December Build Review

As ATOR’s first year drew to a close, we completed some of our key milestones while setting the foundation to complete far more in the next. We built out many of the components of the new network in a development environment and started seeing hints of community interaction with the relay package. On the hardware front, we have shifted focus away from design to distribution, culminating in our hardware sale.

Network

We have completed two successful sprints in December. In the first, we achieved the first foundational ATOR network (both for local and docker environment) and setup the infrastructure needed to run it in a development environment. We set these environments up, including the procurement of VMs within our private cloud, link to our CI/CD pipeline, permissioning and more. As part of CI/CD, we setup the automated build process for x86 and ARM relay programs, to allow rapid iteration and testing as we build out functionality within the relay package.

With the publication of our Docker environment, we saw some of our active and technically-minded community members setting up their own local relays, testing our documentation and binaries.

From there, in sprint 2, we have made rapid progress in populating our development environment with all the components that make up the anonymous routing network. We have setup managed directory authorities, configuring the environment to host them and generating identity and signing keys. These authorities have their own entry points, each with certificates generated and secure storage of both keys and certificates.

We were then able to build the Debian packages for relays, using the aforementioned CI/CD pipeline. This sets the stage for reconfiguring our hardware to operate in our network, and providing straightforward ways to update these packages as our MVP network matures after distribution.

In addition, in December we re-allocated engineering resources away from our protocol and towards the network side. Dr Andrzej Tuchołka worked to create distributed entry points for our infrastructure in more regions. Within our private cloud, we now have entry points for eu-central, us-east and us-west.

Coming up within the current sprint, we will be setting up our own custom logic within directory authorities, with source code modification to communicate within our network and interact with our decentralized consensus logic. We will also be creating QA artifacts.

Hardware

With the completion of our complete prototype, we have confirmed that we will be able to run programs within our network with much the same specifications as before. This has allowed us to maintain the same timelines with the hardware rollout, except that the first units shipped out will be used for global testing by our community, interact with our MVP network and allow users to receive updates in the application as it matures.

We have created an internal set of units that are to be used for testing. Crucially, we created the mint contract and minting page and have completed our very successful presale for the first 1000 units! As the Debian packages mature from the Network team, we will conduct internal testing and have the v1 installable from the first shipping batches.

Next Steps

It is an exciting quarter for ATOR. As our network moves from a development to a staging environment, backed by our private cloud, we will see the network, hardware and protocol align. In addition to the development outlined, our extended team of developers have architected solutions for the more powerful innovations coming to our networks, from decentralized directory authorities backed by token consensus, to the endpoints for developers to build directly on top of us. We will continue working in parallel to harden our plans and bring constant innovation to our network.