The next Autonomi update, planned for two weeks, should include an updated version of rust-libp2p which addresses some of the changes around reachability that we’ve been asking for, among other improvements, so it’s a very welcome development. Over the next few days we’ll be testing this new version to see whether it comes closer to meeting our requirements, or if we might still need to fork some parts of the code base. The rust-libp2p team is small, so we’re also seeing how we might be able to join forces to iron out any remaining problems, which would obviously be our first choice.
The team is currently upgrading to the latest version, integrating the libp2p changes with the request/response mechanism, performing regression tests and checking reachability and uploads/downloads. If all goes well, we’ll be including it in the next Autonomi release.
Community action
Plenty of interesting stuff going on in the forum and Discord, Chris and @rusty.spork have been working through the threads sharing summaries with the team. Our numbers are a bit depleted at the moment with some devs taking a well earned-break, but we’ll get to them all in time. On DBCs, the reason they were sidelined was mainly to do with risk-averse exchanges and a changed regulatory regime rather than technical issues. We didn’t want to pour more time into something that would ultimately be unlikely to fly however good the tech.
@zettawatt updated Colony CLI (a local-first, metadata sharing and semantic search library for Autonomi) with new libraries that he says give huge performance improvements for refresh and upload.
@riddim achieved a the first successful Friends connection purely through Autonomi scratchpads. 
And @happybeing opened an interesting topic on how to share a link or any other data anonymously.
Thanks for all the reports and ideas.
General progress
@anselme has been refactoring the PUT code for a better fit with the request/response protocol used by libp2p. First results look very promising in terms of performance.
@bzee completed a node.js package for antnode and added examples to it for docs.autonomi.com. With that package released, node.js is done. 
@chriso upgraded to the latest version of libp2p then performed regression testing with the help of @vphongph . They also looked into a community query about use by external developers of our internal testing tool NodeSpawner/NetworkSpawner. This is possible according to @vphongph. By default it spawns local antnodes + local EVM testnet, but it can be configured for normal antnodes + normal EVM network. Chris has been fielding other questions from the community too. The team will try to get back to these when we have a moment.
Ermine worked on Raspberry Pi 0 setup and OS installation, making progress on some runtime issues with the upgrade of the antctl service. He’s currently working on Armv7.
Lajos continues to work on the paymaster proof of concept.
@roland opened a PR to remove complex code related to skipping incoming connections.
In addition to helping Chris, @vphongph worked on multi-node logging, and the architecture of our new testing crate to centralise all tests.
And @shu got a PoC emulation of armv7 and aarch64 cpu architecture running with full blown terminal/network access as if they were just another set of virtual VMs on Digital Ocean. We should be able to fully automate other architectures outside of x86_64 going forward. Shu, Chris and Nic also looked into reports of the latest release crashing a user’s router (the user was running 10,000 nodes on Windows). We haven’t been able to reproduce this but we’re keeping an eye out. Thanks for the report.
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