Greetings everyone and here’s to a fab 2025! 
. Plenty going on already of course. On the marketing side, we’ve updated the website, put out a press release and have influencer campaigns lined up. Thanks to Ruski from Discord who is helping to optimise our ad activity.
We’ve also released a hotfix for the client to cure what was an annoying issue where some uploads would freeze indefinitely, and where the ant CLI was not selecting its network consistently from the environment variable. Logging and RPC have now been removed from the node code as we move towards making it as resource efficient as possible prior to the full release.
And we’ve progressed significantly with our dynamic pricing algorithm and APIs - more to share there very soon.
Best of all, David is properly back 
. As most of you will know by now, he’s had a terrible year, knocked flat by a serious illness. It was touch and go for a while, but this week he received the all-clear, which is the best possible news, and proof, if any were needed, that you can’t keep a good man down.
Special shout out this week to @traktion for sharing the latest incarnation of his IMIM blogging app for Autonomi. Fantastic to see useful apps emerging, particularly at this stage where we recognise development is a challenge. Another big hurrah goes to @happybeing who has updated his cross-platform app and Rust library dweb for viewing or publishing websites on Autonomi.
General progress
@dirvine is firmly back in the driving seat, coordinating the development of the APIs, refining Python options and working up one for NodeJS.
@chriso released a hotfix with a new version of the ant v0.3.2 client to deal with an issue of frozen payments. Be sure to upgrade if you haven’t already. Follow the instructions here. He’s also been doing some work to support our upscaling tests.
@anselme has been putting in some fixes to make the EVM network selection a centralised function used by all code (node, CLI, API, tests, antctl) so we don’t need to recompile should we need to change networks.
Lajos has been working on the smart contract for random rewards. This is now active. 220 wallets are being rewarded each day until 26th January. The lottery will run for 20 days in total, during which we will distribute 50K testnet tokens every day. Lajos has also been fine-tuning the tokenomics architecture, along with @jae.kim.
@bzee has been working on the information displayed via the CLI when the user uploads files. There are still some further improvements to be made, for example, we’re currently still printing ‘uploading file x’ while it’s not actually re-uploaded if it’s already on the network. In another PR he fixes an issue where we were paying repeatedly for uploading the same file because the metadata was different each time. Obviously this should not be happening.
Benno also introduced a PR to override a QUIC function that may be causing congestion in home nodes, so community members will be able to test that soon to see if it alleviates CLI upload problems. Plus he contributed to the libp2p discussion forum with a question on why libp2p deviates from the default in this regard.
Danny Beck is the main Dave man now, and he’s been working on three main topics: (1) Over-the-air updates (app can update without the user needing to download a new installer every time.); (2) Support for Windows and Linux as well as Mac; and (3) CI/CD integration with GitHub. @mick.vandijke has been helping him test here too. For those interested, Dave is a Rust backend + Vue (JavaScript) frontend “wrapped” in Tauri. We were hoping he’d be ready today, but you know our Dave…
In addition to helping Danny with Dave, @mick.vandijke worked with @anselme around selecting the correct EVM network, and looked into the problems around uploading/downloading that the community was running into. He fixed a payment verification issue with the updated smart contract, added some relevant tests and logs, and identified the cause of the problems on the CLI side.
Ermine has been working on metric server initiation and connection from the node and antctl side. We have removed logging and RPC from the nodes now for better operational efficiency, and are integrating DCUTR back into the code to manage relay nodes (nodes that act as a connection bridge for other nodes joining the network from behind a NAT). In case that sounds familiar, we were using DCUTR before but removed it while we investigated connectivity issues. DCUTR should lighten the load on the relay servers (i.e. public nodes) for initial connections.
@roland has also been instrumental in the reintroduction of DCUTR, as well as refactoring the deployer code.
@shu has been digging into the power consumption of nodes as we remove logging and RPC, and reports that it’s definitely achievable to get one node running under 200 mW of power. For most folks, any modern computer up to 10 years old should be able to run five nodes with less than 1 Watt of power consumption. Early days and not a rigorous test, but very encouraging as initial findings, and another sign that we will be able to run the network from everyday devices. He’s been spending a great deal of time spending time on upscaling tests and DCUTR analysis as well.
@qi_ma raised a PR to rename RecordType to ValidationType (this indicates chunk or non-chunk), and another PR to refactor RecordKind, denoting the type of data. There is a new enum of DataTypes that becomes the sole place to reflect all data types natively supported by the Autonomi network.
And @rusty.spork is his usual helpful self over on Discord, co-hosting the latest stages with @jimcollinson on Tuesday.
