Blockchain
Urbit is not a blockchain, but it was started seven years before bitcoin, with a similar idea of trying to create a peer-to-peer network free from the influence of big business or government.
That is a major reason why Urbit is often discussed in the context of crypto and invited to conferences in the blockchain industry. You don’t have to spend much time on the Urbit Foundation’s website to come across some of the themes that are popular among blockchain advocates – the idea of trying to short-circuit middlemen and centralized applications that dominate online activity. “We think the internet is beyond saving. As it stands, MEGACORP will always manage our apps and services as we can no longer run them ourselves,” the site reads.
read more: Urbit Courts DAOs, Crypto Teams in Quest to Make the Internet P2P Again (2022)
Users are identified on the network by their Urbit IDs – four-syllable pronounceable names that are algorithm generated from a number and then registered as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. (For example, according to the website, the Urbit ID ~dalwel-fadrun is associated with the number 3,509,632,436.)
“Your Urbit ID is meant to feel a bit like a secret code name,” the website reads. “We want Urbit to be a single, simple interface for your entire digital life.”
Of course, this kind of club feel is an important part of the exercise with any blockchain ecosystem, with building a community of loyal followers being one of the hardest parts. And lately Urbit seems to be gaining some traction.
The chart above indicates that the user base is growing rapidly, with the caveat that an individual can own multiple “ships” or identities. Such growth is due in part to the introduction of personal server hosting services and better user interfaces that made it easier for normies (non-technical types) to join. The number of developers has doubled in the past year; there are now about 90 monthly active developers working on the project – comparable to some of the top 20 blockchain projects.
“Urbit didn’t really grow for a long time,” admits Josh Lehman, aka Wolref-podlex, executive director of the Urbit Foundation. “They were just enthusiasts.”
Urbit recently gained some notoriety to the general public after being mentioned in a Vanity Fair article, while another writer spent an entire weekend last September following attendees around Urbit’s own “Assembly” conference in Miami and then every detail in gonzo- recorded style. (Excerpt: “I met two girls from Minnesota who heard about Urbit through a podcast and wanted to see if they could learn tricks to build their fashion brand by coming here.”)
The conference also had some prominent speakers, including Balaji Srinivasan, who sparked further conversations about the network. Srinivasan, the “Network State” entrepreneur and author who more recently made headlines for his botched $1 million bitcoin bet, was a keynote speaker at the Miami conference. “Urbit actually wants to be a cathedral,” Srinivasan said in a video recording of the conversation. “It’s a bit of a bazaar, but it’s a bit of a bizarre cathedral right now.”
Origin story
Urbit describes itself as an operating system and network where users keep data on personal servers; that way, users have control over all the data they need to function on the network, unlike many blockchains where data is kept on-chain – a feature often championed for its transparency benefits. Then, using Urbit’s peer-to-peer network, users simply communicate with each other and keep local records of those interactions.
Curtis Yarvin, a computer scientist, started the project in 2002 – long before Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin White Paper was published in October 2008. stated that they were hard to ignore in any conversation about Urbit.
Read more: Urbit is Web3, weird and wonderful and I don’t care who made it (2022)
In 2019, Yarvin (aka ~sorreg-namtyv) stepped down as CTO, board member and voting shareholder of Tlon, the company that previously sponsored the development of Urbit. was no longer mine and became of the world.”
“Urbit is not yet equally good everywhere,” Yarvin wrote. “There are a few medium-sized cleanups in the pipeline in the short term. But this is a matter of months, not years. I don’t see an unknown unknown,” he said.
According to the Urbit Foundation’s website, the nonprofit was founded in 2021 when it split from Tlon, a private company formed in 2013 to work on the network.
Urbit proponents are quick to argue that the underlying programming language is simple and elegant, as it only needed to solve the problem of how best to set up a peer-to-peer network. The entire Urbit operating system supposedly compiles up to 33 lines of code, known as “Nock”.
There are plenty of Urbit talking points that sound like core arguments for Web3 – the imaginary next iteration of the Internet, which would promote decentralized protocols while reducing reliance on big tech companies like YouTube, Netflix and Amazon.
An example from Urbit’s website: “We usually just use our laptops as an access point to MEGACORP services. Our phones are the same. These services are great and convenient. But for that convenience we have traded control, ownership and privacy.”
One of the Urbit believers, Hocwyn Tiplex (he no longer uses his real name in a professional context), is a co-founder of the Uqbar Network, which is building a zero-knowledge rollup to Ethereum.
He says Urbit’s inherent peer-to-peer design makes it easy to build peer-to-peer applications and decentralized apps, known as dapps. So far there are apps for chatting and social media, as well as poker on the Urbit network.
“Peer-to-peer infrastructure is harder than it looks,” Tipx said last month at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2023 conference in Austin, Texas.
What is also difficult is building a community that can rally around any project, cryptocurrency or otherwise. Urbit’s weird little group of devout followers with secret code names could be a good start as the project tries to build a larger and more user-friendly ecosystem. Projects like Tipx’s show how the network could eventually transition to crypto.