Althea Development Update #55: Network organizer features

I’m very happy to say that since our last update we’ve had about 8 devices be put into real world use without any of the failures/crashes that plagued the previous releases.

This is the first release to include all of the long term changes inspired by our recent push for stability. We wanted to see how it held up before really pushing it out.

We’re going to take this as a green light to start expanding into our wait-lists and getting people online.

You can find a guide to flash your own device router on our forum. We’ve also moved a lot of our development discussion there so you may want to peruse it anyway.

Our first blockchain-backed features going into testing next week. It’s the first part of our governance model, the local Network DAO that allows organizers to collect a small fee for fixed cost services (eg tech support) and allocate funds to network wide projects.

I hope to have a release candidate with that by this coming Friday.

The goal is to have this stabilized sooner than actual bandwidth payments, the network integration is very simple and the heavy lifting on the blockchain side is being handled by Aragon. This should allow us to have a way to collect real money while the more complex payments system is audited.

There’s a big motivation here to get real features out the door, we’ve been cultivating real world Althea networks for a long time now and shepherding them through the setup process.

Things like finding backhaul, hardware, and performing antenna setup do take time, but it’s finally started to reach critical mass in several locations and the pressure is on to deliver something that works for them.

I’m looking forward to the challenge.