This is the update we’ve been wanting to bring you for a long time. Of course, the big reveal has already happened (you can read more about it here if you’ve just emerged from under a rock) but it’s great to set it out in the usual Thursday slot where it belongs.
First, a very warm welcome to our new CEO Bux, who will be taking many of the partnership and commercial activities off David’s hands, leaving him free for some serious thinking and able to really get his hands dirty once again. Bux has masses of experience in Web 3 projects, most recently Gala, and is a perfect fit for our project, as I’m sure those who heard her speak on Tuesday will agree. We also have new staff members joining soon to help us with the AI aspects of the vision.
Together with the massive efforts put in by the core team, these new team members allow us to break with a long tradition: ‘soon’ now has a concrete meaning. Very soon, i.e. next week, we’ll be publishing a new roadmap. Soon, i.e. in March, we’ll be launching our Beta release MVP - don’t go looking for bells and whistles; do look for data that can be updated on the fly and uploaded / downloaded reliably. Quite soon (October is the plan) we will be ready for a full release. It’s a tight timetable, but then we’ve had a long run up, and are very confident the basics are now in place. And soon enough we will launch a full marketing campaign, with a new website, updated primer and the rest.
It’s been a long, often arduous road, and there’s no way that we could have arrived here without the help of the best community in tech, bar none. This week we really do need to reserve a special, extra loud and extremely grateful shoutout to @shu who identified a very nasty doublespend bug which had slipped through, overlooked, as a todo in the code. @shu also provided some very helpful feedback on safenode_manager, which @chriso has been using to make improvements. 
The ValentinesNet is now offline and we’re working on the next one, which will have bad node detection.
Do join our new Discord channel if you haven’t already - it’s where many live announcements will be made. Don’t worry though, this place is here to stay.
PR corner
@mav continues to bring closer the glorious day when Omni MAID can be exchanged for SNT. Signed wallet addresses are now used instead of ECIES encryption This simplifies the claim process, particularly for hardware wallets, and removes the need for some users to regularly provide their MAID private key.
General progress
@anselme fixed the critical double spend vulnerability identified by @shu where nodes were blindly trusting replicated spends. He submitted with a temporary fix, and is now working on refactoring the spend verification code to ensure similar scenarios cannot occur again. He also implemented a royalty collection system using the DAG. This separates royalty collection from wallet redemption.
@roland reviewed Anselme’s double spend fix and started work on a payment refactor PR to handle retries with a different payee on failures generically. His work on getting node manager running as a background process is complete.
@qi_ma has mostly been on cleaning up replication and also looking at data pricing approaches with @joshuef. Calculating data pricing based on network proximity rather than a single node’s proximity could reduce price variation. He also submitted a PR to detect and block bad nodes based on verification failures and connection issues, which we will get into place for the next testnet.
In downloadsville, @jason_paul fixed a filename bug where spaces were not being handled properly. This led him to find a concurrency bug when downloading updated versions of files. He has an upload refactor in progress.
And in the wild wastes of WASM, @bzee is hacking away to support multiple network transports like WebRTC and WebSocket in WASM clients. He also has a PR in progress to add QUIC transport with a fallback to WebSocket if browsers don’t support QUIC.
@chriso has been integrating his faucet subcommand enabling the faucet to be controlled as a service. He responded to helpful feedback from Shu on thenode_manager and created tasks to address issues raised. He refactored the faucet and node services to manage them uniformly, allowing addition of future services like the DAG nodes.
On folders, @bochaco completed and merged a PR to store file maps within folder metadata chunks, removing redundant chunking. He started work to implement local folder syncing by allowing users to sync local folder changes with versions on the network.
As well as preparing Tuesday’s announcement, and standing in for David who unfortunately was literally speechless on the day, @jimcollinson has been looking at how users can claim ownership of assets and how to onboard communities. He also discussed features like messaging and paying creators of data assets.
And, as always, @joshuef has been here, there and everywhere, leading the conversation on enhancements like bad node detection and how we calculate data pricing.
Useful Links
As an open source project, we’re always looking for feedback, comments and community contributions - so don’t be shy, join in and let’s create the Safe Network together!
We are going to see exponential user growth.
. Awesome!
demand and usage for Safe --and in the near term to boot!
So it’ll all be allright, right?
