Last Saturday, AO Mainnet and its first devices went live. This completely new implementation, called HyperBEAM, takes AO’s original approach of splitting different functionalities into different devices and expands it on a much wider scale. As a result, AO-Core nodes are powerfully flexible in ways that we can’t wait to tell you about. For the curious, here is the HyperBEAM repo with more details.

The role of payments in AO-Core

Even in the infinitely scalable protocol that is AO, payments play an important role. This is because they provide a powerful incentivization mechanism for node operators to join the network, enabling compute to be faster and truly decentralized.

Without the appropriate incentives unlocked by payments, Legacynet (formerly known as Testnet) has only a limited number of computers attached to it, with no incentivized way to bring more nodes online. Since causing any amount of compute on the network comes at no cost, anyone can congest the network and drown out the experience of all users. This isn’t how AO works in the real world.

Using payments on AO-Core gets rid of this problem altogether. Your user experience will be vastly improved and you can now take a “fast lane” to have your compute prioritized.

Browser integrations are coming soon, but devs and automated users can start using payments today. See the full instructions here and a demo below.

Onboarding to AO-Core

The AO Mainnet codebase is already available to those who wish to explore it alone today.

In less than two weeks, we will be holding our first Node Onboarding Workshop. At this event, our team will help the first wave of external node operators get onboarded and start offering their compute on AO.

During this time we will be preparing and improving documentation to help your onboarding journey. AO-Core introduces a huge number of new primitives and innovations, so there is a lot to dive into.

In the meantime, as a current or future node operator, you will likely want to prepare to run your compute inside a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE). While anyone has been able to run their own compute for the network since launch, running it inside a TEE will help your compute to be  “trusted” by other nodes, increasing its usage and your rewards.

The first TEE to be supported by the system is AMD SEV-SNP, with other TEEs coming soon. We will go over the configurations you need to make in our AO Node Onboarding Workshop on Tuesday February 25th. 

Make sure to join the event to have a chance to win one of five AMD CPU’s to spin up your own AO node!