We’ll soon be launching a new testnet to fix some of the annoying niggles with payment verification and store cost revealed by the previous one. Basically, we were starting payment validation too quickly, leading to repayments occurring needlessly. We have also made some changes to the logging, including payment request logging so that @happybeing’s new Vdash feature should now work.
Niggles aside the IntolerantNodeNet worked pretty much as we’d hoped, albeit testing parallelisation and batch sizes was stymied by the errors mentioned above.
Annoyingly, we couldn’t fix bugs in the client and have it accepted by the existing testnet nodes, so we had to take it all down and start again. This was due to libp2p being stricter with protocol versioning than we had imagined; we have a fix in place now we think.
We’re making excellent progress, and a back of a beermat calculation suggests we’re past the halfway point to Beta now, with payments, store cost and rewards all in place. @bochaco is working on libp2p gossipsub (good spot @upstate!) for paying the Foundation its share of transaction fees, and the same functionality should help us with archiving nodes, which will also need to listen to the activity on the network.
DBCs have now been deprecated, with the code in the sn_dbc crate moved to sn_transfers, and some functions and features renamed to better reflect the reality of the network with libp2p. The only real functional change in moving to libp2p is that our half-offline transaction are no longer possible. But to counter that loss, we gain a good deal of simplicity and lightness.
Thanks again to all the testers. We’ve especially appreciated @josh’s payments spreads graph and logs. We believe the spread is simply due to the network being small but we’re keeping an eye on that one. In addition, @loziniak has put in some more useful fixes. @happybeing has updated Vdash for the new testnet and @optimator’s PowerShell IntolerantNodeNet [18/09/23 Testnet] [ Offline ] - #143 by Optimator script looks very handy for Windows users. We’ll stop here before it turns into an Oscars speech, but you all know who you are! 
General progress
The team have been working on internal improvements to continuous integration workflows, reduce test durations on churn and verify, fix bugs and also updates to logging, monitoring and visualisation.
We’ve put in a couple of fixes for issues spotted by the community, including a PR to update the CLI send command so that it expects full token amounts.
@bochaco is working to integrate libp2p gossipsub messaging into the network. This adds support for pub/sub behaviour and messaging, allowing nodes to subscribe to certain services. Foundation nodes will be able to subscribe to Foundation payments, archiving nodes to archiving messages, and so on. His work so far has focused on getting the core gossipsub infrastructure and APIs functioning between nodes, and its at the testing and debugging stage.
@joshuef and @dirvine discussed making more use of libp2p functionality including, caching, provider nodes and fault detection, and also MVP features including revisiting the metaphor of ‘Safes’ for private data. Josh also investigated store cost timeout errors unearthed by the testnet.
@anselme officially removed DBCs and introduced new currency nomenclature. He also added receipt payment logging for Vdash.
@Qi_Ma has been looking at the updates issue and introduced a patch which should allow client code to be updated without becoming incompatible with the node code. He also investigated store cost timeout errors.
@Roland introduced concurrent file downloading, present in the last testnet and also worked on Grafana dashboard and Docker setup and raised a PR to fetch bootstrap peers from network contacts.
Finally, @chriso updated the CLI to add file address output on upload and considered potential changes to file upload handling.
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