of AutoNAT (automatic detection of nodes behind NAT) need further refinement, but it’s at a stage where we want to test out what we have, and see if home nodes are earning – proof that they are connected properly. So come and give it a whirl from home with our latest alpha network: PunchNet.
And it’s great to see another community testnet out this week! Credit to @shu for this one. It’s incredibly pleasing to see it doing so well and folks jumping in to get involved.
For those wondering what ‘shunned’ signifies in the logs and vdash, it just means that one of your close nodes has indicated you are unreliable. It does not mean that you are banished—yet—although that is the likely outcome. More explanations on this thread. The algorithm used to shun peers is still under development, so we may need to back it off a bit if the shunning gets out of hand.
We have a couple of staging networks planned, one to test out a faucetless network, another (perhaps the same one) to put the node manager through its paces, so watch out for those. First though we’ll be looking at hole punching.
We’ve also been looking ahead to Beta testing, how to incentivise testers to join. @bux spoke a bit about this at our bi-weekly Discord Stage event Tuesday and there’ll be more about that really soon.
Welcoming our Autonomi Builders
There was also some exciting news about ecosystem builder partnerships with Cosmos, Jams and Cloudprox TurboDataSafe. For those who weren’t able to hear these teams explain their projects firsthand, here’s a quick summary of what they have in store, and why they are building with Autonomi:
Cosmos
What is Cosmos?
- Cosmos is a super app that enables people to easily and securely acquire properties to rent and buy. They also would like to build a micro ecommerce function for those who want to sell goods (an old tv for example). Cosmos want to build a decentralised, independent app, so we can’t be restricted or controlled by a single individual or organisation. An app, that’s free from any form of corporate or government interference
Why build on Autonomi?
- “We wanted to build on something like Solana but discovered that Solana, Eth, IPFS etc aren’t truly decentralised. We needed a truly decentralised solution that is localised and scalable as well as transaction free. We had a previous project that died off due to gas fees being too high, Africa works different to most other places in the world and cost to participate is a big factor.”
CloudProx TurboDataSafe
What is CloudProx TurboDataSafe?
- Cloudprox is a mini version of what is already in use in the big data centres. A really fast storage device (actually a piece of software installed on linux) that allows you to store your own data locally and automatically starts running nodes/and storing data on Autonomi. Part of the user interface is browser based which you can aim at a select set of hardware or a really small storage system eg. raspberry pie 5. It also comes with a mini pop up store for retail services and/or products. An example of a use is to store a video locally as well as simultaneously on Autonomi so if something happens to the local copy it is easy to retrieve.
What’s the future vision, the dream for CloudProx TurboDataSafe?
- “We want to make this available in a form that others can use to support other people and make projects easily accessible.”
JAMS
What are you working on right now, what is the MVP of JAMS and what’s next?
- MVP is going to be basic as you would expect (MVP and all that) - think early 2000s iTunes player. Shortly after being able to follow people, we will implement artist discovery. Artists will be paid directly, no skimming off the top, you can listen for free but subscription money would go 100% to the artist.
What’s the future vision, the dream for JAMS?
- Main goal is for artists to be paid fairly so they don’t have to worry about anything other than creation, everything else is taken care of as well as the creation of a suite of tools. We were also looking at JAMStand, for artists to connect with fans and to help with royalty splits, copyrights etc (now looking at partner integrations as well here). Ultimately we want to put everything in the hands of the artist.
All three of these builders have their very own channel on the Autonomi Discord server, so feel free to dive in, ask questions, and help build the future!
Another date for your diary
Bux will be speaking live at Consensus in May, so we expect a big influx of interest in Autonomi then. It’s all coming together folks! 
General progress
@roland and @bzee successfully got hole punching working! The home node was functional and was able to receive PUTs via a relay from clients running behind NAT.
Benno has also been looking at uPNP testing it with a remote node and seeing what happens when compiling with Wasm32.
@qi_ma has been working on some fixes for self-encryption as well as investigating logs from community testing, making some changes to reduce the size of the logfiles and improving logging from the faucet in testing.
@Bux, @JimCollinson, and @andrew.james have been turning their attention to attracting and incentivising beta testers as well as developing our new partnerships. We think you all are going to have a great time getting stuck into the Beta when we launch the rewards program in the coming weeks! This along with hole punching, and an improved node UX is really going to get the beta network expanding quickly, as we cast the net wide for new participants and power towards launch.
Meanwhile, @chriso continues to tweak and add functionality to node manager including issues seen by community members on macOS and Windows. He refactored and upgraded testnet-deploy, our tool for automating the deployment of testnets on AWS and Digital Ocean.
And last but definitely not least, @joshuef created a PR to feed the Foundation wallet by default rather than the faucet, and worked on getting @mav’s mnemonic work integrated with the client and faucet, so we can start to have Genesis disbursed to foundation initially and test out that flow in testnets.
