We’ve had quite few requests on social media and on email these past few days requesting updates on development progress. These messages serve to remind us that not everyone has the time or the inclination to read the weekly development updates which we post each Thursday onto the forum. So many projects, so little time! So the intention with this post is to provide a summary of the most recent events and our hopes and expectations moving forward.

Image: Richard Tilney Bassett

Roadmap

The best place to start is our development roadmap, which we updated and published late last week. This web page tries to encapsulate all the complexities of development over time on 1 page so it’s pretty high level, but it is this snapshot view that most people seem to appreciate. You will notice that the roadmap outlines the major aspects of development and a rough indication of the order in which we anticipate tackling them.

You will also notice that we haven’t included timescales. In the past we have provided timescales for ‘launch’ of the network. These have always been wrong despite our best efforts. We have found it difficult to estimate timescales since, we believe, so much of what we have been working on is brand new technology, sometimes completely bespoke, and other times building on the work of other projects. Testing is also interesting, it really helps us understand more about how the network fits together and how it is utilised by our community, but invariably leads to more tweaking and testing with previously unplanned and unknown rework and test durations.

We believe that publishing release dates that have a high degree of uncertainty attached is not helpful to anyone and can cause more frustration than not publishing them at all. Network related development is typically where the biggest black holes are and as we get into incremental development client-side, we anticipate time scales will become more predictable.

Stable decentralised network

In late March we released test 15, a network that incorporated both data centre resource as well as enabling user run vaults. Within this release, users were also able to run the SAFE Browser, Launcher and demo app, which continue to facilitate the storage of private and public data, as well as create public ID’s and publish SAFE websites.

After 3 days of running a stable network without any lost data we realised we had reached an important milestone. While we had done this extensively in private tests, it was fantastic to see it running publicly and see the community reaction to it. Of course, life has a sense of humour and shortly after it became apparent that a script had been written that created fake accounts and filled the relatively small network with data, stopping the creation of new accounts or the uploading of new data. This was really helpful to us as it enabled us to find out what happens to the network when it reaches capacity in a real world setting. The fact that it behaved as expected was reassuring, although we’d be lying if didn’t admit to finding the spam attack a little frustrating. This is of course something that the integration of safecoin would stop, as the requirement to ‘pay’ to store data will make the attack expensive, while the incentive of safecoin to farmers would lead to a significantly bigger network.

What now?

Looking forward we are currently focussed in 3 main areas:

Catering for mobile devices.

Enabling greater user participation.

Improving the resilience and robustness of the network.

Mobile

The patience app developers have shown to this point is soon to be rewarded. The process of converting our APIs away from a REST paradigm to SDKs was essential to cater for mobile devices, as the requirement for REST APIs to maintain state would not have worked with mobile devices that disconnect and reconnect regularly. Users of the SAFE Network will gain access through the Authenticator, a secure gateway that protects user credentials from the application itself. The Authenticator is currently being bundled with the SAFE browser and will enable users to securely authenticate themselves onto the network, or enable them to browse publicly available data without logging in.

To implement Authenticator the team required to add a new data type, mutable data. The new data type improves the network efficiency, saves bandwidth, and provides the granular access control required by mobile platforms.

With mobile devices being so ubiquitous throughout the world, enabling mobile client access to the network, mutable data has been receiving significant focus. From a resource provision perspective, both alpha and beta versions of the network will require laptop and desktop and in time single board computers to earn safecoin when it is released. In time, we will look at enabling mobile devices being able to farm for safecoins when plugged into a power outlet and when in range of WiFi, however, as we will detail below this is not a priority for now.

More alphas

Some of the example applications that have been created are currently being ported to suit the new data type and to be compatible with the new APIs. The team are updating the documentation and are testing the applications using a mock network, and they seem to be far more stable than previous iterations which looks positive. We anticipate alpha 2 will encompass the new Mutable Data type and Authenticator, SAFE Browser DOM APIs and Node.js SDK, along with example apps, tutorials and documentation.

Image: Clint Adair

Alpha 3 will see our focus shift onto enabling a greater number of users to run Vaults from home by integrating uTP. Presently users must TCP port forward, or enable UPnP on their routers which requires a little set up in some cases. Adding uTP support will make for a more seamless process for many while making the network accessible to more users. uTP is used in some BitTorrent protocols and when implemented effectively helps to mitigate poor latency and facilitate the reliable and ordered delivery of data packets.

During this phase we will also integrate node ageing, a feature that make the network more resilient to consensus group attacks. The team will also implement the first part of data chains, a feature that has been planned for a while which it is anticipated will ultimately enable the secure republish of data should the network ever lose power, and to provide validation that data has been stored on the network.

Looking ahead

Beyond alpha 3 we will focus on:

Data Chains, part 2.

Data republish and network restarts.

A security audit of the network

Test safecoin

Real-time network upgrades

Network validated upgrades

As has been the case to this point we will continue to release multiple test nets regularly between each alpha network to prove the technology in a public setting, and to mitigate against the code regressing.

We continue to be grateful to the huge support of the people that take the time to run these networks and report back, you all know who you are!