Testnet (08/2019—09/2020)
The Audius protocol began welcoming its first 3rd-party node operators into the network, with artist content and metadata being hosted by end users for the first time. Through this period, as more node operators were onboarded, the project team wound down most of their internally-operated nodes, maintaining a few as a canary mechanism to understand how the network is performing.
One month into this testnet period, at the end of September 2019, the Audius first-party client implementation launched publicly for the first time. This included basic functionality for uploading content, playing content, searching for / following artists, and more.
Over the following months, many more client features were shipped, including: notifications, mobile apps / desktop apps, remix competitions, and a welldocumented API for interfacing with user-operated nodes directly.
By the end of the testnet period, the protocol was being used by over 500,000 fans every month (see Section 1.3 for more details).