Voting opened today (Thursday 8th May) for the Impossible Futures Challenge. This is your chance to explore live project profiles built by our amazing creators, vote for the projects you’re most excited about, and support the ideas shaping the future of decentralised infrastructure, entertainment, and knowledge. Voting will stay open for 7 days. Time to have your say!
Last night at Stages we heard from 5 of the projects:
Impossible Futures Featured Projects
Colony (by @zettawatt)
Colony is a cross-platform Rust application designed to make data discovery and sharing easy on the Autonomi network.
Key features include:
- A “pod” system for metadata storage, allowing users to add descriptive information about files
- A 12-word seed phrase for key management, enabling access to data across different devices
- Recursive friend-of-friend network discovery, which allows users to build a comprehensive web-of-trust network
- Cross-platform compatibility (Windows, Mac, Linux)
- Encrypted key storage
- The goal of creating a community metadata standard for portable, interoperable data
The project aims to create a decentralized, user-friendly search and sharing mechanism that overcomes limitations of centralized services like Google, emphasizing user sovereignty and data privacy.
Regru
Regru is an online marketplace for regenerative food and land management that aims to:
- Connect customers directly to land regeneration efforts
- Create a fully traceable and transparent platform for agricultural products
- Address environmental degradation in agriculture
- Support farmers through a comprehensive digital ecosystem
Key features include:
- Tracing products back to their original land
- Providing farmer training and verification
- Using NFTs and smart contracts to store ecological and animal health data
- Leveraging Autonomi for secure and sovereign data management
The project wants to help agricultural producers worldwide by creating a transparent, technology-driven platform that supports sustainable farming practices and provides consumers with detailed information about their food’s origin and environmental impact.
Soma
A platform for managing health data with a focus on user sovereignty. Uses Soma IDs and may expand into legal and financial domains.
Soma is a health management platform built on React, focusing on:
- Personal health data management
- Providing opinion-based medical advice
- Creating a secure “Soma ID” for individual health information
Key features include:
- Supports global health data sharing
- Developed with a vision of giving individuals more control over their personal data
- Solving complex data fragmentation for patients and medical professionals
- Potential to expand beyond health data to include legal and financial information
The project was inspired by personal experiences highlighting the need for better health data management, with the goal of creating a platform that allows individuals to securely store, manage, and potentially share their health information across different contexts.
IMIM (by @Traktion)
A censorship-resistant blogging platform that allows anyone to create immutable blogs, rich with media, which cannot be silenced or censored.
Key features include:
- Sits on top of AntTP, the HTTP proxy/gateway.
- Separation of back-end infrastructure (TP) and front-end applications
- File upload capabilities
- Media content caching and streaming
- Support for a wide range of web application types
- Leveraging the inherent interoperability of Autonomi
The project aims to enhance the Autonomi ecosystem by offering a robust, censorship-resistant platform that allows users to store, share, and access content without traditional centralized limitations. It emphasizes user sovereignty and data permanence through decentralized technology.
Stashbag (by @Brog577)
STASHBAG is an app for securing all your digital stuff. Not just storing data — but stashing it — for usability and portability. It combines decentralized identity protocols with AI assisted services. What the Cashapp app did for financial ease of use and accessibility, the STASHBAG app will do for digital security and privacy. Designed with a viral campaign to attract a centralized serviced public to a decentralized ecosystem of freedom, STASHBAG will also act as a gateway to the other apps offered by the Autonomi Network!
Key highlights include:
- Technical Integration: Intends to incorporate Nillion’s decentralized biometric ID system
- Plans to enable direct P2P crypto exchange via OTC sales
- Viral marketing campaigns planned
- Decentralized health data collection through the Detritable Laboratory (a sanitation system)
- Aspires to allow anonymous sharing of health information in the developing world
Community Activity
Tons of community action this week, in fact way too much to go through in full, but thanks for the projects you’ve put forward for IF, offered to the community and mentioned in the forum @traktion, @brog577, @saykor, @zettawatt, @safemedia and @loziniak. Apologies if we’ve missed anyone out. It’s getting hard to keep up. Remember, you can check all the IF projects at https://impossible-futures.com/.
There have also been interesting discussions around decentralised DNS kicked of by @feinberg, plus an easy-to-use local dev testnet docker image from @rolandr, who also put together an idea for easier dynamic client configuration.
On marketing, we have a new press release out Autonomi Network Gains Momentum with 40+ Projects in Just a Few Months
And don’t miss the latest videos from @dirvine and @bux on the future of decentralised data and freedom cutting down the forest of if statements, and, err, whether grass is green or in fact magenta. (Depends how much you’ve smoked perhaps).
General progress
@bzee finished implementing all Python methods and classes in Node.js. He is now documenting high level and low level examples and conducting more testing.
@chriso introduced a PR for the --alpha argument across the ant, antnode and antctl binaries.
@roland worked on the deployer to support the reachability check PR, which requires five genesis nodes/VMs to be present. He also put in a PR to reduce the handshake timeout errors.
Ermine continues to look at libp2p-quinn, working on bringing libp2p abstraction on top of a quinn binary, starting with peer identity validation. Together with @roland he also analysed antnode and ant-networking to investigate handshake signal errors. Roland’s PR seems to have improved the handshake situation. 
@shu Worked on a temporary ELK dashboard to test @Roland’s handshake changes. Overall, the handshake timeout has reduced significantly from perspective of private a node on test nets.
Handshake timeouts still happen periodically from generic nodes when connection is incoming from X remote peers, but the remote peer data is not available.
Lajos has been working with auditors on checking the IF Phase 1 and Phase 2 contracts. Initial audits have passed with just a few minor tweaks necessary.
@qi_ma looked into an issue that saw put_record_to failing with timeout errors on poor connections. He put in a PR to the libp2p team to address the problem, which they have accepted and merged. He also followed up on an enquiry on Discord as to why Pointer and ScrachPad counters use different integer types u32 and u64. This is just a historical artifact and we will consolidate on u64 in the future.
