And no clear product, no dates, no deadlines. Nothing about the token, tokenomics.
Clearly, no usable product in mind of the people (person) who plan(s) this. It’s more of someday, somehow, maybe and maybe not.
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This is looooong. Sorry!
Intro & summary
I love what David is doing, and find the R&D stuff he’s working on very exciting and I’m keen to see how it goes, so I am in no way diminishing this. It’s all good if David doesn’t want to focus on the token.
I want to address what I perceive as misunderstandings David has about the community’s reasons for wanting a native token.
Here I address some of David’s perspectives on the native token in relation to the community that I don’t currently agree with. Of course I may be wrong and I’m open to learning, so let me know if my thinking is off / I’m misunderstanding what David is saying.
While I’ll argue why the native token is important, I very much agree that Native Token shouldn’t be top priority yet; a perfect token + poor user experience would achieve nothing, so delivering a highly usable product should be priority number 1.
At a high level, I know exactly what I want from a native token and why;
- Native Autonomi token to allow P2P payments to nodes and other users
- Decentralised 2-way peg mechanism so that the native tokens can be swapped for ERC20 versions when needed for on/off ramps and smart contract uses
- Benefit 1: no / tiny fees would make paying for storage far cheaper, keeping value in the ecosystem, and make micro-transactions for tipping etc possible without the ETH tax.
- Benefit 2: no blockchain. In the future, private transactions will remain private. Blockchain analytics won’t apply. Privacy may not be perfect, but it’d be better than blockchain, especially with tokens earned by a node and later used for uploading data.
Claim: Native won’t improve privacy
David says privacy won’t be enhanced by a native token.
In my fairly uninformed view this seems unlikely, because avoiding permanent blockchain interactions + exchange interactions for those with a specific need for high levels of privacy seems like a significant improvement.
E.g. whistle-blowers can run some nodes, earn native token, upload with Native token, and leave a far smaller trail than if they used multiple blockchain transactions to achieve their uploads. Not everyone would need to do this, but it sounds like improved privacy vs the ERC20 only situation.
Of course, if the innovations from the labs deliver compete privacy for all long-term, that’s even better, but in the short to medium term, Native could be a beneficial improvement for privacy.
Proposed new payment protocol integrations (AP2 and x402) sound game-changing for easier usage for normal people, which is hugely important and welcome. But, they are likely to entail significant metadata overhead that privacy focused individuals may prefer to avoid, even if it seems the chances their payments will be linked to specific data payments is small. I don’t understand these protocols well, so perhaps there are privacy preserving options on how to integrate them. We’ll see.
Claim: Native can’t be sold
David says native won’t be able to be exchanged for anything, which seems to assume no 2-way bridge & co-existence of ERC20 and Native versions of AUTONOMI.
ERC20 AUTONOMI already exists with on/off ramps, so keep them, and use smart-contract locked ERC20 AUTONOMI as the basis for minting native AUTONOMI for use where its benefits matter to users.
If a user earns Native & wants to sell them, use them in defi, or store them on a hardware wallet, just bridge to ERC20 and it’s all available.
Claim: it’s not a technical issue holding native token back
David has said multiple times that it’s not a technical issue holding native token back.
Loziniak’s community token demonstrates a basic native token system on Autonomi, but getting that polished + adding securely minting from ERC20 and burning to unlock ERC20 sounds like a fair technical challenge to me. (Then again, I couldn’t code a game of pong).
Native token priority
David is right that the native token shouldn’t be top priority for Autonomi, but he seems dismissive of legitimate and clear reasons why people want it; primarily lower fees and improved privacy options.
I agree that native token shouldn’t be a top priority… people won’t start doing loads on the network just because it’s cheap. In my mind, the top priority should be getting a good user experience.
But, once a good user experience is in place, the ETH fees will slow down upload activity significantly, reducing the growth in the quantity of content going onto the network, which in-turn will reduce the network value to users, and reduce payments to nodes vs a lower-fee situation.
Higher upload costs, less content, lower node-payments, smaller network, smaller impact. Not trivial IMO.
As long as ETH fees remain high, these will keep draining funds from the Autonomi ecosystem & reducing the potential of the network once the user experience is ready to roll.
Anyway, hopefully David has gained some understanding of the legitimate elements of the community’s desire for a native token solution from the hours of discussion since the spaces yesterday evening, and hopefully he can ignore token issues for another few weeks if he wants to 
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Just to add on to that.
I think we’re all a little distracted and upset we were told we won’t be getting our favorite cookie.
But one thing we’re overlooking is the vision and looking forward. David long ago laid out almost to a T, what the world is currently on the cusp off. We need vision to guide us and give us goals and from my understanding, Saorsa has some working code, multiple in the works, some massive and maybe bloated but this alignment is more important than anyone has acknowledged.
Take a step back and look at the big picture. This is a trajectory that ultimately makes the most sense. You don’t look at a moving target and aim directly at it, you lead the target. That’s what is being done here.
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I wonder how much of the upset or desire for native is about what you note above vs what people think will make the token more valuable in the future vs what makes the network more valuable.
My sense is that a percentage want what you note for genuine reasons and a percentage want it because they believe it will add value to the token they have held for ages. (Thats fine not dissing anyone’s reasons, we all obviously hold ANT and benefit from utility and hope for it to moon)
How much of the omg going on is fear that the token will lose value if it does not tick all the boxes previously hoped for, and are those fears justified?
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I want both - ANT increasing in value but I also want to remove those stupid, STUPID ETH taxes. I really hate to see so much ETH going out of our ecosystem and paying like 10000x more in ETH than ANT, when doing an upload.
I want to upload a lot of my own data, but I can’t - ETH taxes are way too high for me.
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Community and economy are more imporant than privacy (whatever that means) imo. You can have all the privacy in the world, but if the (brick and morter) community in which you live, or neighbouring communities, lack economy and opportunity, then privacy means nothing because you won’t have any security.
I agree, because this brings economic opportunity (security) which is more important in my mind and to people round me than privacy tokens.
Helping myself or a single mum or dad , or young person or student or migrant or Joe Blogs with a hand up (opportunity) is more important and worth investing my time and energy in , and far more empowering than a whistleblower trying to change (good luck with that) a corrupt system.
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It could be huge. It was exciting to see how the Saorsa work could supercharge Autonomi going forward. 100% NAT traversal, dynamic privacy-preserving geographic caching, a possibly very useful communications app, plus a load more could be revolutionary.
I guess some may have been frustrated by the apparent long-term, low-certainty focus there. But it sounds like it may become very tangible very soon if Communitas gets running on a test network within a few weeks 
Absolutely people shouldn’t miss the big picture… and for the detailed short-term product stuff, wait for the spaces with Nick
But, I do hope David learns the concerns the community has about the token so he’s able to communicate about it in the future in ways that doesn’t get many people riled up 
I expect some people’s fear / jumpiness is based on a desire for quick gains. But, I think people want the network and token to be successful if they invested in the token, so both seem fair. I doubt many who only care about money will be hanging around here at the moment 
I agree, though I don’t think anyone is arguing that community isn’t important or that there’s a trade-off between privacy and local community. Helping people in your immediate surroundings is important and great. Empowering whistle-blowers who help improve corrupt systems can also be a good thing.
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Indeed, it is, very imporant and i came over as being a bit defeatest (which i’m not) , i have great respect and admiration for whistle-blowers and the sometimes thankless task they perform, usually at great personal expense. Life is never boring in this amazing forum 
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I do. A good call. I didn’t think it was definite then, because it got sugarcoated and polished with the good old sneaky slime, but here we are.
I remember my own “uh-uh” moment when David posted on ai agents and how launch or token were not that crucial now that agentic ai and blah blah blah. I remember thinking, “oh yes, here we are”.
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Where is this statement from #general-chat on Discord? I can’t find it anywhere.
Thanks Autonomi team and supporters for the updates to all of the code. Always great to see all of the improvements being made each and every week.
I wrote a script that does this for StorPunk website - makes editing websites much easier.
@gmason This is what I am doing with the StorPunk project:
Those that are interested in a network that includes the Autonomi network (dual network client) and offers a complete cypherpunk ecosystem for trade and exchange, please check out the project. Website is still under development, I’ve only shared links here on this forum so it’s up to all of you who are interested to help me shape the project. I consider this a community project. While many here agree with the direction Autonomi is going, we do not all agree, and for those who don’t, please consider assisting with StorPunk. Supporting StorPunk is supporting Autonomi too. We can have it all if we want it.
I’ve just pushed a major update to the site and all of the documentation. Please have a look.
Cheers,
Tyler
Edit: Logo contest: 500Ant tokens to the best submitted logo for storpunk. I will create a poll in the StorPunk thread when we have submissions. I’m looking for something the same dimensions as the Autonomi logo, but with StorPunk website blue/yellow colors. Deadline for submissions is 30th of Nov. 2025
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I would say. Listen to the stages. Listen to it again. Listen to it a third time.
This may be the most bullish I’ve ever been.
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Thx 4 the update Maidsafe devs and all your hard work
Great update can’t wait for next week 
Roadmap is bonkers 
@oetyng, @happybeing, @zettawatt 
@dirvine love how you now only code 
Keep hacking super ants
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I’m a bit confused here about the current status. Currently a large part of what makes the network too expensive for many use cases is the fees. The fix for this was supposed to be the native token, but that’s now scrapped? And is there something replacing it for making possible to actually use the network for a reasonable cost?
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Bux has mentioned that we are working on reducing blockchain fees on ARB. I do not know exactly how the developers plan to do that from a technical perspective but she said in discord we are aiming to have a reduction in the next release.
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It could be, by observing when the data appeared and correlating with blockchain’s record of transactions. You can narrow the trace with every new piece of data you track.
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Taking so long to do something by someone with a highly complex and original vision does not necessarily correlate to the vision being entirely altered or corrupted by changing of the times, but hopefully rather updated. I wouldn’t say this project is immune to gigantic alterations, but the flow of time technically runs separate for the most part in this case, and influences updates in thoughts. What was a vision is still a vision, and yes I was surprised to still see NAT Traversal in the road map in 2025. I will say I have really no idea what’s going on in this project anymore, not for thoughts of it being corrupted (maybe potential for that), but because said updates / evolution are now even way more technically complicated in terms of engineering than it already was, for me. (I swear, people who live in Florida are literally [exaggerating, here] only dumbed down because the humidity is such an energy vampire that their brains literally cease to function properly.) What’s that tidbit in the road map regarding 68 Million lines of code? What even am I reading?
I don’t think AI is a small thing to consider, either. AI will change every 10 years, but there won’t be some kind of new entity that hasn’t appeared ever in the history of humanity that suddenly now is as was the case with “AI”, coinciding with coming into being in the midst of this project’s vision being ideated.
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look here Discord
The preview doesn’t show it because of not being logged into discord here.
From what I have seen when she has mentioned this is that it is related to paying the fees with Autonomi through the paymaster. I hope that she also is thinking in terms of actually reducing the cost and not just how its paid.
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Why is no one mentioning BSV Teranode?
Far cheaper than the cheapest options that have been mentioned, plus 1 mln tps.
Team please take a serious look at it, because it is what we need to solve Autonomi its fee problem.
Hope this helps 
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I seem to remember something about paying 1 vs 3 nodes… not sure if that’s part of it, but she definitely said sometime about reducing ETH fees somehow, so let’s hope it’s something that has a god impact in that regard.
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