While there is no doubt that the delay introduced with Stake Wars 2 has had an impact on our ideal timeline we will not be confirming a delay to our targeted Q3 mainnet launch in this post. With that out of the way, let’s take a look at what has been achieved since we last looked at the roadmap.
Ecosystem
Running from left to right and top to bottom as before, we start with our problem child - Stake Wars 2. Please do remember that finding problems like the ones we have with the original launch is exactly what testnets are for and, despite the issues we’ve experienced, the net result is a stronger protocol and a slew of UX improvements that were further out in the roadmap previously. We can see that there is a new item added to the map denoted by the dotted border. Watch our announcements channels for when the new Restart Stake Wars 2 activity will be taking place. The only other completed task in the Ecosystem track is the testnet emissions alignment which took place on the 10th of July and means the current testnet reward pool is growing at 0.05% of total token supply per week.
Hacker Month 2 remains waiting in the wings for a stable Stake Wars to be underway as it has a dependency on the Nova and Auto ID domains being in a state we can launch this exciting initiative designed to attract and engage builders to our ecosystem.
We do have some news on Nova infrastructure projects which we will be sharing with you soon so keep an eye out for that!
Foundation
We continue to work in the background on bootstrapping the foundation. A number of infrastructure tasks have been completed with the foundation gaining the tooling software it needs to function without friction. Team have also been getting familiar with and testing the Substrate governance pallet which will be integrated into the protocol to facilitate the same on-chain governance that powers Polkadot among others. The foundation has inherited the old Subspace GitHub organization after the core protocol code was migrated to the new Autonomys one. Website copy has been drafted and we will work with our design partners on setting its online presence up.
Draft ambassador agreements have also seen progress with them being refreshed from Subspace to Autonomys branding and incorporation of the Ambassador Bylaws. There are some technical questions that need to be answered around vesting contracts and exactly how they will be deployed which, again, we are working with our launch partners on.
Tokenomics will not be shared before we announce the incentivized testnet end date and confirm the allocation that our farmer community has earned.
Product
As we can see, the Astral staking interface did get updated but promptly had many issues which we have covered in the Stake Wars 2 update. These issues have spawned an additional task which is to deploy fixes and enhancements to the software. This is expected to be deployed very shortly (within the next week). We will be appealing to the community for help with initial testing of operator and nominator functions while we monitor closely.
The Auto ID domain was deployed without any major issue which is a win and we have the first version of the Auto SDK designed to ease development with our Auto suite of products. You can expect to see documentation on this coming soon and we will be testing internally in preparation for its use in the upcoming Hacker Month 2.
Protocol
Steady progress has been made on the protocol engineering roadmap. All the Stake Wars 2 upgrades were deployed without major incident (apart from the receipt gap issue that was introduced) and the scalability roadmap documentation is materially complete with just some final reviews required.
The Autonomys whitepaper could potentially be moved up the next time we see the roadmap as drafts have been shared internally and the effort just requires some diagrams and polishing. We’re very excited to share this with you all as it succinctly encapsulates the Autonomys mission and how we plan to achieve our goals.
Summing Up
We are acutely aware of the ramifications of not hitting the dates we share with our community but it’s important to stress that they are target dates that we set based on the best information we have at the time. Our mission is to release mainnet beta when the protocol is ready for that milestone and the delay with Stake Wars 2 has a reasonable probability to affect the launch date. We will not be announcing how we believe that effect will manifest itself before we are able to restart Stake Wars 2 and confirm stability. This is possibly the first big issue that we’ve found on the incentivized testnet and is exactly what the initiative is designed for. The smooth sailing so far is testament to our wonderful engineering team and running multiple domains with staking v2 has introduced a large amount of change and complexity.
We are committed to transparency and will continue to disseminate updates on the target launch date as soon as they are available. We thank you all for your patience as we work through these issues and get things back on track.