Development Update — April 4

Skywire: Regional Saturation Scaling for Rewards

A significant economic change to the reward system: regional saturation scaling (#2278).

The problem — the presence pool distributes rewards equally across all uptime-eligible visors. If a single country has 1,000 visors, it receives 1,000 shares. This creates an incentive to flood a single region with cheap VPS instances to maximize reward extraction, which distorts the geographic distribution of the network.

The fix — apply diminishing returns to the presence pool based on unique IP addresses per country. Countries with more unique IPs still receive a larger total allocation, but each additional IP contributes less. Default is square-root scaling (configurable via --sat-exp flag). A country with 100 IPs gets sqrt(100) = 10 units of weight per IP instead of 1 per IP; a country with 4 IPs gets sqrt(4) = 2 units per IP — so the 100-IP country gets 5× the weight of the 4-IP country, not 25×.

Performance refactor — reward calculation now uses native Go JSON parsing instead of shelling out to jq for each survey, map-based frequency counting, and shared pool calculation logic extracted into reusable functions. The reward calc script used to take minutes for a full run; now it completes in seconds.

Skywire: DMSG Vendor Update

Unified services config (#2277) — dmsg is now vendored at commit 63477a8, which reads DMSG endpoints from ServicesJSON (the unified services-config.json) using _dmsg suffixed fields. As a result:

• deployment/dmsghttp-config.json was removed along with its embed directive
• The conf dmsgconf command now prints ServicesJSON
• The rewards calc uses ServicesJSON
• Config gen fallback uses ServicesJSON

Redesigned service DMSG bootstrap — the new bootstrap flow is: embedded config first → DMSG refresh → HTTP fallback. This gives fast startup (no HTTP calls on common path) while still allowing fresh configs to propagate.

Skywire: Autoconfig Fixes

A cluster of related fixes for the autoconfig script used by the Arch/Debian packages:

• Use SKYENV for all config defaults — don’t hardcode -p -b flags that override the user’s config file
• Set SKYENV=/etc/skywire.conf for config gen if the file exists, so package-managed deployments use the right config path
• Add -r to test config — needed for deterministic test output
• Suppress debug output in the autoconfig path so users don’t see internal log noise
• Seed test config from prod config instead of passing the SK manually, then simplified further to let SKYENV handle the SK
• Remove prod seed from test config gen (#fa7f66)

Release workflow fix — the release workflow was still trying to build cmd/release, which was removed earlier this week when hardware wallet handling was moved to the root module. Fixed to build the root module instead.

DMSG: More CI Tests

Ctrl+C handling fix (#370) — Ctrl+C wasn’t working on long-running dmsg commands. Root causes:

• --with-kill (force-exit after 3 interrupts) was hidden and off by default
• isFatalHTTPErr only checked context.DeadlineExceeded, so context.Canceled from Ctrl+C was ignored and retry loops continued
• Retry sleeps didn’t respect context cancellation
• Outer retry loop didn’t check context at the top

Fixed: --with-kill defaults to true and is unhidden. context.Canceled is now treated as fatal. Retry sleeps use select on the context. Outer loop checks context at the top.

E2E test expansion — new test coverage for:

• dmsg curl -B (direct client, no discovery)
• dmsg curl -S (specific server)
• HTTP discovery vs. dmsg discovery
• HTTP served over DMSG