Bux [ANT], 
WEEKLY UPDATE
Hi @everyoneeveryone, hope your week’s are going okay, a little full on this side, so pleased to be able to check-in with you all. Update below!
Where we’ve focused
We know speed and reliability since launch isn’t to the standard required - even for a baby-sized network. The benefit of being out in the wild is that we’ve been able to observe behaviours, find the root causes and as a result, will be able to roll out a nice juicy update automatically (slated for tomorrow).
MASQUE relay
The headline change. NAT hole-punching has been replaced with MASQUE relay. Your node establishes a persistent connection through its nearest public node instead of trying to punch through your router on every request. For those that are a little less technically fluent (… you’ve a friend in me there!) the problem NAT traversal solves is: how does a node sitting behind a home router participate in the network when it can’t accept incoming connections? ‘Hole-punching’ is one way - a complex, timing-dependent dance where two NAT-bound nodes try to simultaneously punch holes in their respective routers. It works, but it is slow and it can also be unreliable. ’
MASQUE relay’ solves the same problem with a different approach. Instead of trying to punch a hole, a NAT-bound node establishes a persistent relay connection through its closest public node. All traffic flows through that relay. It’s deterministic - no timing games, no router-dependent failure modes. MASQUE relay also means a node’s home IP address is never exposed directly to peers (traffic routes through the public relay node), which provides TOR-like IP hiding as a side effect - this is something that hole-punching can’t offer, as it requires both parties to see each other’s IP.
All this is to say, that the ability for anyone behind a NAT to run a node will be (after upcoming release) faster, more reliable, and more private. Noting: upload speeds on our staging testnet went from 5-8 minutes for 50MB down to 1-2 minutes. Downloads under a minute. For those who read relay and think ‘yikes’. MASQUE relay is completely different to the relaying system in 1.0, and relays are only used if a direct connection can’t be established, usually only when UPnP is not enabled on a router.
Quoting and connection speed Separate to hole-punching and MASQUE, we also tracked down why the quoting phase (where your client finds the right nodes to store data) was so slow. The routing table was dialling stale addresses for nodes that had reconnected on different ports - each failed attempt burning a full 15-second timeout before moving on. The fix is tighter dial timeouts on the lookup path and smarter iteration budgets. Quoting is now more than twice as fast and went from roughly 40% reliability to 100% in benchmarking.
Desktop app We had an issue where the CLI and the desktop app were not updating the status of the node correctly. That’s now been addressed in the daemon, with nodes no longer get marked as ‘stopped’, and the version number will update. The GUI, also needed functionality added to control the daemon, i.e., to stop and start it so changes can come into effect. Finally, a new ant file cost command will let you check what an upload will cost before committing to it.
What happens next Once the release goes live, there may be some bumpiness during the transition window - as nodes pick up the new version - that’s expected. After that, uploads and downloads should be dramatically faster and more reliable. This release will also unblock the next wave of what’s being built and means we can get on with promoting and sharing the same to the wider world - not just Autonomi the archive layer - but also the products associated with it and providing an easy entrance way to use it. Speaking of product have to give a big shout out to Josh this week for his development master class - do give his name tag: @Josh a search in general!
Onwards we go, Bux
(Ten, characters)
