Thanks to the many, many of you who attended the Discord Stages event on Tuesday and for your feedback. Fabulous to see so many of you there, and so great to be able to hear David’s voice and thoughts and encouragement after so many months of battling illness.
A quick recap/update. We are moving forward with TGE set for 6th February, with the caveat that the network will not guarantee perpetual data immediately upon release. We will test, solve and make upgrades to get there as soon as we can.
We also want to have time to convert MAID and eMAID giving us a clear path to the network to the network token, which will allow the market to function properly and also really help marketing efforts to convert and bring new people (node runners and token buyers/holders primarily right now) into the ecosystem.
Meanwhile we have a lot of nodes online now… 440,000 nodes at the time of posting, which is great!
The next release, which will support TGE, will be a breaking change (a new network). We hope this will be the last, with future updates not being ‘breaking’ and the network proving to be stable, but as a caveat, it’s only sensible to make provisions for that eventuality, and this we have done.
The date of the token listing will be dependent on our first exchanges (we have centralised exchange BitMart and DEXs Uniswap and PancakeSwap onboard), but we are hopeful for next week. We also need to have the burn/redeem mechanism in place for MAID and eMAID, and to be able to airdrop the incentive rewards that have been earned.
For those claiming beta rewards from the early stages of testing, we’ll need you to submit your discord name and wallet address, and we’ll verify the same with you. More instructions to follow!
After TGE, random rewards will continue to be issued to node runners until emissions start in earnest. The system is not in its final incarnation yet, so we will be turning on emissions a little bit later. We’re going to get the live token out there first, and we’re going to continue on with the random reward system, which is kind of reflective of how the emissions will work anyway. It’s a random sample of good nodes that are there on the network and hosting. That period will go on for a short amount of time, and will then be replaced with proper emissions.
@dirvine is laser-focused on getting the API into a fit state, and @jimcollinson is on the documentation. We’re getting there, but obviously we’d have preferred to have reached the end of that road by this stage. Likewise with upload/download niggles and NAT traversal. We’re happy with the current release candidate, which hammers out a few bugs, but this is a process of continuous improvement.
For those who haven’t seen it, take some time to read David’s excellent interview with Digit.
Onwards and upwards! 
General progress
As well as co-hosting the latest Stages on Discord with @bux, @rusty.spork has been involving himself in discussions about the reward structure with the new dynamic pricing and the airdrop, along with Lajos.
@anselme has been working away on data types Scratchpad and GraphEntry, the latter being the replacement for the old Register data type, which was limited to 1024 entries. In fact, since Registers were quite popular, they are being reborn as a high-level type built on top of GraphEntries, with a similar API and features: infinitely mutable; users need to keep track of only one key; all update history retained. For context, we now have four native data types: Chunk, Pointer, Scratchpad and GraphEntry, and four high-level data types: Vault (built on Scratchpad), Data (on Chunk), Files (on Chunk), Registers (on GraphEntry+Pointer).
@bzee is looking into backward and forward compatibility of Archive and Metadata in our client API, during which he’s run into a few issues with the rmp_serde crate we use for serialising/deserialising messages.
@chriso introduced a PR to retry getting the market price when fetching quotes. He is also in charge of the upcoming release candidate.
Ermine has got the antctl runtime working nicely with the metric service. He’s now cleaning up the code with proper error handling and testing on bigger networks. He finished removing RPC in favour of metrics.
Lajos worked on the new pricing formula and smart contract. He also discovered and fixed a hard-to-spot issue with the token lock contract, completed unit tests for the app registry, revenue split and leaderboard pools, and looked at mechanisms for the airdrop.
@Mick.vandijke implemented changes to node and client to incorporate the updated data type-based quoting mechanism. He also worked on CLI improvements and the not enough quotes error, raising a PR that should reduce the frequency of the error. The exact cause is still something of a mystery, however. Mick also enabled a retry strategy for getting market prices from the pricing smart contract, which should reduce the frequency of MarketPrice errors.
@qi_ma reviewed @anselme’s Scratchpad refactor work and raised PRs [2] to include the GraphEntry and Scratchpad data types in churn tests.
@roland has been testing DCUTR along with @Shu and @Chris around our private node simulation environment, identifying some issues with DCUTR. He investigated the latest libp2p version (0.55.0) and found an issue related to the evm rpc server and one related to payees being out of range. These are two changes that might’ve potentially caused the out of range payee issue. He also worked on download metrics for the client.
@shu also spent a lot of time on DCUTR. Further internal testing is still ongoing, and we hope to make a decision shortly if it is to be released before or at TGE.
Thanks to @happybeing for his PR about an app failing to connect to a local testnet on the same device, when the home WiFi drops.
Glad to see the recap of the Stages event published. I think the clarity will make many community members more at ease.
