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In this step-by-step guide, you will learn how to stake your KSMs, the native token of the Kusama blockchain, using Polkadot JS and the Polkadot Browser Extension. You will go through the following key steps:
Since it is recommended by Polkadot / Kusama for most users to use the Polkadot.js Browser Extension to create their addresses, we are focusing on this method. In case you want to explore alternatives, have a look here.
Make sure to install the Polkadot.js Browser Extension before you get started. You can download the extension for Chrome/Brave and FireFox.
Once you successfully installed the extension, click on the icon for Poladot extension - a P button in your browser bar to open the interface. You will be prompted to create an account if you don't have one already.
Click the little Gear Icon in the upper right corner and choose Kusama Relay Chain under Display Address Format For.
Then, click on the + Icon followed by Create new account. Uncheck the box next to “Derive new account from existing” & click “Create an account from new seed”.
Write down your mnemonic seed phrase and securely store it. Whoever has access to the mnemonic seed also has access to your funds! Check the box on the bottom and click “Next step”. Choose a descriptive name for your Stash account as well as a strong password. Then click “Add the account with the generated seed”.
Never share your Mnemonic Seed Phrase!
Congratulations, you have successfully created your Kusama account. You will now also find the address on the Polkadot JS Website under “Accounts” — reload the page, if this is not the case. You can now fund this account.
In order to successfully bond your funds and nominate your validator set, you need a separate account, namely your Controller Account. You will perform everyday staking operations like changing validators or claiming rewards using this account.
To create your Controller Account, use the Polkadot browser extension. Click the plus icon in the top right corner. Then click Create new account.
Now you have two options:
The second option is preferable because this lets you have independent keys. So, click Create new account.
Congratulations, you have successfully created your Kusama Controller account. You will now also find the address in Polkadot JS under Accounts — reload the page if this is not the case.
On the Polkadot JS website, make sure that you are connected to the Kusama mainnet. You can change the network by clicking the network symbol in the top left corner of your screen.
Polkadot JS supports several networks, make sure to choose “Kusama” before you continue
Before starting the Nomination process, send some funds from your Stash to your Controller account in order to cover transactions fees (1 or 2 KSM should be plenty).
To start the staking process, click “Staking” in the “Network” drop-down menu.
Afterward, visit the “Account actions” tab and click the “+ Validator” — button.
You can perform all staking operations under the Account actions tab in the Staking menu
Choose the Stash & Controller accounts accordingly, choose the amount of KSMs you want to use for staking under value bonded. Make sure to leave some funds in your Stash account. Bond a max. of 95% of your tokens so that you are still able to pay for transaction fees.
Choose a destination account for your rewards under payment destination.
Then click next to bond your token.
Make sure to leave some KSM unbonded, so that you can pay for the transaction fees
You can nominate up to 16 validators. Simply select the validators of your choice by clicking on them in the left box. You can unselect them from the right box by clicking on them again. Alternatively, you can also use the search bar at the top to look for specific validators by name or address.
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HRMhY2CtVMp2yVSieKvq8Y8FHAhRKrGGMd6MoQe3iN6uJ2D
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Then click Bond & Nominate.
Please note that you cannot specify the amount delegated to a particular validator. Your bonded DOTs will be spread out among the validators you selected according to the NPoS algorithm.
Choose your validators wisely — we recommend doing some research about them before your nomination
In the following window, click Sign & Submit. Afterward, enter your password and click “Sign the transaction” to conclude your nomination.
Almost done! The only thing left is signing the transaction!
Congratulations, you are now a Nominator on the Kusama network!
Your nominations will be effective in the next era (~ in up to 6 hours).
You can manage your staking operations with Polkadot JS. In the Staking menu, click Account Actions and then click the three dots on the very right to perform the following operations:
Please note that if you have bonded your tokens, a period of 7 days needs to pass before you can unbond. Once your tokens are unbonded, you need to issue another transaction, namely Withdraw Unbonded in order to be able to transfer your funds.
Understanding Active Nominations
Active nominations & Inactive nominations are the validators of your nominations that are currently in the active validator set. In general, your only one validator will be shown as active. That is because the algorithm used to distribute your stake is optimized so that each validator in the set roughly has the same amount of stake backing him/her. Your stake is therefore usually only backing one of the validators you nominated.
Waiting nominations are the validators that are currently not in the active set.
By ~dosnul-sogteg
As a mathematician/cryptographer working at Chorus One in the role of Team Lead, I tend to dive deep into the fundamentals of cryptographic, tokenomics and consensus protocols while helping out with due-diligence for investments and network onboarding.
Crypto has been a passion for a long time and it graduated to a work/life obsession in the last 3–4 years. More recently, I have also been diving into Urbit although, on that, I still need to familiarize myself with a lot of the terminology and the overall philosophy.
This article, the second of a series of three on Urbit and Uqbar pieces published by Chorus One, is an attempt to report on my findings and what I consider great about these two projects from a technical perspective. Also, last but not least, it touches on how this all relates to crypto and the fundamental problem of “Crypto = Web3”, explored in the previous article on “Why Web3 needs Urbit”.
There was a certain moment I had when learning about Crypto that one could categorize as an “A-ha!” moment. I really see how this technology can — although not guaranteed — revolutionize how we get together to build things and solve problems.
Similarly, I think a little while back I got an “A-ha!” moment with Urbit. I understood what it was and why it was different. Why perhaps its idiosyncrasies are a feature and not a bug, and how this technology can change how we own private data and compute over it.
But it was just recently that I had a “Eureka!” moment! I know, I’m slow to catch on. It was when I identified the potential synergies between these two realms of blockchain and Urbit. My ideas were embryonic to say the least, and certainly not original. As usual with such things, brighter minds had similar ideas before, and I was very happy that in this case, not only have they arrived at similar conclusions, but the technical execution is much more sophisticated than I had first envisioned.
This article tries to describe each of the ideas involved: What is a blockchain, what is Urbit, and how Uqbar — the first project trying to unify both — is a gem among gems.
Let’s dive in.
Please take a look at this picture. If you have some experience with Crypto, you might identify this somehow.
What you are seeing is an often idealized picture of a blockchain. Each diamond shape represents the state of the chain at that given moment in time. The squares are what is called a block — where the blockchain name comes from — and it contains a set of transactions.
These blocks update the blockchain state in a predictable and sequential manner, represented by the solid vertical lines. Here a transaction can be any data that you want to persist, for example, one encoding the transfer of value. But blockchain technology promises you that they have a mechanism to permissionlessly replicate this structure and to allow any participant to introduce said transactions.
By “permissionlessly”, I mean that so long as you satisfy open and well-defined requirements, no one, not even some set of participants in the network itself, can censor you, i.e. forbid you from replicating or participating in the network.
One can debate to what extent existing blockchains satisfy this property, but it cannot be argued that in principle this is true. Similarly, no one can censor you from sending transactions to the network even if you do not participate fully in the network, that is, you are not replicating this data structure yourself.
On can (understandably) ask oneself, “What is the use case here? Why would someone do something so inefficient?” To this, in my opinion, the answer lies in trustless decentralization.
Applications like payments are an obvious candidate, as the trustless decentralization afforded by cash systems are running against market-fit difficulties in the age of information: for example, you don’t truly own your bank balance as anyone who witnessed a bank run can attest. But due to the ability of many blockchains to support arbitrary computation, there is no limit on the applications that can be run in a trustless and decentralized manner.
Decentralized finance or DeFi is a prominent one but gaming, supply chain tracking and verification, identity distribution, crowd funding and many others are in sight.
A blockchain is able to accomplish all this by merging three paradigms: cryptography for verification, deterministic processing for replication and incentivization for bootstrapping and security.
What you see in the picture above is the idea of determinism: that a new block is deterministically computed from information contained in previous blocks plus new inputs. Since every network participant, when honest, computes the exact same thing, this makes it easy to essentially ”vote” on the current aggregated correct state of the chain, that is, its replicated state.
For the purposes of the present article, this is enough of an understanding of blockchain technology, but I would like to add one particular aspect of the cryptography of blockchains that will be important later on. That is the idea of a Merkle tree. A Merkle tree looks like this:
This is a binary tree! A binary tree is a data structure formed by nodes and directed edges. Each node can contain arbitrary data and incoming and outgoing links to other nodes. In a binary tree each node can have at most two children (incoming edges) and one parent (outgoing edges). A leaf node is a node without children and the root node is the unique node without a parent.
The special thing about it is how it is constructed and its purpose. A Merkle tree serves as a short cryptographic proof of the integrity of an ordered set of data. Imagine that you have an ordered set of data.
For example, a list of transactions. Here is how to build the Merkle tree for this set. You select a hash function and apply it to each transaction. You define these hashes to be the leaf nodes of the tree (the base layer) while keeping the order. Then, you iteratively build a parent node by concatenating the hashes of two neighbouring nodes and hashing it. At the end, the root node is called the Merkle root of the tree.
Its purpose: proof of inclusion. You want to be sure that your transaction has been included in the block that was processed. We can use Merkle trees for this because the only way to arrive at a given Merkle root is via this specific ordered list of transactions! Any change in order or content is detectable since it changes the Merkle root.
If you sent one of these transactions and know its position in the block you hash it and use the Merkle tree to see if it matches all the way to the root. Notice that you only need the hashes of the tree along your path to the root. This is why it is so efficient.
As an extra bonus: error detection. We send transactions over the network together with the Merkle root. The chances that the Merkle root (being short) is corrupted while in transit is much smaller than the chances that a set of transactions is corrupted. At the destination, we compute the Merkle root from the transactions and compare. If they match, we can be certain that the blocks arrived correctly.
For the interested: the main reason for this is that the hash function is close to what we call a one-way function.
Now take a look at the following picture:
What you see is Urbit, or an idealized representation of it. Urbit is the first completely functional stack starting at the virtualized operating system up to a computer identity and networking layer.
Here, each diamond represents the state of the computer. The whole computer! Again, the whole computer: memory contents, code, networking stack, buffers and, crucially, identity! Also here, each block represents inputs. Any input. Of course, invalid inputs are ignored, but correct inputs cause the system to update its state in a deterministic manner. This is what is meant by functional.
Like triangles only exist in Plato’s ideal world but interact with the real world via something we call “brains”, so does a functional machine need to interact with the real world. So there is a “brain” in the form of this thin runtime layer that takes care of this interface and allows us to scry the Urbit state.
In Urbit the state can be interpreted seamlessly as a number. A gigantic integer: 2Gb (giga-bits) long! That is a number with approximately 400 million digits! Under this interpretation, one can think of the squares in the image as other numbers (input numbers) and the horizontal arrows as a very complex equation using weird operations that take the state number and the input number and computes a new state number.
Well, THAT is Urbit! But that’s not all: the beauty of Urbit is that it figured out a way to design everything in such a way as to keep this representation intact but actually have a very simple state transition equation. Well, it is still too complicated to be of practical use for a human but it is simple enough for a human to understand what is going on.
This is similar to how one can understand general relativity and develop an intuition for it despite most calculations — except for the most simple ones — having to be left to a computer. This is what is meant with “Urbit is simple and a single developer can understand it all”.
I will go briefly on how this is done below but before that, a reader might rightly be wondering: “But isn’t this how every computer works? Aren’t these all 0s and 1s encoded in some way?”. I want to address this insightful question. The short answer is no. The long answer goes into the heart of what is meant by deterministic and being a true Turing machine.
Urbit being a true Turing machine is, as mentioned above, defined by its starting state and state transition function. It is a mathematical function acting on natural numbers. In this comparison, an ordinary computer is messier. An imperfect but useful analogy is that an ordinary computer is instead like a function on a subset of the real number line.
It is not defined for all numbers, only a subset, and even for the numbers for which it is defined, any small imprecision might cause you to fall outside of this set and fail. Anyone who has worked on trying to build performant mathematical libraries that need to work with arbitrary approximations of irrational numbers using the IEEE floating point specification knows the pain (there are more of us than rightfully deserved), and that’s why we tend to stay away from 80s FORTRAN code. It is not that we can’t rewrite it in C, but we cannot guarantee that it won’t break anything down the line!
As an interesting side note, recall that we shun floating point numbers in the EVM (the Ethereum virtual machine). If you recall adding a token to your wallet in Ethereum you must have noticed this “decimals” field. This is because we would like to represent and work with fractional amounts of this token but the EVM does not support it. Every ERC20 token contract stores address balances in an unsigned integer and there is the “decimals” constant that specifies where to put the decimal point for correct visual representation (usually 18).
So, returning to the Urbit “axiomatic description”, the first step is to define your state number as a specific encoding of a binary tree. So now your state is represented in a data structure as follows (see the previous section on blockchains for a more detailed description of a binary tree):
Each node contains what in Urbit is called an atom and is just a natural number. Here already an important simplification occurs: normally natural numbers and computer unsigned integers are beasts of different worlds: the Platonic world of mathematics and the real world of computer science. In Urbit we are in the platonic world! It is difficult to overstate the importance of this quality to developers.
Next and main step: we build a computer. Perhaps you heard about Conway’s game of life. It is a simple example of how to do this: define some rules to transform some data structure (the state) and show that it is a universal Turing machine. I don’t want to digress here so I will just say that this is exactly what a computer is: a universal Turing machine. The things that can be computed are exactly the things that a universal Turing machine can do.
So in our situation, we do the same: define a set of operations transforming this binary tree so that in conjunction they form a universal Turing machine. We can now encode any algorithm as a sequence of these operations on this binary tree.
This set of operations, together with the initial state of the binary tree, define an input format where a number as input can be interpreted as a pair <code-text>(program, arguments)<code-text>, where the <code-text>program<code-text> is the set of operations to perform and <code-text>arguments<code-text> are any extra input for the program. It can then follow the set of instructions and compute a new end state of the binary tree (or never halt).
Urbit found a way to make this work with just a set of 12 operations on this binary tree. It can famously fit on a t-shirt. This encoding standard and set of operations are called Nock and it can be seen as the assembly of Urbit. Here it is — taken from the Nock definition page — in all its glory but still needing some explanation we won’t go into.
This pseudo-code is defining the operators <code-text>?<code-text>, <code-text>+<code-text>, <code-text>=<code-text>, <code-text>/<code-text>, <code-text>#<code-text> and <code-text>*<code-text>. Please go check the source linked above. But here is a short description of these operators:
Not only did Urbit come up with an economical definition of a functional computer (a universal Turing machine in this case) but it made it practical and modern. Urbit is implemented in C as a VM. The performance is already good enough to be useful and there is an engaging community of developers making real-world applications for it. One of them is Uqbar.
There are two very important aspects of Urbit that I still did not touch upon. The goodies don’t end here. First, Urbit is a computer with an identity. More precisely, in the initial state definition of an Urbit instance, there is already encoded a boot procedure that requires a specific kind of cryptographic secret key. Those keys are finite in number and can only be obtained, or correctly derived if you own a type of NFT on Ethereum. The choice of Ethereum here was arbitrary; they chose to use a blockchain for this and chose Ethereum because of its maturity as a platform. More importantly, that means that each Urbit computer is uniquely identified.
Second, Urbit uses this property of identity to pre-define a complete network topology layer for all of the Urbit computers in such a way that routing packets is simple and private — via encryption — between sender and receiver. This consolidates IP, routing tables, DNS, and TLS/SSL all into one single transparent stack accessible by default to any Urbit computer. You just need the receiver’s name (or identity) to be able to talk to it securely and privately. These are called “@p” and take the shape of a tilde (~) followed by a few pronounceable syllables. For example, I’m <code-text>~dosnul-sogteg<code-text>.
Finally, this network is functional and typed in the computer science sense. Every packet in the network is typed and will yield the same result (return packet) every time it is applied to its destination (if it is online). This forces the input packet to contain all necessary input to be properly decoded and inserted into the destination's transition function.
The power of computers with identity cannot be understated. It turns computers into avatars of its users uniformly for all applications. Since the identities are scarce (finite), this helps build a social reputation system in the network and disincentivizes bad behaviors like spamming.
On the other hand, Urbit wants to be a new private server for every user, so that we don’t need to use and keep our data in centralized services. Going back to the pre-internet era is not an option either. We are social animals, and computers are most valuable to us when we use them to network and collaborate. But there is one thing missing: we can message but we can’t transact. We have an identity, but that’s not enough for trust.
Urbit is missing a shared trustless and permissionless piece of state. A blockchain. Enter Uqbar.
Uqbar is exactly what was alluded to above. A part of the Urbit state that is shared in a permissionless and trustless way. It is a blockchain whose client is an Urbit application. So if you think about it, much like the movie Inception we implemented the state transition of the blockchain as part of the state transition of the Urbit computer. Running a blockchain is executing its state transition and we do it by executing Urbit’s state transition.
This is not so shocking when stated as implementing a universal Turing machine — for example, the EVM — in another universal Turing machine. The first and third figures of this article, as you may have noticed, are the same figure after all! But this can be viewed better as enlarging the blockchain context to have at its disposal a full operating system stack. We will go through what this implies in the next section. In this section, I want to delve a little deeper into some aspects of Uqbar to clarify what I meant in the beginning of the article when I said that “the technical execution is much more sophisticated than I had first envisioned”.
If Uqbar was “just” a blockchain client implemented in Urbit it would already be pretty exciting. But Uqbar has a few other things going for it. Most notably, it comes with a compiler that can take any arbitrary Nock code and generate a zero-knowledge prover and verifier for it. Thus not only execution of on-chain code paths, but off-chain as well. This is absolutely huge and goes back to a combination of the functional aspect to the simplicity of Nock.
Recall, Nock is Urbit “assembly” and it translates any algorithm to a lengthy sequence build of 12 basic Nock operations. Seizing the opportunity, Uqbar built a zero-knowledge prover/verifier circuit for each of these operations. This means that block proposers — known as sequencers in Uqbar’s parlance — can post proofs of correct execution when emitting blocks, and verifiers can quickly verify correctness. I won’t go into more details of zero-knowledge magic, there are plenty of good introductory articles about it like this one. Note that, to be precise, we are not even exploiting the zero-knowledge aspect of it only the computational compression aspect.
This allows for very powerful light clients. Since Urbit computers have identities, Sybil resistance is trivial: Uqbar block verification mechanism can be configured to demand verifiers to be stars[¹], and stars are by nature intended to be service providers.
They maintain the state and archive the blockchain while providing state bootstrapping to the light clients. The light clients can/would be run in any end-user ship. This is how blockchains are supposed to be accessed: in your local always-on server. Because it is always-on and maintenance-free, light clients can be bootstrapped once and (almost) never again without the need for an external (to the network) data availability layer much like the Mina network.
But this still goes beyond all of this. As mentioned before, the proofs can be proofs about statements outside the chain, i.e., any Urbit computation. This of course has some caveats as, for example, the off-chain state — at least in some obfuscated form — has still to be made available to verifiers somehow. Nonetheless, it is to be expected that this will have incredible applications in the future. More on this in the next section.
An Urbit application, being a subtree of the state tree, can easily and transparently access read-only information in the Uqbar shared state. For example:
This last point was alluded to in passing in the last section but is worth elaborating on. It is not easy to accomplish this currently, and dApps tend to go to decentralized “indexers” at best or “trust-bottlenecked” services like Infura or OpenSea at worst. A very good read describing this problem, and probably the fairest criticism of “Web3” around, is in my opinion My first impressions of web3 by @moxie.
💡 An Urbit application is free to run and process any “indexing” required to give the user the best UX while keeping this data private.
ZK technology is a game changer and what is/was holding it back is the computational burden for generating proofs. Despite Ethereum recently moving to PoS, and in doing so abandoning wasteful PoW mining, there are multiple projects considering mining hardware — GPUs, ASICs and FPGAs — for proof generation. Talk about full-cycle. Performing this computation exclusively on block proposers is useful but limiting.
One can imagine that in a completely functional OS and network stack, where everyone has access to the shared state while being able to keep their own personal relevant state and emit proofs of statements about it, the lines between on and off-chain will be so blurry as to be meaningless. Well-designed applications will be truly decentralized (as in uncensorable), private (as in they will leak only the necessary information), and scalable (as most computation can/will be done locally).
As a concrete example, one can implement a country’s complete tax system in such a way that the government does not know what particular transactions were made, but they can be sure that they are correctly taxed and paid. This is, of course, very very far off, but it is in the realm of possibility.
It is our belief that the synergies of these two truly remarkable, not too technically dissimilar technologies can truly unlock the capabilities of Web3. In this paradigm, businesses and organizations (DAOs) can prop up from just a few collaborators and truly be uncensorable. Value can be derived from direct measurable KPIs, and not by external parties (most of which are not even democratic in nature, much less egalitarian).
As a final, more immediate set of examples: we can have an automatically monetized, decentralized, uncensorable github, twitter, office, zoom (in small caps!). Games, forums, email: anything in Web2 has a better version here.
[¹]: Planets, stars and galaxies are how Urbit calls its computers depending on their position on the the a priori defined network topology. See the previous section.
Chorus One is excited to announce that we have onboarded the Passage3D ecosystem as validators.
Passage, or Passage 3D, provides tools for creating a metaverse of virtual worlds that may be accessed using a web browser with no hardware requirements.
The Passage worlds are led by the Strange Clan game, as well as the Blok Hous, which host live NFT auctions and artist performances. These are the inaugural metaverse worlds in the Cosmos ecosystem. The Passage ecosystem runs on the Cosmos Ecosystem and makes use of CPU capacity from the Akash Network decloud with the desire to also decentralise its GPU.
Released on the Juno blockchain, the Passage Marketplace will allow NFTs in the Cosmos Ecosystem to be traded, viewed, and transferred, with ATOM serving as the primary token of exchange. This will be the first NFT-Marketplace to use the native Cosmos ecosystem token.
The Passage token ($PASG) serves as the universal utility token for all Passage worlds. The developers of the new world will stake Passage tokens in order to build a new world within the Passage metaverse.
The APR for World Creator Staking will be the same as for ordinary staking. The needed amount and lock-up duration are determined by the world’s scale. This model will begin with a USD value and will not be tied to a set number of Passage tokens. ATOM payouts are converted to PASG rewards for staking pools.
The gaming industry has a current market value of $200 billion and is expected to reach $340 billion by 2027. At Chorus One, we believe that GameFi and NFTs will become increasingly important in this share. Passage3D is here to expand and improve the GameFi ecosystem.
Passage has developed a Cosmos SDK blockchain in collaboration with the development company VitWit. The blockchain will initially offer staking, vesting, and airdrop capabilities, with a goal of counting 100 validators at blockchain genesis, using the Cosmos SDK. The blockchain’s major features will be a mix of security and efficiency, allowing for a large volume transaction rate with minimal costs.
The Passage token will have a low initial circulating supply of 145 million tokens with a fixed supply capped at 2 billion tokens.
There is a high initial inflation of 50%, followed by a 35% decline each year until maximum supply is attained after year 5. After year 5, staking rewards will be derived from Marketplace transaction costs. 71% of the available tokens are associated with staking incentives.
Aside from the more typical payouts for staking the token, all $PASG stakers will receive in-world advantages for assisting in the security of the blockchain. Savings on streaming Passage worlds and marketplace discounts on transaction costs (0.4–1.2% depending on stake amount) are among the perks. Find more information here.
You need to withdraw rewards and re-stake them with some frequency if you want to make use of compounding returns hence, additional delegation is needed for compounding. There is an un-bonding period of 21 days.
Urbit has gained some renown among crypto enthusiasts in recent years as an ambitious and compelling use case of NFTs to power a novel computing system and network. The technical stack that Urbit has developed is impressive and far-reaching, but some criticize its perceived opacity and lack of a precise use-case. If your first impression of Urbit came from a deep-dive into the intricacies of the OS, network, and identity system, you might be left wondering what Urbit’s specific use case even is. Is there a problem Urbit is trying to solve, or is it all just a severe case of NIH syndrome?
The reality is that there is a problem that Urbit solves, and it’s a complex enough problem that it won’t be obvious to most people, but it’s a deep and pernicious enough problem that it affects everyone using the internet. A rudimentary understanding of Urbit’s problem space can be gained from this tweet from Philip Monk, CTO of Tlon, the primary company driving Urbit development. Urbit is a solution to deep technical limitations of the internet that prevent it from being used the way it should: as a permissionless peer-to-peer network that gives freedom and responsibility to its users.
If this explanation feels under-explored, read on for a deep dive into the core value proposition from Urbit to users and developers alike. But before we begin, we should clarify a basic philosophical understanding of Web3.
“Decentralization” is a commonly used buzzword in Web3 and elsewhere, with much said about new companies whose product is to decentralize some aspect of digital experience. Because of the enormous financial success of Bitcoin and other DeFi technologies, a case can be made that merely decentralizing a product is a sufficient advantage that consumers will flock to it. But this is a poor understanding of what consumers value in crypto, and thereby a flawed approach to Web3’s path to victory.
Bitcoin was, of course, not the first decentralized digital currency ever invented. E-Cash and Bit Gold were predecessors to Bitcoin in this domain, and they each used cryptography-powered precursors to blockchains to make digital payments permissionless. What made Bitcoin more successful than its predecessors is not solely that it was more decentralized (although in some cases it was), but that it was much more secure. The combination of decentralization and security gave Bitcoin holders ownership that they could rely on, and that went on to make it a successful product.
Decentralization is best understood as a special case of ownership, where trusted third parties in central control of a product reduce the user’s intuition that they own the product they use. Merely decentralizing a component of a product does not necessarily compel an end-user to use it, but to some degree, every end-user wants to own their tools if they can.
That’s all to say that Web3’s critics are correct that decentralization itself is not a product. However, decentralization can be a critical component of ownership, and ownership is a critical component of what makes Urbit a compelling product to end-users. Urbit is decentralized, but not for decentralization’s sake. Urbit is “yours forever” and that requires it to have many attributes, including permanence, security, and of course, decentralization.
The story and namesake of “Web3” is perhaps best summarized by this article on Ethereum’s website, which goes through the stages of the internet’s development and shows how a new, blockchain-powered paradigm can shift the balance of power and take ownership from giant tech corporations and give it back to users.
As is well understood by visionaries of a decentralized web, the internet of the early 1990’s was idealized as a permissionless space in which everyone had a voice and could make their own mark on the world by learning and using a set of open protocols that did not discriminate on who could operate them. The early internet was a pluralistic “Wild West” of custom-built websites and services, and while the distribution of activity was anything but equal, there was little resembling a monopoly on most use cases. Idealists saw this web as the beginning of a new flowering of culture and technology, where mass media would become obsolete in comparison to an open field where undiscovered talent could win hearts and minds by their own bootstraps.
As the internet’s ecosystem developed, the idealists only partially got their wish. The internet did become a phenomenal landscape for small contributors to make a big impact, but only under the patronage of monolithic platforms. Somewhere along the way, the expectation that users would have actually owned their means of communication was subverted. As it turned out, running infrastructure and operating servers is boring and hard. End-users needed powerful platforms to obfuscate the complexity of the tech stack, and were willing to give up their ownership in exchange for an approachable user interface.
Detractors and sympathizers alike refer to the early, pluralistic internet as “Web1” and the modern, centralized internet as “Web2”. In accordance with this scheme, the hypothesized successor paradigm of the Internet is called “Web3”.
Proponents of Web3 see in blockchain technology an opportunity for a new phase of development that corrects this flaw by taking the responsibilities of Web2 infrastructure and offloading them to consensus networks that are owned by everyone and no-one. Rather than private infrastructure managed by giant corporations, web services can use public infrastructure managed by the community, and the power structure of the internet can thereby resemble the same fair and open field that the Web1 idealists envisioned, while offering an equal or better user experience to Web2.
Blockchains are a promising technology for secure digital ownership by providing one immeasurably valuable feature to its users: trustless consensus on data. By nature, applications must rely on a single source of truth for a dataset in order to be sensible to the developer and the user. In order to obviate the need for a trusted third party to secure and manage this data, consensus must be reached across a network on what is true. This problem is best summarized by the infamous Byzantine generals problem, to which blockchains offer a reasonable solution.
Blockchains also offer another potential way to revolutionize software by offering developers the ability to create new, scarce assets ex nihilo. By allowing investors to speculate on these spawned assets, free and open source software finds a new financial model where code can be given away to the community without thankless developers having nothing to show for their contributions. Given the scope of work required to make systems that are sensible to everyday users, this advantage is truly invaluable.
However, the aforementioned Byzantine fault tolerance comes at a cost in blockchains. Consensus over a network offers a better assurance of ownership to users, but duplicates work that, in the centralized case, only needs to be performed once. The inevitable tradeoff between ownership and efficiency in blockchain networks is best summarized by Vitalik Buterin’s scalability trilemma, which shows that the two most valuable components of blockchains are fundamentally at odds with a third attribute that powerful systems seek to maximize, which is efficiency.
Solutions exist which extend blockchain capabilities in all three domains, so the trilemma is not completely binding. But to the degree that the trilemma is unsolved, scalability constraints manifest themselves in gas fees, which make it costly to write transactions to any chain that is uncompromising on secure decentralization. Costly writes are an anti-feature that make it difficult to excite end-users, and so this limitation threatens the ability of blockchains to obviate monopolies powered by Web2 infrastructure.
Privacy and latency are also notable challenges in a blockchain environment. Infrastructure that, by default, gives read access to everyone and only adds new data at set intervals, forms a limiting use case for many applications that are expected to be responsive and permissioned. Like the scalability problem, these problems have prospective solutions, but still represent technical hurdles for developers to grapple with, that Web2 solutions can simply centralize away. There are several other hurdles of this type that would deserve exploration in deeper dive.
These limitations to blockchain-based infrastructure have, to some degree, already been explored in other places, and may one day each find satisfactory solutions. But one under-explored limitation is the repeated reliance of Web3 applications on trust in order to access blockchain data. This isn’t even necessarily a hard limitation in blockchains as a tool, but can be observed as a pattern in the industry.
Uniswap, for example, is served from a specific domain name, and consumers implicitly trust that domain name with their tokens. MetaMask is a ubiquitous non-custodial Ethereum wallet, but uses hard-coded proprietary endpoints to access on-chain data. OpenSea, despite its name, does not even claim to be permissionless — it’s explicitly a custodial service with administrators to intervene if something goes wrong.
These hallmarks of the Web3 ecosystem are all fueled by a cultural environment that eschews centralization and prioritizes ownership, and yet find themselves making similar compromises to Web2 companies that promise to democratize the ability for people to express themselves. Rather than creating a system that is thoroughly trustless, some trust is inserted into the equation in order to iron out the difficulties of operating permissionless systems, whether blockchain networks or other peer-to-peer protocols.
Again in Web3 as in Web2, complexity is hidden from the user by an interface that achieves a level of human-comprehensibility by offloading user choice to the provider. There are many exceptions, just as in the Web2 era there were alternatives to centralized services that could be used, but were not mainstream. But there is a reason why the choices that make compromises to user ownership tend to win in this environment, and it’s clear that the reason is not lack of access to blockchains as a tool.
Despite countless efforts to make user-owned applications and networks reliant solely on peers, the role of nodes in any solution is costly to discount. Solutions that give primacy to peers still run nodes to pick up the slack caused by the intermittency of peers. In the Web3 world, offloading all node work to blockchains manifests itself in the cost of writes and the need to obfuscate the gas expense. The need for servers did not go away with blockchains, but only made itself manifest in new ways. Knowing this, the question of a user-owned internet returns to its old question: how can we create a world where each user runs a node?
The underlying need for user-owned servers is not breaking news to those familiar with the history of the internet. In the idealistic days of the early web, user-owned servers were simply a given — as applications became easier to use, always-connected services would follow suit, and the internet of the future would be a patchwork of independent personal servers hosting whichever services were important to the user. In this way, the developments of both Web2 and Web3 technologies can be seen as an adjustment made in response to the failure of personal servers to thrive in the consumer market.
We have made a case for why blockchains cannot provide an answer to the former problem. But do blockchains, and other advancements in computing, have anything to say about the latter?
One interesting case to consider in the landscape of user-owned servers is the omnipresence of personal routers. A router has much in common with a server from a consumer’s point of view: it’s a black box that sits somewhere out of the way. It needs to always be powered on and connected to a network, and you will find out quickly if it’s been unplugged. If it malfunctions, getting it working again is a top priority. In order to do your business, you have to connect to it — what exactly it’s doing is not always clear to the end-user, but that it’s important is well-understood.
Find a personal server that meets all three of these conditions, and we can begin to imagine a new computing paradigm. In practice, Unix servers typically fail on all three, and where they succeed in one domain, they typically compromise on at least one of the others.
A general study of successful consumer products is also helpful in understanding how and why personal servers failed in the market. This article by Lane Rettig makes a concise case for the viability of tools in the marketplace:
“What the tools we rely on the most heavily have in common is that they’re all simple, durable, and ours.” ~ Lane Rettig
While personal routers do not always satisfy the property of ownership, one can see how their value proposition fits neatly into this model. Unix servers, on the other hand, have only ownership to offer. While they are arguably simple from a highly technical point of view, none of this simplicity is legible to the non-technical user. And their durability is certainly not under question by professionals who rely on them, but non-professionals are almost universally unable to replicate that impression.
But why is Unix in particular under question? The answer is, there is not much else to offer consumers in the way of personal servers. Other solutions exist or have existed, but mostly in the business domain, and mostly targeted at professionals. Servers targeted at tinkerers and privacy advocates have seen some success, but even in that market, Unix is almost always the backbone of their software stack. This may shed significant light on the failure of personal servers in the marketplace: no fully capable operating system has been constructed with the personal server use-case in mind, except for various implementations of Unix. Unix, of course, was never designed for everyday consumers.
Urbit is a novel software stack, with its own OS, network, and identity system, built de nihilo from elementary primitives. The OS, as the centerpiece of the system, aims to fulfill the use case of a personal server that is simple, durable, and yours. Urbit uses many theoretical advancements in software engineering to achieve this outcome, most notably determinism, referential transparency, and cryptography.
Much remains to be said about the innovations made to create a general purpose server that feels more like a mechanical clock than a fighter jet cockpit, and a deep dive into Urbit’s architecture is recommended to engineers who want to understand the system at more than a superficial level. But for our purposes, it’s also worth taking a glance at our earlier example of the personal router to examine how Urbit compares.
Urbit is as valuable as the personal router. The end-user’s access to the internet is mediated by their router, and the internet is an invaluable ecosystem of force-multiplying services. The Urbit network, similarly, can fulfill the same potential. By adding powerful primitives and a unified back-end to the protocol by which individual Urbit nodes communicate, Urbit’s network promises to lay the foundation for networked applications that can compete with, and even exceed, the services provided on the modern internet.
Urbit is as low maintenance as the personal router. It is designed to never reach an unrecoverable state, and even reboots should never be necessary. The commitment to minimalism and determinism at every turn has paid dividends for Urbit’s developers, and while it cannot be called “zero maintenance” yet, the path to that milestone today yields more known unknowns than unknown unknowns.
Urbit is as opaque as the personal router. The underlying architecture never shows itself to the end-user. To the degree that it has an interface, this interface is a friendly webpage that mirrors the homepage of a mobile OS. Developers can fork its code or play with the internals however they please, but should never need to look at the terminal to use it or its applications. Just like in the case of the router, a connection needs to be established so that services can be made available, and this intuition will be all the end-user needs to know to proficiently use their Urbit.
While serving primarily as a gateway into Urbit’s network, an Urbit server can do much more than merely route packets. As a general-purpose computer on a peer-to-peer network, Urbit can act as a much-needed backbone to user-owned applications that demand nothing more than code from developers. The guarantees of Urbit’s networking primitives, combined with the assumption that all peers run nodes, makes it possible to deliver cutting edge social applications consisting of only two elements: a protocol and an interface. This leads to limitless possibilities for developers, who previously needed to duplicate massive amounts of work and run their own servers in order to deliver software that satisfies users.
Urbit also benefits both users and developers by consolidating data to where it belongs: in a unified environment that the user owns. Developers need not assume the liability of user data residing on their own infrastructure, and users need not trust developers with their private information. And in the case of creating integrations between services, there is no chasm of APIs and terms of service to bridge between: all of the user’s data is in the same place, speaking the same language. The only chasm between two services is the user’s permission to share data between them.
Prior examples show that this level of added value is necessary to put ownership in the hands of users: a sensible, lightweight product that asks no compromises in terms of UX, while giving full control to the owner.
While it is difficult to overstate the centrality of personal servers to the problems Web3 aims to remediate, there remains a need for applications that interface between end-users and blockchains. Even more than this, a growing industry is responsible for developing middleware in Web3, both between different blockchains and between a given blockchain and the real world. Urbit offers solutions in both of these domains, in the bleeding edge industry of blockchain development on Urbit.
Some aspects of Urbit’s natural affinity for blockchains are already well-understood. Azimuth, for example, which serves as Urbit’s identity system and PKI, is implemented as a Solidity contract on Ethereum. Furthermore, the basic problem of association between names and public keys can be considered solved on Urbit, as name-key associations are already an assumed part of the system, and already integrated into Urbit’s Bitcoin application. Already on Urbit, you can natively send and receive BTC with other Urbit users with no need to keep records of their addresses.
Other faults in Web3 are addressed by the mere lack of any need to compromise on user-owned architecture. dApps on Urbit, for example, are truly dApps — they are sent to the user’s server upon installation, and run locally. API layers and trust bottlenecks between Web3 applications and blockchains are not needed if blockchains are built on Urbit, as the network provides a sensible common language for all applications, even if they are hosted on different servers. And above all, the most important factor in keeping blockchains decentralized is user-run validators, which can be considered no different from any other application on a robust and user-friendly personal server.
Even beyond this, Urbit promises to add even more value to Web3 in the domain of global integration. The need for middleware to connect components on-and-off the chain is said by some in the Urbit community to be a symptom of a deeper problem: the lack of a sensible, unified execution environment shared between applications. In summary, crypto needs an OS, and Urbit can be that OS.
The accelerating power of crypto on an OS that speaks its native tongue is much discussed and speculated on in the Urbit community. Uqbar, the first blockchain native to Urbit’s network, aims to obviate any need for middleware by using Urbit as a general purpose orchestrator to synchronize data between disparate components, whether blockchains or ordinary local state. Their solution uses zero-knowledge proofs, sharding, and other bleeding edge technologies to create a crypto ecosystem on Urbit that can not only compete with the best of the L1s elsewhere, but add features that prove indisputably that Urbit is the true home of Web3.
Uqbar is hard at work developing their tooling and plans to release a public testnet in the very near future. Will it revolutionize the industry the way its developers claim? In that domain, only theories and speculation can provide an answer. But their argument is worth a glance for anyone interested in emerging technologies in crypto.
Much is promised here and elsewhere about the potential for Urbit to take the world by storm and bring about a new era of user-owned computing. Nevertheless, if you try Urbit today, you will see a friendly, somewhat minimal interface for text chat and an ecosystem of experimental applications. You may find Urbit’s promises wanting, in the domains of zero-maintenance servers, competitive UX, and perhaps even avoidance of sysadminship. Regrettably, it is not yet even possible to run a Bitcoin node on Urbit in the one-click way that it should.
Urbit is exciting to early adopters not because of what you can do with it right now, but because of what it can enable after the necessary steps are taken. And in contrast to the Urbit of even two or three years ago, the necessary steps are well-understood and waiting in queue. The revolution in computing is no longer “how?” but “when?” for the Urbit community.
Today, Urbit is a simple and clean tool for chatting with friends, playing games, and experimenting with new ideas. More than anything else, the Urbit of today is a tool for doing what its users care about most: building Urbit. If you’d like to get involved, the community would love to have you. If you’d rather observe from the outside, keep a keen eye out. Big things are coming in the near future for Urbit and Web3, and you don’t want to miss out.
Urbit’s value proposition is long-winded enough that it won’t fit into a tweet or a TV commercial, but it’s promising enough to excite developers who share our vision of the future and want to play a part in building it. When it matures as a product, rethinking Unix and the internet won’t be included in the pitch. Urbit will be a service you can buy, either as a subscription or a physical product, that enables you to use apps that are just plain better than the ones you used to use.
Much remains unclear about what happens between now and then, but crypto and Web3 enthusiasts will have many reasons to get involved before you start seeing ads on the television to buy an Urbit planet. Urbit offers a comfortable home to idealists who believe in cryptographic ownership and share a concern about the future of humans and technology, and the next generation of early adopters is sure to include a wide cohort from that audience.
Now that you understand Urbit’s core value proposition, stay tuned for an exposition into the details of Urbit’s capabilities as a platform, its integrations with crypto, and a deeper dive into the promise of Uqbar to reshape the landscape of blockchain development.
