Dev

This week the Session team continued making excellent progress on disappearing messages and the closed groups overhaul. Disappearing messages on desktop made it into code review and we're making good progress on Session android. All platform teams made steady progress on closed groups, with all teams now in the process of writing unit tests for closed group chunk 1. The Oxen core team continued working on the BLS signing and smart contract validation prototype this week focusing on an implementation of Merkle trees to prove Service Node balances. The Lokinet team is continuing on the internal Lokinet refactor, which has resulted in the removal of a significant amount of code and refactorisation/rewriting of other areas. 

Session

Session Android

• Fix author display when quoting your own message (thanks to community member aaronkerckhoff)

• Ongoing work on improved onboarding project

• Ongoing work on closed group overhaul

• Ongoing work on disappearing messages overhaul

Session Desktop

• Fix issue where Session gets stuck loading on splash screen

• Ongoing work on closed group overhaul 

• Ongoing work on disappearing messages overhaul

Session iOS 

• Fix issues which could be caused if onboarding was restarted mid process

• Ongoing work on closed group overhaul  

• Ongoing work on improved onboarding project 

LibSession 

• Ongoing work on protobuf handling

• CMake and packaging improvements  

• Debian/Ubuntu library packaging

• Create new repo with python bindings around some of libsession

Oxen core 

• Ongoing work on reviewing BLS smart contracts and getting BLS signing to work in Oxen core

Oxen Encoding 

• Added “require” methods for easier handling of required fields

Lokinet

• Ongoing major reworking of Lokinet’s internal communication layer

• Libquic: configurable request timeouts

• Libquic: bt-stream request interface enhancements to better fit Lokinet’s needs

• Libquic: Configurable ALPN support for proper protocol handshaking

Marketing

Last week we made sure that everything was wrapped up nicely from Q3 so we could jump into October (Q4) on the ground running.

The biggest news straight off the press though, would be this article published by CoinTelegraph highlighting the project's upcoming shift to a L2 token. In just under a week the article has been read nearly 20,000 times spreading the news of the upcoming changes to our project to a broad crypto audience. Following its release this article was one of the most read stories hosted by the site that week and allowed us to see clear and great interest in Session Token. 

We spent much of last week wrapping up our Q3 projects as we transition into Q4. Specifically, this meant finalising strategies, goals, and planning for our upcoming social media campaigns and making sure that our quarterly strategies have been correctly set up. These strategies differ from platform to platform – specifically we are looking to maintain our engagement at 5 percent across Twitter and see follower growth of 7 percent, work towards building our Mastodon audience by 16 percent and build a rehauled YouTube channel.  We spent some time last week on YouTube, as we worked through strategy outlines and created assets (and content) that will reflect our more Session focused brand umbrella (to better reflect the ongoing Oxen rebrand). This has been something that we have been working on for a couple weeks, expect the revamped channel to be live very shortly.  

Alex and Cam were also busy finishing off blog content for Session, with Cam finalising his story on generational attitudes towards surveillance following some feedback from our written content maestro, Alex. Keep an eye out for that one dropping soon across our socials. 

OPTF wise, Alex had a full plate, liaising with our ICD fellow. Specifically Alex was reviewing the literature review on censorship resistance in Iran that was submitted by the fellow as he prepares to proceed onto data analysis. 

Thanks for tuning in folks, catch you next week!