LastCall (✧ᴗ✧)

a few words about the upcoming changes and the preliminary roadmap, as well as our internal plans and thoughts in general: 1). mainnet upgrade (it depended on devnet surprisingly enough) ,but for the first time on a live network we achieved full decentralization outside our own machines, where right now about 40 external validators and early testers have deployed nodes. this took some time because, outside sandbox conditions, we were squashing a ton of minor bugs along the way, so special thanks to everyone for this help and support And now we're down to the final steps before the final merge, which will drop right at devnet epoch 1500000 once the last consensus tests are run, after which we'll publish the configs and p2p map for the mainnet. 2). HFHE will become a separate and independent track with everything that entails; we'll continue working on pq solutions and r&d on pq signatures (MQ, LPN, etc.). we believe this direction has huge potential - several tools haven't been published publicly yet (we're prepping them for announcement). 3). the ML hysteria doesn't concern us. we got lots of messages about inference mining, how it's the future, etc. several teams literally forgot what they wrote in their whitepapers right before our eyes and completely flip-flopped mid air multiple times just to pack their freshly baked pitch decks with buzzwords. our stance is different: we believe in proof of useful work, but we believe in it our own way - through resource attestation and other validator primitives. this concept (including inference) was proposed by us long before the llm/ml hysteria blew up, so our plans won't change. we're not going to jump into new trends just because they're being massively shilled (personally, i don't give a shit about llms; i like ml, but in a different problem, arithmetic encoding , etc.) 4). applied meta language - the total lang with functional primitives that we're building for the virtual machine - will be significantly expanded. it'll be ideally suited for any on-chain tasks, from DeFi (which is alive and kicking, and everything will be fine with it) and complex decentralized systems built on circles, to local isolated HFHE programs that can run privately right inside the execution kernel, plus a lot of other stuff we'll cover separately. 5). the $OCT coin position: due to r&d, we haven't spent much time on coin positioning, but now everything changes. with the mainnet upgrade, OCT will become the centerpiece tying together the tokenomics, useful resource utilization, compute effort spent on program execution, and much more. we also plan to burn some of the minted supply prior to the upgrade, thereby increasing the pool of available coins for mining; the 1 billion coin cap remains unchanged (fun fact, by the way: roughly 13 mil coins on the testnet were permanently lost by early testers due to careless handling). listings are also just around the corner, protocols will receive initial liquidity, and the best of the best will get grants and support from our treasury. 6). circles (isolated runtimes on top of the mainnet), the private network, hidden services, and the high-level data transport protocol (oct://) will continue to evolve, turning into a standalone product and a great showcase of just how convenient, secure, and accessible all this can be. on octra, you can run websites, services, and even dedicated clusters completely anonymously and in a decentralized way. these concepts will be heavily refined to perfection over the next year; a marketplace of ready-made examples and apps, along with plenty of other stuff, is also on the way. ps: thanks to all early testers, validators, devs, and everyone supporting us. the next two weeks are going to be packed with announcements 💅🏻