October Development Summary

Welcome back to the monthly development review!

The biggest release of October was the launch of the Incentivized Testnet! However, a number of other engineering streams have seen significant progress this month, visible on GitHub, ahead of major rollouts this quarter. Let’s dive into the development!

Protocol

Shortly into October, the Incentivized Testnet was released, alongside the dashboard and testnet faucet.

This release saw a substantial improvement in how the dashboard is presented, with the a more familiar URL — dashboard.anyone.io, a proxy server served by our own ar-io node — that still ultimately reads from Arweave.

A number of bug fixes were issued shortly into the testnet, including logic around the ordering of distributions and hardware validation. Our dashboard developers have also been hard at work issuing a number of UX improvements, including a breakdown of epoch rewards, information on the holding requirement and loading/state improvements that has made the UX considerably faster than earlier iterations.

However, the majority of focus for the protocol has been on our rewrite from Smartweave to AO — the Hyper Parallel Computer built on Arweave. This rewrite is now well underway! It sees the introduction of a new language — Lua, for this new logic. Ideas introduced in our Tokenomics — such as uptime bonuses, family multiplier and geolocation multipliers — are being built into these new contracts.

The move to AO, where computation occurs in parallel ‘AO Processes’ will improve the distribution cadence. The protocol will no longer be limited by tag size limits on Smartweave’s Warp, which will allow scores to be computed more frequently and be made more available for the frontend.

In addition, the AO rewrite marks the first substantial change to the Anyone Client for decentralization — client signing with their fingerprint keys is now a locally-running AO process, and is the first step in eliminating a central directory authority in favor of a set of on-chain processes for relays to onboard themselves.

Hardware

October was a very productive month for our hardware division. The focus — on building a more robust routing feature and considerably simplifying the user experience — has yielded an entirely new mode for non-technical users. As we move away from our own community, and begin to use the hardware as a vehicle to onboard mainstream non-technical, a simplified privacy-focus mode is a must.

Users will now have an option to skip over manual relay setup and instead rapidly start a secure hotspot that goes through the Anyone Network.

This update has seen general improvements to the use of Wi-Fi, with standardization to WPA2 across the board, and the use of the application to scan available SSIDs automatically. Our hardware leads are also exploring new connection options through the use of a Wi-Fi enabled dongle attached to the powerful USB OTG port.

In addition, a few bug fixes for all relay operators are to be released in the next update:

• Paths have been updated to reflect the new APIs
• An issue with dynamic IPs (which led to some relays resetting without and ‘breathing red’ periodically) has been resolved with new logic to auto-restart to accommodate a new public IP.
• The complete set of relay flags will now be visible from the homepage

Another fascinating development has been around the ATEC encryption chip onboard the custom shield-board on the relay. The chip onboard will be given a new lease of life as part of a direct collaboration with MicroChip, unlocking uses for all of its slots. We will host a secure Certificate Authority in our Hashicorp vault that all ATEC chips will be securely provisioned against, as part of our custom collaboration with Microchip.

Network and Apps

On the network front, two updates have been merged to the main Anyone client — one patch for Android JNI changes, and one to merge upstream changes from Tor.

In addition, our stage environment has been boosted with a set of Nomad deployment processes, including the ability to spin up 100s of relays on stage and run automated tests for every new client version.

The Anyone NPM package has been transformed from a vector to operate the client to a fully-fledged library. We have exposed a new level of circuit configuration and control to programmers — the ability to set a circuit, view your path, and more, which opens up to the widest possible range of applications.

Benjamin Erhart continues as one of our core contributors, building libraries for both Android and iOS — both CocoaPods and Maven libraries are built and to be released as part of the wider SDK rollout!

In addition, for those actively watching our GitHub, a new repository — Anyone Desktop —is being increasingly populated — more on that next month!

As always, all protocol and network code is entirely FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software), so be sure to check it out on our GitHub page https://github.com/anyone-protocol.