The SAFE Network Release Cycle

As you may have gathered from the even greater amount of activity on GitHub (I didn’t think it was possible either) the core of the SAFE Network has been getting tested both internally and externally as we get ever closer to a stable decentralised network. While details about the team’s development progress continue to flow via the forum, the purpose of this post is to establish the main phases of the impending and iterative release process. There are:

• Alpha — the core network and fundamental functionality is provided via an initial implementation, this is the first public testing phase.
• Beta — alpha implementations are reiterated and improved, based on user feedback.
• Release candidate — the fundamental feature set is stabilised to provide greater security, resilience and efficiency.
• Release — privacy, security, freedom!

The speed at which MaidSafe will iterate through the alpha testing phase is unknown and will be dependent upon how well the network performs at this stage. However, it is anticipated that having the core network in place will make it significantly easier to test the addition of new features than ever before. Testing against mock networks is only useful up to a point!

There will be several alpha releases, which will commence in simple numerical order, each denoting an incremental improvement on the previous version. For example, as per the roadmap, alpha 1 will come with: public ID management, public and private data storage, vault configuration and desktop installers (64 bit Windows, Mac and Linux). The second alpha iteration will include additional features and will be called alpha 2, and so on.

SAFE Network Fundamentals

The fundamental features, beyond the alpha 1 release, have been defined as:

• Contact management
• Messaging
• Test safecoin
• Vaults running on ARM architectures
• Launcher UI
• Safecoin wallet

The alpha release will gradually implement this functionality in an iterative cycle and provide the features highlighted above. However, this will be the first iteration of these features and development on them will continue until the engineering team are satisfied that the implementation provides the desired functionality. At this point, the network will transition to beta. When in beta, these features will become more elegant, efficient and secure. The release candidate will see the features frozen and further stabilised prior to full release at which point safecoin will go live.

In tandem with this release cycle, both users and developers can expect the ongoing release of APIs that reflect access to ever increasing network functionality, as well as example applications that showcase features of the network to end users and also act as tutorials to developers.

Out of Beta and Moving Forward

Beyond release MaidSafe, either alone or working in partnership with other developers, will start to create some of features below that will offer both developers and end users access to some exciting new tools, such as:

• Pay the producer
• Smart contracts
• Autonomous updates
• Computation handling

We will provide you with more details on each release as it approaches and hopefully this post has been useful in providing more detail around our planned release cycle.

Originally published at blog.maidsafe.net on May 6, 2016.