I had a call a few weeks ago with @w about my status on project (re: %ecWj6gQ...). In the 1-2 weeks left of the grant time I didn't feel I would be able to complete the goal of the project. I was encountering difficult to debug and reason about situations while trying to implement the blobs replication and I/O scheduling.
However, there are still some things I could try to do:

• Implementing message signing and/or canonicalization, and verification, could be done orthogonal of I/O, and could be useful later. But I don't much of a use case for this.
• Implement ssb-tunnel. An sbot not even implementing SSB replication but just the ssb-tunnel API, would be useful.
• Implement client and server commands just for secret-handshake. This could be useful for building a sbot in a modular way, to have secret-handshake factored out into a separate process. It could also enable wrapping other protocols in secret-handshake.