I hope you’re all doing okay out there. It’s been a busy week in the world of Autonomi and friends, so looking forward to jumping into our regular Thursday update!
First, Some Context:
Appreciate it’s been mentioned several times and across several formats now but for the sake of completeness (and for anyone that’s new) … Autonomi 2.0 will launch as an encrypted, permanent, decentralised data store. Think archives, backups, published content, immutable version stores - data that should never be tampered with, lost, or censored.
In Autonomi 2.0 we have built something AWS, Google Cloud and their ilk can’t fundamentally offer - connecting home computers directly to each other, so that there really is zero need for corporate middlemen or gate-keeper servers.
With scale, Autonomi will be able to unlock the largest untapped infrastructure pool on the planet. There is no other p2p network today that can actually do that.
What’s more, every piece of data is encrypted with quantum-proof cryptography before it ever leaves your machine. Clients get TOR-like privacy through MASQUE relays, and The Network has built-in Sybil protection, trust scoring, and geographic diversity enforcement - this isn’t just a roadmap thing, it’s in the codebase, right now.
For those who’ve followed MaidSafe for years - this is the vision that David and the guys refused to stop pursuing, now built and able to deliver what was intended, with all the hard lessons of v1 baked in.
Moving on …This Week:
Chunk encryption is now in the stack, upgraded to ChaCha20-Poly1305 with BLAKE3 hashing, replacing the older crypto. Public/private file handling, datamaps and large file streaming are all back. The core networking layer has been stripped back and hardened - less legacy code, stronger peer identity checks, and a cleaner foundation to build on. Auto-upgrades for nodes are working across Linux, macOS and Windows, validated on a 102-node testnet. The unified CLI has end-to-end tests passing.
Getting Ready for Deployment:
We’ve had a good internal debate about timings. With auto-upgrade now working, we could release the Autonomi 2.0 network next week as intended, and ship remaining features as live upgrades - no manual updates, no waiting for everyone to catch up. It felt like a bit of compromise though, and the debate was such that we wondered whether it was best to let you guys call it via a vote …
However, after further discussion with the guys shipping this stuff, we’ve decided to make the call and hold on for the full feature set - meaning Merkle payments, the client layer, and porting the remaining Autonomi library into the new stack will all land before we go live. Testnets are spinning up now to validate everything as it comes together.
Why this way? Because we want 2.0 to land well. Adherence to deadlines matters, as does/so does quality of delivery itself. We have missed the mark on both in the past - so making a choice between them wasn’t ideal, but for what it’s worth, I think we landed in the right place, prioritising 2.0 completeness.
We’re targeting an additional 2 weeks of development time to the original timeline, and I will keep you posted as things progress, at pace, next week. I’m also intending, with all now moving forward well, on sharing progress on: x0x, client side, Trust Layer POC and the mobilisation/engagement plans we have too!
Onwards we go …
