December Build Report

Happy New Year to Anyone! In this article, we will cover the key technical developments of December and the pivotal architecture decisions that will drive 2025. December saw the AO distribution get wrapped up and transition to testing, the creation of new services to monitor the network, and strategic additions to the Anyone SDK!

Protocol

On the protocol side, we completed the new distribution logic in AO, adding the final key feature: access control. In the Smartweave implementation, all of the authority roles for each contract (such as the operator that submits the redeemable reward values to the Facilitator) shared a single keypair. With new access control, we define roles for each contracts, such as Owner, Admin and Operator, and enable more detailed permissions for each of them.

The AO version of the distribution is now running internally, and the dashboard has been forked and is being modified to read from the new relay rewards contract. In preparation for the handover to AO, we have also created the scripts and operational templates to migrate state from Smartweave to AO, or from existing AO contracts to newly deployed ones — both helpful features for our rapidly iterating testnet!

Finally, we made huge strides in architecting the delegated staking mechanism. Working with Austin Seiberlich of CoinCraft, we created a detailed model of an economic attack on the network, and built the delegated family staking as the most effective response to it. Find out more about that mechanism here.

The beauty of the Anyone Distribution Protocol is its versatility! The same AO processes that deliver relay rewards can deliver staking rewards in any currency. To incorporate the staking mechanism, the registrator and facilitator smart contracts have been merged, and a new ‘staking controller’ is being written to organize the distribution of staking rewards.

Hardware

With the new sale, our hardware division has been focused on manufacturing. We have started production of the customized encryption chips, as well as the other bespoke components that make our router.

On the distribution side, we have partnered with Freshminers to offer the router in alternative channels as well as their physical store in the Netherlands. We are also bringing in more established DePIN hardware resellers to widen our reach further.

Network and Apps

Our Network team at the Forte Group have completed the metrics service to estimate the number of active users without de-anonymizing them. This has yielded impressive results, showing consistent connections from around the world.

Additionally, our recurring network IPerf tests, which load test the network to understand its speed, now have their results published to an internal Grafana dashboard. As the number of nodes and exit relays have grown over 2024, our average network speeds have grown impressively, and we’re excited to publish the results!

The Collector and AnonOO services, which the reward distributions are dependant on, are currently being upgraded to accommodate the increased load of these new services. We also released an internal update to the Anyone client to accommodate the .anon names, and this will be pushed out to the community in Q1!

On the SDK side, we published our Android Maven repository, the first step to our full set of mobile SDKs, and added new features to the NPM SDK to see the characteristics of available relays. Both are key to proliferating the network beyond individual use and personal privacy.

As we go into 2025, we’re excited to explore the versatility of the network — its confluence with AI, its unique strengths as a network for censorship resistance above and beyond anonymity, the economic value of our global network of proxies, and the numerous paths for network revenue and value accrual. Having built an incredible DePIN foundation, this is the year we show our strength in adoption.

It’s safe to say that this protocol will truly be for Anyone.