While the network is still experiencing volatility, we are now seeing the real network in action: Much reduced in size but with real storage and payment occurring. There has been a notable increase in network traffic as seen by many members of the community, something that will calm over time, with some of the fixes below aiming to improve the situation with better response rates for heavy network load.
Code Quality & Usability
A lot of work has gone into the platform reach project over the last week, aiming to boost accessibility to our builds and spread of code across the globe.
We now have signed and notarized pkg installer on macOS, for the CLI suite (ant, antnode, antctl), providing a standard macOS installation experience with binaries installed to /usr/local/bin.
We also have a new signed MSI installer for Windows, for the CLI suite (ant, antnode, antctl), installing to C:\Program Files\Autonomi\ and adding binaries to PATH.
And not to leave Linux out, we have signed CLI packages for both Debian/Ubuntu and RPM (Fedora/RHEL/CentOS) systems.
The launchpad now has proper app bundles (.dmg) for macOS, allowing users to drag the application to their Applications folder for standard macOS app installation. On Windows, a new MSIX installer with automatic update support via .appinstaller files and Start Menu integration has been released.
Network Stability & Mainnet Improvements
More work has gone in to stabilising the network code, with request timeouts increased to 120s to improve reliability for slower network operations. This matches work from last week to standardise these across the board. Work on peer management for routing tables has been added, removing when version fetch operations fail leading to improved routing table accuracy and reduction in unnecessary network traffic.
We have changed gas estimations to now use EIP-1559 for more accurate and predictable transaction costs. This has been combined with some changes to how we display gas price information during payment operations, providing better visibility into transaction costs.
A positive update and one that moves us closer I feel.
With downloads and uploads brokened at the moment Iām focussing on hopefully getting another couple of node machines into peopleās houses and running quality nodes. Iām mindful of the last storm and donāt want to be caught with too many nodes that mess up the houseās internet access when there is a lot of churn and have to be shutdown.
Thanks to all involved in making this report and the new release possible.
Looking forward to running the updated nodes from the new release.
Encouraging news on the token price too!
Great to see usability being addressed. But findability on the GitHub release page could be improved for non-coders like me. It took my AI alot of work to find a clickable download link:
Finding Download Links on the Release Page
When navigating your releases page, I encountered a challenge: the page had lots of content (Binary Versions, SHA256 Hashes, etc.) but the actual download file links werenāt directly visible in the HTML structureāthey appeared to be dynamically generated.
I worked around this by:
Searching the page content for download filenames using text-based searches
Extracting URL components from the page (owner, repo name, release tag)
Constructing the download URLs manually using GitHubās standard release pattern: https://github.com/[owner]/[repo]/releases/download/[tag]/[filename]
Suggestion for the team: Consider adding explicit download links or an assets section to your release notes. While the current structure works, having visible file links (like GitHubās standard asset attachments) would make it much easier for users and automation tools to locate and download binaries without needing to infer the URL structure.
But this PR was not merged before the release. I would have thought it as necessary for removing the nodes with old / no versions. Have I misunderstood something again?
Well, the new version was release a few minutes ago, but now I absolutely need to get sleep soon. Maybe Iāll just find some of my node upgraded in the morning.
Hey @bochaco would be great if Formicaio could sort nodes according to version number.
The download links are in the āassetā area of the releases page. All github releases for any project are similarly laid out. That layout has been in place for years. If your AI cant find it, sounds like it ran into a Layer 7 issue.
Ha, I thought that the nodes would upgrade without me having to do anything, but apparently that is not the case.
I upgraded them all now and since my home network with potato router has been tolerating 30 nodes just fine, Iām going to increase the number to 40-50.
I love knowing that my nodes are now helping to remove the versionless nodes out of the network.
I checked yesterday whether there was a new version of the node. What I do is - separately from running nodes with antctl - I have installed the node software with whatever version antctl is running. Then I run antup node and see if it upgrades. If it does then a new version has been released and in the old days I would know to run antctl upgrade or these days check later to see if upgrades are automatically happening.
When I checked late yesterday there was no upgrade available using antup node.
This morning there is!
Iāve not seen any nodes being upgraded yet but I understand it is probabilistic and can take up to 3 days.
