Autonomous Agents On Mainnet: Ready For Takeoff Obyte Follow Feb 19 · 3 min read

After 7 months of testing on testnet, 2375 Autonomous Agents deployed, 25482 AA transactions processed, and 7 rounds of AA developer contest, we are happy to make the next step: launch Autonomous Agents on mainnet.

The original design of Autonomous Agents released in July of 2019 has undergone significant changes thanks to input that we received during the developer contest and new applications conceived during this time. Thanks to participants of the contest, a number of bugs were found and crash-and-burn rewards paid, a number of unmet needs discovered and changes in Oscript language introduced.

The developer ecosystem has also improved, and in addition to easy to use web based Oscript editor that allows to quickly write new Autonomous Agents, we now have an AA testing framework to test your AAs and make sure they work as expected, and a number of excellent guides written by the contest participants. Obyte.js, a javascript library for working with Obyte ledger developed by Fabien, was significantly extended and now allows to easily develop browser based dapps.

We hope that Autonomous Agents developed during the contest will be deployed on mainnet and further developed into easy to use dapps with nice UI (those that didn’t already have it).

Oswap, Fabien’s project funded through Obyte grants program, should be ready shortly after the launch of AAs on mainnet. It will allow an easy and fast exchange between tokens issued on Obyte, powered by an AA and happening completely on-chain. It’ll be handy both for end-users for easy two-click exchanges and for other AAs that need to exchange tokens as part of their function.

The core team is also developing several interesting DApps that will be released shortly after AAs go live on mainnet. They include stablecoins, predictions markets, decentralized oracle, and much more.

A decentralized exchange, which will be an important infrastructure element that brings liquidity to thousands of AA-managed tokens, is ready, already works on testnet, and will be launched on the same day as AAs are activated on mainnet.

With all this in place, we concluded that ceiling and visibility are OK (CAVOK) and the Autonomous Agents should be cleared for takeoff!

Update your wallets

All Autonomous Agent features are set to activate at MCI 5,210,000 which is expected at the end of February. Since this is a protocol upgrade and therefore a breaking change, all nodes, including light nodes, need to upgrade to version 3.0.0 that was released today.

For full nodes (both headless and GUI), the upgrade will take a very long time since the update also includes moving part of the data from SQLite database to a much faster RocksDB database. The move will improve performance of some queries, especially data feed queries that some AAs might actively use. The conversion of data will be done when you launch the wallet for the first time after the upgrade and it will take several hours (in our experience, from 3 hours on a dedicated server to 39 hours on a VPS), so please plan accordingly. RocksDB database will take additional 15 GB of disk space (but the data that remains in SQLite will grow a bit slower after the upgrade and the data that was moved to RocksDB will eventually be deleted from SQLite by a later update), please check that you have enough free disk space before the upgrade. Create a backup before upgrading.

For light nodes, the upgrade will be much faster since their database is usually small, but light nodes with long transaction history can still experience a noticeable delay during the first start, especially mobile ones on older hardware.