November Progress Review

November saw some key milestones hit for our project, culminating in the recent opening of our hardware sale. We also made big strides in the new distribution protocol built on AO, and delivered strategic updates to both the network and its apps. Let’s dive in!

Protocol

The existing logic that currently exists in Smartweave has been rewritten into Lua, with new names given to the AO contracts:

• Relay registry logic that existed in the centralized Validator server and in the ‘Registrator’ smart contract have become the Operator contract.
• The Smartweave distribution has now been widened, more aptly, into a Rewards contract, also written in Lua.

Additionally, new reward categories are actively being built into the rewards contract, including the geolocation, flags (exit) and uptime rewards! Using the Relay Directory contract, we also take the first major step towards decentralization by having relays signing directly with their anon keys.

In parallel with these new AO contracts, the ‘glue’ servers that feed information to or read from these servers have also been redesigned. Jobs, such as adding bandwidth scores, responding to events or delivering rewards, will now be completed in parallel by containerized workers! This improves both reliability and speed.

Services that traditionally have external dependancies (such as those that respond events through Infura) now have their own dedicated processes and have seen reliability upgrades such as backup providers. This applies to both relay locking and relay redemption services.

As we progress through our Smartweave testnet, using a number of now-deprecated Arweave libraries, we appreciate all operators’ patience! We can’t wait to see the faster distribution and decentralization that comes with AO.

Hardware

Recently, our second major hardware sale went live! We have partnered with Ampchampment to sell units, now buyable with Credit Card, PayPal as well as crypto — check the sale out at https://anyone.io/shop.

In addition to arranging manufacture of the custom enclosure and daughter-board PCB, we have made substantial strides with the new router mode for the hardware, introducing IPTables and DNS logic to ensure that all traffic is secured by our network. Router mode is now being tested for efficiency and UX internally.

We have also improved components for the next batch of hardware: the shield board is now fully programmable by the OS and apps are no longer limited to a limited set of sequences; the fan has been replaced by a new component by Sunon; and additional cooling components have been added within the enclosure.

Network and Apps

Network development also continues consistently. A new version of the anon binary has been released to live, pulling in upstream changes. The next focus for our team from the Forte group is hidden services: .onion names will now be turned into .anon, with a new checksum. Note that this does mean any hidden services that exist currently will have to be redeployed, but more information on that to follow.

In addition to the new suffix for long-form hidden service addresses, our team have been building out a system for convenient short-term mappings (such as anyone.anon) that will initially come hardcoded in the client but will eventually have their own decentralized claiming process.

A big release this month was the public release of the npm and native Anyone SDK! The creativity shown both by the students at HackSC and our wider community has been fantastic. From apps that collect anonymous health data from athletes to a community-run hidden service directory, we are excited for the next generation of projects to join the Anyone Ecosystem. We have already collated valuable feedback and you can expect the next iteration for npm soon, as well as the release of the updated CocoaPods library for iOS. Finally, the Anyone Desktop VPN has also had key UI/UX improvements and enters internal testing from December!

As our focus grows from the supply-side of our DePIN to the wider demand side — from developer tooling to user-friendly mainstream apps, we are starting the journey to make the internet private for Anyone.