January Development Review
In January, we opened the AO Distribution Protocol for community testing and made progress on a number of big Q1 releases — from staking to apps. Development progress is only getting stronger month on month, and we’re impressed by what our team can achieve across parallel streams!
Protocol
Amid a resounding response to our request for testers, we opened a group for a small number of individuals to test the new dashboard. Thanks to our testers, we identified improvements to the flow of the dashboard, adding automatic state refreshing after users lock and claim. Additionally, we identified and patched a bug in the operator registry restart process, where it fails to restart when the job queue is empty.
Additionally, ahead of release, we created our own Arweave Bundler to be able to deploy the dashboard seamlessly, and we’re looking forward to utilize this bundler in the future with more censorship-resistant utilities! We also added finishing touches to the protocol’s security, configuring better alerting and establishing a multi-wallet system to pass tokens from relay rewards to the facilitator contract in batches.
While we heralded issues from our testers, the protocol team also forged ahead in building the staking system for holders. Those watching the GitHub bot can see a number of new repositories for staking, with special logic to allow rewards to either auto-compound, or be directed to register relays without needing to be withdrawn.
Finally, it was fantastic to forge a closer bond with Arweave and AO, with our recent announcement on 𝕏 look forward to closer collaboration around Arweave and DePIN.
Hardware
Hardware was focused on the upcoming router mode, and continuing to improve all (18 !) new user-paths that come with it, including running a relay/router in parallel, incorporating the optional Wi-Fi dongle and more. It has been a massive undertaking, but we’re excited to be at the final stages.
An update on the shipment of hardware units ordered at the end of 2024. We are on track to hit the Q1 estimate for hardware shipped. For the first batch of buyers who purchased in November and did not receive in 2024, we are arranging an expedited release of units, working with the operational constraints of manufacturing within Europe and the Far East. We appreciate users’ patience and hope you are all excited about the new Wi-Fi dongle, improved shield board, top-range Sunon fan and router update!
Network and Apps
We have established an impressively efficient network and apps team, able to deliver updates to the network, mobile apps and desktop apps in parallel. In the month of January, we released the change in hidden service footer to .anon, created our first complete Android APK ready for testing; forged ahead with the internal v1 of Anyone Browser for iOS; finalized the NPM proxy to allow you to anonymize any app from the command line; and built our entire Python SDK. Whew!
Additionally, we are increasingly focused on adding big blocks of users to the network through key integrations, such as Carbon Browser. We will dedicate engineering resources to integrations just like these, and excited to see the growth of adoption in 2025 and beyond.
We’re tackling one of the biggest unsolved problems on the internet, one that affects billions of users. As always, thank you for being part of the journey.
