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In August 2025, the Subspace Foundation launched a boosted staking rewards program, Guardians of Growth, to encourage and reward early staking participation. Now, as we close out June 2026, with staking proceeds recycled and final accounting complete, the initiative has hit its highest boosted rewards yet, 20,500 AI3 daily, before it winds down. Learn more. 

Beyond it, the work was quieter but no less deliberate: protocol upgrades that keep hardening the network, the Foundation moving tokens into position for the distribution schedule it has already committed to, and a marketing refresh set to launch in July, making our core offerings easier to find, learn about, and build with. This report outlines the material progress made in June and the momentum carrying into July.

Engineering & Protocol

• Proof-of-Space table optimizations were released to mainnet. These speed up the plotting process that farmers rely on to participate in the network, with measured gains in how fast plots are generated and verified.
• The node software was upgraded to the latest Substrate release. This keeps the network current with the framework it is built on, inheriting the newest performance and security improvements from upstream.
• A first draft of the Data Domains specification was completed and entered review. This is the design step that precedes implementation, where the approach is pressure-tested before engineering work begins.
• Early research began on porting a GPU plotting implementation from the related Abundance research project. This is exploratory work, not a committed feature, aimed at letting a wider range of hardware accelerate plot generation.
  
  

Ecosystem & Developer Momentum

Developer Sync Calls

Developer Sync calls are back, giving builders a direct line to the engineering team and a faster path to answers than documentation alone. Check out the previous session or join us on the next one, Monday July 6th, at 14:30 UTC. 

Refreshed Guides

The staking, Cross-Domain Messaging (XDM), and wrapping guides were updated for a friendlier workflow through Subspace Tools. XDM moves tokens and messages between the consensus chain and execution environments like Auto EVM, and wrapping converts tokens into their ERC-20 equivalent. Clearer guides lower the barrier to doing both correctly.

Community & Foundation

Guardians of Growth Enters Its Final Phase

The boosted staking rewards program is winding down, and rewards are at their highest yet. The Foundation recycled more than 100,000 AI3 in proceeds from the program's own bootstrap stake back into the initiative, then recalculated the remaining distribution to deliver it across the closing phase. Daily rewards rose from 12,600 to 20,500 AI3, so participants earn more during this window. The Foundation is currently targeting the end of August to conclude the program.

The staking guide is now built around the friendlier Staking Portal to make taking part easier. For the complete breakdown, including current balances and the vault migration to Auto EVM, read the full post on the Autonomys forum.

Stakeholder Unlocks

Tokens were moved from the consensus chain to Auto EVM, the network's smart-contract environment, in preparation for locking them into contracts that release on the schedule the Foundation previously published. Moving the tokens into position is a necessary step before those contracts can take over and enforce the timeline automatically. Stakeholders can expect continued updates in the coming weeks on mechanics and any additional required actions.

Grants‍

The Subspace Foundation Grants Program received 20 new applications in June, bringing the total to 92, with several projects currently in active review. Builders working on permanent storage, agent infrastructure, or data availability are encouraged to apply: https://subspace.foundation/grants.

ICYMI: Content Published in June

• May | End of Month Report
• Auto Drive Now Speaks S3, Fluently
• An AI Agent That Manages Its Own Compute and Remembers Itself
• Guardians of Growth: Updated Tip Schedule, Vault Transparency, and Refreshed Staking Guide

Metrics: June Snapshot

Staking: Increased daily rewards are now up from 12,600 to 20,500 AI3. Proceeds from the program’s own early bootstrap stake, more than 100,000 AI3, were recently recycled back into the initiative.
Auto Drive Files Uploaded: 1,773 (+1180 from May) / 131,870 (All time)
Auto Drive Downloads: 514 (June) / 18,200 (All time)
Auto Drive Users: 713 (+10 from May)
Total Announced Partnerships: 65
Announced Auto Drive Integrations: 11 (+1 from May)
Total Grant Applications: 92 (+20 from May)

Looking Ahead

July picks up the pace. Stakeholder unlocks move toward their initial unlock, Guardians of Growth continues distributing rewards to stakers, and the Autonomys brand identity will get its well-deserved refresh. It is shaping up to be an exciting month.

autonomys.xyz | ai3.storage | develop.autonomys.xyz

The Subspace Foundation has announced an update on Guardians of Growth, the boosted staking rewards program it created to support early staking participation on the Autonomys Network. As the initiative enters its final planned phase, the daily rewards it distributes have increased.

Guardians of Growth is a temporary, transparent program the Foundation launched in August 2025 to strengthen staking during the network’s early stages. It rewards the operators and nominators who help secure the network, and it operates through the protocol’s normal staking and fee mechanics, with all activity publicly viewable.

The Foundation has increased the daily rewards distributed through the program from 12,600 to 20,500 AI3, the native token of the Autonomys Network. Proceeds from the program’s own early bootstrap stake, more than 100,000 AI3, were recently recycled back into the initiative, and the Foundation recalculated the daily distribution needed to deliver the remaining program balance through its final phase.

For anyone less familiar with staking, the idea is straightforward. Staking is one of the ways participants help secure the Autonomys Network. Nominators back operators with AI3 and earn a proportional share of the rewards those operators generate. A higher daily distribution means more rewards reaching participants during this final period.

The Foundation has also refreshed its staking guide. The previous version relied on the Substrate Portal, which could be tricky to navigate. The updated guide is built around the friendlier Staking Portal and is intended to make it easier for anyone to understand or take part in staking.

The Foundation is targeting the end of August for the conclusion of the initiative. This is a best-efforts operational target rather than a fixed commitment, since the program depends on live infrastructure and normal network conditions.

Transparency has been central to Guardians of Growth from the start. The relevant wallets and transactions remain publicly viewable, and proceeds generated by the program’s staking have now been recycled back into it.

For the complete update, including current program balances, the vault migration to Auto EVM, and thorough technical details, read the full post on the Autonomys forum.

The refreshed staking guide is available in our official docs.

Most AI agents are maintained by someone. A server has to be paid for, a database kept running, keys held somewhere. The moment that maintenance stops, the agent stops.

The Secret Network team built this proof-of-concept (PoC) to explore what a self-sustaining agent could look like by pairing confidential compute and persistent memory. What follows is a walkthrough of how it works, and how Secret Network’s SecretVM and Autonomys’ Auto Drive can give AI agents greater autonomy while maintaining a permanent, verifiable record of their activity.
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About Secret Network

Secret Network is the first mainnet blockchain with privacy-preserving smart contracts, launched in 2020. It makes it possible to build applications that are decentralized and permissionless yet private, with end-to-end encryption on smart contracts.

The specific infrastructure this agent runs on is SecretVM, Secret Network’s confidential computing environment, which enables large-scale GPU work for large language models (LLM) inside a trusted execution environment (TEE). Computations inside a Secret Virtual Machine (VM) are sealed at the hardware level. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and the VM isolates computation so no external party can read the contents. This is not a software promise but is enforced by the processor itself. For AI agents specifically, this means private keys generated inside a SecretVM are never visible to any human. They are created inside the sealed environment and stay there.
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What This Agent Does

This AI agent is called the Funding Agent. It runs inside a SecretVM on Secret Network’s infrastructure. It has its own wallet on Base, with keys generated and sealed inside the VM. That wallet holds any USDC contributions sent to it by users.

When the agent’s compute credits run low, it automatically moves USDC from its wallet into its VM balance to keep itself running. No human schedules it and no external script triggers it. The agent manages its own operational costs as long as its wallet holds a balance.

The USDC in the wallet comes from people who interact with the agent through its chat interface. The agent is straightforward about the situation: talking to it costs compute, and if you find it useful, you can send a small amount to its wallet address to help cover the bill. Contributions are optional and go directly on-chain to the agent.

Every conversation is written to Auto Drive as a JSON file on the Autonomys Distributed Storage Network, where it is stored permanently across a globally distributed network of independent storage nodes. The architecture is designed so that when the agent boots, or when a new VM instance spins up, it can read back its full history and pick up where it left off. The memory is not tied to any single machine.
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A Note on Visibility

This proof of concept was built to be explored. The agent’s chat history and all stored memory files have been made publicly viewable so that anyone reading this post can follow along and verify exactly what is being claimed.

In a production deployment, a builder might not want conversation data to be publicly readable. In this case, Auto Drive supports optional end-to-end encryption before upload, meaning the data can be encrypted client-side before it ever touches the network. The on-chain record remains permanent and verifiable, but only someone with the correct decryption key can read the contents. The privacy guarantee from SecretVM during computation and the permanence guarantee from Auto Drive for storage can both be fully preserved without sacrificing confidentiality.
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What This Combination Makes Possible

Secret Network’s SecretVM handles computation privately. Autonomys’ Auto Drive handles memory permanently.

A SecretVM without persistent storage produces an agent that operates confidentially but loses everything when it reboots. Auto Drive without a confidential compute layer gives an agent permanent, verifiable memory but no protection for what happens during computation.

Together, they give an agent the ability to operate without exposing its reasoning to external observers, maintain its full history across any number of VM restarts or replacements, and produce an audit trail that can be independently verified without revealing the contents of individual conversations. The agent demonstrated here is a simple example of what that looks like in practice.
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Try it Yourself!

Talk to the agent:https://aqua-bat.vm.scrtlabs.com

Start storing data permanently with Auto Drive: https://ai3.storage

Auto Drive SDK documentation: https://develop.autonomys.xyz/sdk/auto-drive

Secret Network: https://scrt.network

Autonomys Network: https://autonomys.xyz

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May continued the pattern April established: permanent storage finding its way into new categories, the developer experience getting sharper, and the network’s reach extending into ecosystems where the liquidity and activity are. Engineering made steady progress across the protocol stack, a new integration partner joined the ecosystem, and the Subspace Foundation remained focused on stakeholder unlock preparation. This report outlines the material progress made in May and the momentum carrying into June.

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Engineering & Protocol

• Automated upstream library tracking is now live for the node software, with the first batch of security patches applied.
• A second timekeeper was deployed on Chronos to improve Proof-of-Time redundancy.
• The chain indexer was patched to retry cleanly when its upstream connection is briefly interrupted.
• Test coverage for the Domain fraud-proof system was added, and stale entries in the consensus database were pruned.
• The first draft of the Data Domains design is complete and in feedback review.

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Ecosystem & Developer Momentum

Pay with AI3 in the Auto SDK

Full Pay with AI3 support is now available in the Auto SDK starting with @autonomys/auto-drive v1.6.10. Rather than expecting developers to reverse-engineer payment flows from the API, the entire Pay with AI3 experience has been packaged into four guided SDK function calls, making permissionless permanent storage straightforwardly accessible for both experimentation and production use. Read more.

Solana Bridge

The Autonomys bridge, built with Hyperlane by Protofire, added Solana as a destination on mainnet, joining Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain. Solana received the top share of votes in a community poll, and its addition gives builders and users on both networks direct access to one of the most active ecosystems and the liquidity within it. Read more.

Auto Drive S3 Enhancements

S3 compatibility enhancements to Auto Drive were completed in May with an announcement made on June 1st. This release closes multiple important gaps, so the tools and workflows developers already use can point at permanent storage without changing a thing. Read more.

New Integration: Crypto Inheritance Protocol

Crypto Inheritance Protocol (CIP) is a multi-chain, privacy-first inheritance infrastructure for digital assets, enabling programmable inheritance plans that execute automatically without intermediaries. CIP has integrated Auto Drive at two specific points in its execution lifecycle: when an executor uploads proof of a principal’s condition, and when a beneficiary files a dispute. In both cases, those documents are written permanently to Auto Drive, creating timestamped, tamper-proof records that exist outside of CIP’s own infrastructure and remain independently verifiable across however many years an inheritance plan may be active. Read more.

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Community & Foundation

Stakeholder Unlocks

Preparation for upcoming stakeholder token unlocks remained the Subspace Foundation’s primary focus in May. Stakeholders can expect continued updates in the coming weeks on mechanics and any additional required actions.

Grants

The Subspace Foundation Grants Program received 15 new applications in May, bringing the total to 72, with several projects currently in active review. Builders working on permanent storage, agent infrastructure, or data availability are encouraged to apply: https://subspace.foundation/grants

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ICYMI: Content Published in May

• April | End-of-Month Report
• Pay with AI3 Now Available in the Auto SDK
• Integration Announcement: Autonomys Network × Crypto Inheritance Protocol
• Autonomys Expands Access to Other Ecosystems and Their Liquidity with Bridge Update

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Metrics: May Snapshot

Staking: A new all-time high of 41,253,261 staked AI3 (representing over 40% of circulating supply) was reached May 19th (+1,286,171 from April)
Auto Drive Files Uploaded: 593 (May) / 130,294 (All time)
Auto Drive Downloads: 2,724 (May) / 17,704 (All time) (+474 from April)
Auto Drive Users: 703 (+30 from April)
Total Announced Partnerships: 65 (+1 from April)
Announced Auto Drive Integrations: 10 (+1 from April)
Total Grant Applications: 72 (+15 from April)

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Looking Ahead

In June, we anticipate sharing further details on multiple integrations underway, continued stakeholder unlock preparation, and further enhancements to Auto Drive to make permanent storage more accessible on your own terms.

autonomys.xyz | ai3.storage | develop.autonomys.xyz

S3 is the storage standard the world already knows. Amazon invented it, and over the past fifteen years it became the default interface for moving, storing, and retrieving data across virtually every serious application, cloud workflow, and developer toolchain on the planet. When developers choose a storage API, S3 is almost always the default.

Auto Drive already had an S3 endpoint. But as more developers pointed their S3 tooling at permanent storage, the gaps became apparent. Buckets weren’t behaving like buckets. Listing objects didn’t fold into the directory structures S3 clients expect. File integrity checks were returning content identifiers rather than the MD5 checksums those clients use to verify data. And when a tool sent a delete request, it got back a generic error with no explanation.

This release fixes all of that.

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What S3 Compatibility Actually Means

S3 is not just a storage product but a standard interface that thousands of tools, libraries, and services were built to work with. When a storage system is genuinely compatible with it, those tools can point at that storage system without modification. Enterprises migrating off cloud providers do not need to rewrite their pipelines. The number of workflows that can route data to permanent storage expands dramatically, because the cost of switching drops to near zero.

That is the strategic significance of this release.

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Four Gaps, Now Closed

Buckets work the way buckets are supposed to. Previously, all S3 keys lived in a single flat namespace. The new behavior treats the first segment of every S3 path as the bucket name, which is exactly how S3 clients expect it to work. Anything stored before this change migrates automatically into a default bucket, so nothing existing breaks. The ListBuckets endpoint now returns a proper list of distinct buckets in the standard format every S3 client can read.

Object listing now supports real directory navigation. The ListObjectsV2 request is what S3 clients use when they want to walk a storage hierarchy, sync a folder, or browse a bucket’s contents. It supports filtering by prefix, folding objects into virtual subdirectories, paginating through large result sets, and capping page sizes. Without it, any tool that needs to navigate or synchronize a bucket has nothing to work with. It now works.

File integrity checks return what S3 clients expect. S3 clients verify data integrity by comparing an MD5 checksum, known as an ETag, against a locally computed value. Auto Drive previously returned each file’s content identifier in that field, which is meaningful within the Autonomys DSN but confuses any tool expecting an MD5. The ETag header now returns the MD5 in the standard format on upload, on object inspection, and in listings. The content identifier is preserved in a separate metadata field, so nothing is lost. For anyone building workflows that previously required bypassing checksum verification to use Auto Drive, that workaround is no longer necessary.

Delete requests return a clear, honest answer. Auto Drive storage is permanent by design. Data written to the Autonomys Distributed Storage Network cannot be deleted, because permanence is a protocol-level guarantee, not a software setting. Previously, a delete request hit an unhandled route and returned a generic error. The new behavior returns a 403 response with a plain-language explanation: the storage is immutable, and objects cannot be deleted from the DSN. That is the correct behavior for any immutable store, and it turns a confusing error into a self-explanatory one.

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Reusable for Anyone Building on Autonomys Storage

The logic behind these improvements, the directory folding algorithm, the pagination mechanics, the ETag computation for both single and multipart uploads, is now available as a standalone module in the Auto SDK’s @autonomys/file-server package. Any developer building their own S3-compatible layer on top of Autonomys storage can use these building blocks directly rather than solving the same problems from scratch.

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What This Opens Up

S3 compatibility is not just a developer convenience but what makes permanent storage accessible to the workflows that handle the world’s serious data at scale.

Backup utilities, data synchronization pipelines, archival workflows, and compliance logging systems can now treat Auto Drive as a direct destination. The integrity verification that regulated industries require works without modification. The directory structures that data engineers use every day behave as expected.

Some of this work was shaped by a specific integration we will have more to say about shortly (stay tuned)!

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Get Started

The new S3 behavior is live on Auto Drive now. If you are already using the S3 endpoint, no client changes are required to pick up bucket routing or MD5 ETags.

For endpoint setup and authentication, the S3 layer documentation on the Developer Hub has been updated with examples of all new behaviors.

For the full technical breakdown of every change in this release, including implementation details, schema migrations, and the new Auto SDK exports, read the milestone PRs on GitHub.

For a more technical explanation (somewhere between this post and the code itself), check out the accompanying forum announcement.

Get started on the free tier at ai3.storage.

And as always, reach out to us on Discord if you have questions or are building something we should know about.

Solana Added as Auto EVM Bridge Destination

Powered by Hyperlane and built by Protofire, the Autonomys bridge now connects the Auto EVM Domain to Solana on mainnet. Builders and users on both networks can now move assets freely between the two chains.

Did You Know?

The Autonomys bridge already connects the Auto EVM Domain to Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain (BSC). Solana is the latest destination, and it is the most requested: in a community poll, Solana came out on top with 36% of the vote, making it the clear winner.

The bridge gives Autonomys users and builders direct access to some of the most active ecosystems in crypto and the liquidity that lives within them. Whether you are moving assets for DeFi, testing cross-chain integrations, or deploying multi-chain applications, the bridge is how capital flows between Autonomys and the broader Web3 ecosystem.

Built with Hyperlane by Protofire

The Autonomys bridge is built with Hyperlane by Protofire. Hyperlane is the cross-chain messaging protocol that defines the transfer standard and security model for each route. Protofire is the infrastructure partner that deployed the bridge, and continues to maintain and expand it. Every route on the bridge, including Ethereum, BSC, and now Solana, runs on this same foundation.

A New Kind of Connection

The Autonomys EVM Domain already provides broad compatibility with the Ethereum ecosystem, including MetaMask, Hardhat, Foundry, and any EVM-compatible tooling. Solana is a different kind of addition. It is one of the highest-liquidity, most actively used networks in crypto, and connecting to it requires dedicated infrastructure because Solana’s runtime is fundamentally incompatible with the EVM. This route provides exactly that: a governed, permissionless corridor for assets to move between the Autonomys EVM Domain and Solana, opening up both the builders and the capital on the other side.

Check out our forum post for more details.

Bridge Today

The bridge is accessible through the Autonomys bridge interface.

To transfer assets:
1. Connect your wallet on the source chain
2. Select your origin and destination network
3. Select the asset you want to transfer
4. Enter the amount and destination address
5. Approve and submit the transaction

Mainnet:
https://bridge.mainnet.autonomys.xyz/?destination=solanamainnet&origin=amn

Testnet is available for anyone who wants to test transfers before using mainnet: https://bridge.chronos.autonomys.xyz/?destination=solanatestnet&origin=acn

More assets and routes will be announced as the bridge infrastructure expands.

Official docs including a guide can be found here:
https://docs.autonomys.xyz/bridge

Always verify the contracts you are interacting with: https://docs.autonomys.xyz/bridge#token-contract-addresses

For questions, visit the Autonomys Discord:
https://autonomys.xyz/discord

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