Urbit, a network older and weirder than Bitcoin, is finally turning to growth
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 large companies or the government.
It is a key reason why Urbit is often discussed in the context of crypto and invited to blockchain industry conferences. One doesn’t have to spend much time on the Urbit Foundation website to come across some of the themes popular among blockchain advocates – the idea of trying to cut out middlemen and centralized applications that dominate online activity. “We believe that the internet cannot be saved. The way things are going, MEGACORP will always control our apps and services because we can no longer run them ourselves,” the website says.
Users are identified on the network by their Urbit IDs – four-syllable pronounceable names generated by an algorithm from a number, and then recorded as an NFT on the Ethereum blockchain. (For example, according to the website, Urbit ID ~dalwel-fadrun ties back to the number 3,509,632,436.)
“Your Urbit ID is meant to feel a bit like a secret code name,” the site says. “We want Urbit to be a single, simple interface for your entire digital life.”
This kind of gregariousness is, of course, an important part of the exercise with any blockchain ecosystem, where building a community of loyal followers is one of the hardest parts. And lately, Urbit seems to have gained some traction.
The chart above indicates that the user base is growing rapidly, with the caveat that one person may own multiple “ships” or identities. Such growth is partly due 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 around 90 monthly active developers working on the project – on par with some of the top 20 blockchain projects.
“For a long time, Urbit didn’t grow at all,” admits Josh Lehman aka ~wolref-podlex, CEO of the Urbit Foundation. “It was just enthusiasts.”
Urbit recently gained some exposure to the general public, after being mentioned in a Vanity Fair article, while another writer spent an entire weekend following attendees around Urbit’s own “Assembly” conference in Miami last September and then chronicling every detail in gonzo style. (Excerpt: “I meet two girls from Minnesota who learned about Urbit on a podcast and wanted to see if they could learn some tricks to build their fashion brand by coming here.”)
The conference also had some prominent speakers, including Balaji Srinivasan, who further talked about the network. Srinivasan, the entrepreneur and “Network State” author who recently made headlines for his failed $1 million bitcoin bet, was a keynote speaker at the Miami conference. “Urbit wants to actually be a cathedral,” Srinivasan said in a video recording of the speech. “It’s a bit of a bazaar, but it’s a bit of a bizarre cathedral at the moment.”
Urbit describes itself as an operating system and network where users keep data on personal servers; that way, users control all the data they need to operate on the network, unlike many blockchains where data is preserved on-chain – a feature often championed for its transparency benefits. Then, using the Urbit peer-to-peer network, users simply interact with each other and keep local records of those interactions.
In 2019, Yarvin (aka ~sorreg-namtyv) stepped down as CTO, board member and voting shareholder of Tlon, the company that previously sponsored Urbit’s development, writing at the time: “From the start, I knew Urbit couldn’t succeed until it stopped being mine and became the world.”
“Urbit is not uniformly excellent yet,” Yarvin wrote. “There are a few medium-sized cleanups in the near pipeline. But this is a matter of months, not years. I don’t see any unknown unknowns,” he says.
According to the Urbit Foundation’s website, the non-profit organization was established in 2021 when it split from Tlon, a private company formed in 2013 to work on the network.
Proponents of Urbit are quick to argue that the underlying programming language is simple and elegant because it only needed to solve the problem of how best to create a peer-to-peer network. The entire Urbit operating system supposedly compiles down to 33 lines of code, known as “Nock”.
There are many Urbit talking points that sound like core arguments for Web3 – the imagined next iteration of the internet, which will promote decentralized protocols while reducing dependence on big tech companies like Youtube, Netflix and Amazon.
An example from Urbit’s website: “Mostly we use our laptops only as access points to MEGACORP services. Our phones are the same. These services are amazing and convenient. But for the sake of simplicity, we have traded away control, ownership and privacy.”
One of the Urbit stalwarts, 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 for Ethereum.
He says Urbit’s inherent peer-to-peer design makes it easy to design peer-to-peer applications and decentralized apps known as dapps. So far there are chat and social media apps as well as poker on the Urbit network.
“Peer-to-peer infrastructure is harder than it looks,” Tiplex said last month at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2023 conference in Austin, Texas.
What’s also difficult is building a community to rally around any project, crypto or otherwise. Urbit’s odd little band of devoted followers with secret codenames could serve as a solid start as the project tries to build a larger, more user-friendly ecosystem. Projects like Tiplex’s show how the network could eventually bleed into crypto.
