On October 13, we launched Pay with USDC, so teams can now buy permanent storage on Auto Drive with a dollar-backed stablecoin instead of acquiring AI3 first. That extra step had been a real barrier for many teams, and removing it means buying storage on Auto Drive now works much like buying storage from the cloud services they already use.
The rest of the month was shaped by partners moving from evaluating Auto Drive to building on it. healthpass1 is integrating, work began on the accounts that will let partners see usage from their own platforms, and feedback from teams mid-integration is now guiding our reliability work.
The network ran normally throughout October. Block production, storage, and domain operations were stable, with no incidents to report, and no action was required from farmers, operators, or nominators.
Pay with USDC Is Live
Auto Drive users can now purchase storage credits with USDC on Ethereum, alongside the existing Pay with AI3 option. Storage on the network is still settled in AI3 whichever option a user chooses, and the independent farmers who provide that storage continue to earn AI3 rewards. Full details are in More Ways to Access Permanent Storage: Introducing Pay with USDC, and integration instructions are in the developer docs.
Partner Accounts and Usage Attribution
Work began on partner accounts and usage attribution, so that storage used through a partner’s platform is recorded against that partner. The changes coming to the grants program depend on this work.
Consolidation Work
We have started a program of consolidation work focused on Auto Drive’s reliability, guided by the needs of partners who are integrating now. So far, that has meant targeted investigation and fixes for issues we have identified, and the biggest improvement delivered to date is faster downloads for larger files. More fixes are in progress, all aimed at making sure what Auto Drive already offers works the way it should.
Auto Drive Is Now an Official rclone Provider
Auto Drive is now a built-in storage provider in rclone, the widely used command-line tool for syncing and backing up files across cloud storage. Our provider was merged on October 16 (rclone#10093) and ships in rclone v1.76.0. Users pick “Autonomys Auto Drive” from the setup menu, add their API key and sync straight to permanent storage. October’s S3 compatibility work, including a CDN-free S3 hostname and support for large files, took rclone’s integration suite from 22 ignored tests to just 3. Setup details are on rclone.org.
It’s the latest step in making storage on the Autonomys Distributed Storage Network (DSN) easy to use from the tools people already rely on, meeting storage users where they live. We’ll share the full story, including the technical challenges we solved along the way, in a forum post shortly.
Guardians of Growth
Season 2 of the Subspace Foundation’s staking program continued through October. Details on the program and how to take part are in Guardians of Growth Season 2 Is Underway.
Community Contributions
October brought the highest volume of community contributions we have ever seen across our repositories, and we are grateful for it. We are also planning changes to the contribution contest so that it reflects how much easier agentic coding tools have made it to open a pull request. The network benefits most from pull requests that fix existing issues, introduce meaningful features, or address bugs, whether already known or newly identified. If you are considering contributing, please make sure your pull request addresses at least one of those areas.
Staking: 49,877,070 AI3 (+2,551,562 from September)
Auto Drive Files Uploaded: 2,593 (October)
Auto Drive Downloads: 295 (October)
Auto Drive Users: 760 (+14 from September)
Total Announced Partnerships: 66
Announced Auto Drive Integrations: 12
Total Grant Applications: On hold
November is shaping up to be a busy and exciting month. We look forward to sharing more on rclone, a new partner integration, and several ongoing partnerships as we continue working to make permanent storage easier to adopt and use.
The most helpful thing you can do is put Auto Drive to work. It is free to start at ai3.storage, with 20 MB of uploads and 5 GB of downloads each month, and beyond the free tier you can purchase additional storage directly with Pay with AI3 or Pay with USDC. If you are building something where records need to outlast the system that produced them, that is the fastest way to find out whether this fits.
We would also appreciate support through referrals for integrations. If you know a project dealing with expiring links, pinning costs, or an audit trail nobody can verify, send them our way.
