Another productive week for the Gonka network. Fourteen pull requests and issues closed between February 20–26, spanning authentication, inference performance, and node stability. Here's what shipped.

Authentication Overhaul

Token-based authentication landed in two PRs (#485, #446), replacing the previous auth mechanism. This is a significant infrastructure change that affects how API nodes verify requests. The merge into the gmdev0.2.6 branch signals preparation for an upcoming release.

Inference Performance

Three PRs targeted inference speed:

  • Missed inferences fix (#785) — resolved cases where valid inference requests were being dropped
  • Start/end inference optimization (#786) — reduced overhead in the inference lifecycle, directly addressing issue #783
  • Signature verification skip (#759) — TA and Executor signatures are no longer checked during MsgInference, removing redundant cryptographic operations from the hot path

Combined, these changes reduce per-inference latency and improve throughput under load.

PoC Proof Improvements

Two PRs strengthened Proof of Compute verification:

  • Votes and weights in proofs (#416) — votes and weights are now embedded directly in proof data, making verification self-contained
  • Participant vote calculation (#427) — fixed how participant votes are tallied during verification

These changes make PoC proofs more robust and auditable.

Node Stability

Several fixes improve day-to-day operations:

  • FastNode disabled by default (#799) — the experimental fast-sync mode caused issues for some operators and is now opt-in
  • Snapshot join fix (#797) — new nodes joining from snapshots hit an error that prevented synchronization. Fixed.
  • Propagation proofs cleanup (#792) — stale propagation proofs are now properly garbage-collected
  • Vested payments fix (#790) — corrected module account usage for vested coin transfers
  • Seed persistence (#504) — improved how secret seeds survive node restarts
  • Onboarding clarity (#502) — better error messages and flow for new node operators
  • BLS crypto dependency (#606) — cleaned up go.sum entry for the BLS cryptography package

What It Means

This week's work is clearly preparing for the next release. Token-based auth is a major infrastructure change, inference got faster, and several operational pain points were resolved. The combination of auth overhaul + PoC proof hardening + stability fixes suggests v0.2.11 is not far off.

Week 10 stats: 14 closed items, 3 inference optimizations, 2 auth PRs, 2 PoC improvements, 7 stability fixes.