End of Year Post
A post from the MaidSafe Team!
For those of you who don’t know us, we’re a Scottish company that was founded back in 2006 by Scottish engineer David Irvine. We have been on a mission to build a decentralized, private, and secure internet platform (a storage layer or archive if you will), that mission has resulted earlier this year in the launch of Autonomi. Autonomi is an open-source network designed to support the future of the web, in a way much better than we currently know it today.
Since Autonomi's deployment was completed in early February of this year - with The Network’s token ANT being made available on central crypto exchanges - the team at MaidSafe have been busy with updates and refinements. There have been over 24 releases (updates to The Network) and work continues on with another two releases scheduled before Christmas. We knew and planned that these first 10 or so months of The Network’s life would need to be focused on troubleshooting and issue resolution. A sterile testing environment (no matter how comprehensive) was only ever able to take us so far, we needed to see Autonomi in the real world - which it now is.
Due to some of the observed issues, including the insufficient replication of data when it lives (securely encrypted) on The Network, aspects such as ‘churn’ (large numbers of nodes that host data coming on and offline at the same time), have created instability. This instability, while expected in the early days, has been further compounded by ‘bad actors’, who have been over-provisioning nodes.
Node over-provisioning is when a node looks available and ready to host random, encrypted, chunks of data, but it does not in fact have the capacity to do so - these nodes are therefore being paid by The Network (through emissions) and at times by data uploaders to not provide the service they are claiming they do.
While this is being addressed, it has reduced the desirability for The Autonomi Foundation to invest in marketing or expansion initiatives in 2025. The Network will need to be able to confirm data permanence v.early 2026, and to have these ‘bad nodes’ disincentivised and cast out to avoid their autonomous selection (there is an update related to this due to be released ahead of Christmas), so that greater promotion, engagement and scale (all impacting token demand and utility) can begin.
Linked to engagement and scale - MaidSafe are aware that relatively deep knowledge along with a significant amount of persistence and patience has been required to run nodes for The Network, to upload files onto The Network and to continue on with developing apps that will generate data that can be stored on The Network. These barriers have meant that data uploads have so far been very small, visibility surrounding the project has been low and any utility and trading related to ANT has been greatly restrained.
All of this can and should be combatted by making Autonomi more accessible through apps and APIs - with the core of The Network itself (i.e. the archive/storage function The Network provides) also becoming fully autonomous in 2026.
Moving into 2026 …
MaidSafe are deep in planning for the year ahead, and are working in lock step with The Autonomi Foundation to formulate the most optimised and impactful strategy we can - specifically focusing on data uploads as the most critical component.
For added context, The Autonomi Foundation is a not for profit organisation based in Switzerland, it is the legal entity responsible for compliance around aspects such as The Network’s token. The Foundation’s goal is to support the scale and success of Autonomi and for the same to also become (over time) fully autonomous (i.e. no need for any individual or group to be involved).
The Foundation has previously received a grant, and has used these funds to support The Network. Aspects such as exchange listings, liquidity provisions and builder initiatives (such as Impossible Futures Series 1), have been funded by The Foundation. While MaidSafe does not receive emissions from The Network (i.e. it has not and will not receive tokens over time from The Network), The Foundation does (please see the Autonomi White Paper for details).
It is recognised by The Autonomi Foundation that development costs are currently still critical (these relate to both the archive and application components of The Network), fortunately The Foundation has recently secured a privately made donation - this was specifically gifted to support the team requirements that relate to Autonomi’s ongoing development over the next 3 years.
Speaking of development, MaidSafe wanted to achieve the following ahead of Christmas 2025:
Improve network stability by reducing churn and make significant gains towards data permanence through the identification and ‘casting out’ of bad nodes.
Move toward improving accessibility, for large data uploaders, supporting the utility of ANT and network scale through the release of an Indelible demo.
Remove some of the friction associated with blockchain payments through the ‘best optimised’ deployment of Paymaster in both Dave and Indelible.
Significantly reduce the cost of using the network (data uploading), by minimising the fees associated with EVM blockchain through the deployment of Merkle Tree payments.
Optimise the way the team track, test, document and deploy, through role crossover, actionable insights, PR quality and streamlining of code.
Get the fly wheel going to support the health of the Autonomi token - through demonstration of future utility and network potential/scale (this should be reflected in trading volume and token price)
Let’s work through these and share where we got to, and where we go from here!
“Improve Network Stability”
Following on from previous updates (close group verification and chunk size for streaming of data), prior to Christmas we will be releasing two major updates for performance enhancement. These include:
The delay of replication initiated by churn, to ensure that nodes have enough time to come back online ahead of data being unnecessarily reproduced to protect its permanence. In essence this update removes the creation of unnecessary load from The Network.
A check of close group members to ensure that they are holding the data they are expected to be, with those not holding expected data being removed from the routing table. This update aims to ensure only ‘good nodes’ are interacting with other nodes and data uploaders, and that bad nodes have no incentive and no access to participate in the ecosystem.
Alongside these new updates, the team has also implemented Auto Updates which will be in use from today with the upcoming release being automatic for Linux and Mac users. Noting here that to stay eligible for emissions a node operator needs to be running either the latest or previous version (important for windows users who will not currently be automatically upgraded).
“Improving accessibility for large data uploaders”
Indelible is a locally deployed service that enables an organization to readily access the archiving and storage capabilities of Autonomi, without need for additional coding or complexity. A user interacts with a web UI (although there is a full REST API available),
Indelible allows for multiple users to access a centralized (or group of centralized wallets) so that they can upload documents and other data to Autonomi without having to worry about purchasing ANT (which will be the admins role). The service is ideal for those handling large amounts of data and/or significant file sizes, who want to secure and archive the same indefinitely. Where direct uploads to The Network are time consuming and prevent a user from being able to navigate away from the process, with Indelible a user is able to queue uploads and benefit from the service being asynchronous, meaning it works in the background, and informs the user of its status via configurable webhooks or API, while they continue on with their day.
There is now a fully working demo of Indelible, further refinements to the UI and UX will be made early in January, so that the service can begin being utilized by organisations (using SSO) in the New Year.
“Deployment of Paymaster”
Paymaster is currently available in Dave and will be deployed in Indelible in the New Year. The team will also be integrating Paymaster into Merkle Tree payments so that not only are blockchain fees low (for payments, other elements of The Network are non-blockchain), but they are easily integrated into the data upload payments which will only require a user to have ANT.
“Deployment of Merkle Tree Payments”
The MaidSafe team is introducing Merkle Tree as a structure for organising payments. The structure reduces the number of transactions by grouping them together in a way that means there is a single gas fee rather than multiple fees for uploads. The tree is limited to 4GB worth of data, beyond that size, a new tree is created and a second payment is added to the first (i.e. 2 payments grouped together). At the time of writing The Merkle Tree deployment has been partially released (for main-net testing only), and will be publicly available for use ahead of Christmas 2025.
“Optimise”
Moving into 2026 the MaidSafe team wants to remove some of the legacy dependencies and restrictions that naturally happen when there is a reliance on an individual or group - this also speaks to the fact that Autonomi should not be controlled or overly influenced by any person or party. From automatic node upgrades (churn management) and nodes from code (speed and diligence), to testing portal (a self-service for developers to run their own testnets, followed by MCP for AI deployment) and logging optimisation (easy validation of issues for early network troubleshooting).
“Health of the Autonomi Token”
Driven by the utility of and demand for ANT, the focus has been to create the services (indelible) and toolkits for builders to support data uploads. The Autonomi Foundation, once The Network is stable and data storage permanent, will be supporting both partnerships and promotion from early 2026.
Onward!
The team is deep in planning mode for 2026 and will be working to complete the Q1, Q2 and broader strategy shortly after the 2025 Christmas holidays. And with that said, it feels timely to wish all of you in our community a wonderful Christmas and a happy, healthy and wealthy 2026,
Yours, MaidSafe.
