**A** (0:00):
Don't worry, we are friends.
**B** (0:17):
GM Friends. And welcome back to another episode on Friends. Validator. If this is your first video, I'm yours, Yuri Meibom. And this shows the hub that brings together crypto pioneers, exciting projects and a thriving community. And today I'm super pleased to have Sunny Agarwal on the show once again. But for the very first time, we won't talk about Osmosis or MEV related things. Nothing with Defi at all. Actually, today we will talk about urbit. But Sunny, first of all, thanks for being here once again.
**A** (0:45):
Thank you for having me. Yeah, it's exciting. The topic I find very interesting, but don't get a chance to talk much about. People always want to have me on about osmosis and stuff, but I have other interests too.
**B** (0:59):
Yeah, the pleasure is mine because today we will talk about one of these interests everyone knows you about as the co founder of Osmosis, as one of the core contributors in the Cosmos ecosystem. But you are also active in the URBIT community. And today we will elaborate on the question, what the hell is urbit? We hear it here and there from very smart people in the Cosmos. I also know that Brian, the co founder of COROS one and president of the Intelligent foundation, is a huge fan of urbit. So you hear URBIT here and there. But yeah, let's do a quick introduction into urbit. So Urbit, if you go on the website right now to basically set the groundwork here, why is URBIT saying that we need to fix the Internet? Because that's the first sentence that you read on the website. So what are essentially the problems that the urban community wants to solve actually in the white paper? Or is it actually a white paper but on the overview page it's written by the community members? We think the Internet can't be saved. The way things are going, Mega Corp will always control our apps and services because we can no longer run them ourselves. The only way out of this mess is with a completely new platform that's owned and controlled by its users. What are they talking about? What is like and where is urban coming in here?
**A** (2:26):
Yeah, so I'll admit I think one of the challenges the urban community faces is sometimes they are not the best at communicating what it is that they're building and why. Like, you know, they use a lot of lofty language, but it kind of. You kind of get lost in the Boston it. So I mean, yeah, maybe talk about the why and then we can come back and talk about what it is. The why. What Are they trying to say there is basically that most applications that you have on the web today are very centralized architecture. What I mean by this is imagine a chat application. It could be run as a peer to peer application. If I'm sending messages to you, why do we have to. Like, why, why do I have to send my messages to a centralized server? Whether it's Facebook server or, you know, WhatsApp. That's Facebook as well, I guess. You know, Facebook has a lot of them. But like, or Telegram, like, why do I have to send my messages to a single centralized server and they send the messages to the other people, right? Like, why can't IDA send messages directly peer to peer? So the idea is of Urban is basically like maybe not every application in the world web app, right? But a lot of web apps can be re. Could in theory be rewritten as peer to peer application. So you know, I think messaging is the standard example that like, you know, a lot of Urban people focus on. But like, another one would be like, imagine something similar to Google Docs, right? Like, why is it that Google Docs has to exist on Google's servers just for us to edit a document together, right? Like, you know, Microsoft Word documents don't exist on someone's servers. They existed on your computer. And you could share it, share it with people. But like, you know, Google Docs added some nice functionality which is like the collaborative editing, right? Multiple people can edit that at the same time. But it's like Urban saying like, oh, why can't we, why can't we achieve that in a peer to peer architecture rather than having to send all of our data to Google or any centralized operator?
**B** (4:44):
Yeah, I think the more you start thinking about it, the more it makes sense. I think the messaging, the messaging aspect is very obvious.
**A** (4:52):
I mean, it sounds very, I mean, what I just said now, now that I think about it, sounds very similar to how you pitch blockchains to people, right? It's like, oh, why am I sending my data, you know, all the transactions to a bank and we can do this peer to peer. You can imagine like URBIT is basically saying like, hey, why, why can't we do this for more types of applications?
**B** (5:12):
Yeah, yeah, I think totally makes sense. But to be fair, like the same was with blockchain. So before Satoshi Nakamoto wrote his white paper, we also didn't think that this was possible, that you could send money around without any intermediaries in between. So now URBIT comes in and say, hey, we can actually rethink that we can remove essentially the middleman, if you want to put it like this. So very similar to crypto. So at what point do they like, like what is the idea? So that I basically send messages back and forth without relying on a server or company or whatnot.
**A** (5:52):
So yeah, so I guess your question is like, how does this differ from like, you can say that's our idea behind, right, Like Ethereum also like hey, let's, let's, you know, remove that. I would say the difference between urbit and blockchains is blockchains still have a single, a central coordination point but they decentralize that coordination point. Right? Like the, and what that is is the blockchain itself. We can think of the blockchain as a decentralized server. So most Ethereum apps still follow what you can consider like a client server architecture where you know, you're all pushing data to a server and then pulling data from that server. But it just so happens that that server is a blockchain. Urbit is saying no, actually we don't need that. We don't need a single centralized server at all. Our, our messages can just be done as a gossip protocol at the peer to peer gossip layer. We don't need to have a single centralized or not centralized. We don't need to have a single single threaded source of truth like, like a blockchain for this.
**B** (7:05):
Like more similar to a deck, right?
**A** (7:08):
A what?
**B** (7:09):
Yeah, more similar to a deck, right?
**A** (7:11):
Yeah, yeah. So maybe so let me, let me give the analogy that I usually use to explain urbit because I think it is helpful for crypto bros.
**B** (7:22):
Right?
**A** (7:22):
For crypto bros. This is for crypto bro specifically. I'll give the crypto bro version and then I'll give like the cosmos people version because I think it's even easier for cosmos people. So the crypto bro version is okay. Once upon a time there was a project called Secure scuttlebutt. So Secure scuttlebutt was a decentralized social network. It still exists today. I don't know how popular it is, but it's a decentralized social network. And what it is is it uses a DAG in architecture, not a blockchain. The idea is that like let's say I'm sending messages or I'm, you know, what happened is let's say you and I have a, have a connection with each other on the network. But then, you know, every time I send a message, I'll send it to you. And every time you broadcast a message you'll pass it up along with passing your own messages onto your peers. You'll pass my message onto your peers as well. What will happen is everyone is just talking to their friends. But because everyone's friends are not fully overlapping, messages eventually make their way throughout the entire network. So what this does is you have eventual consistency. Let's say I say that I told you one thing and I told John something else and Mark something else. Eventually, as people gossip more and more, everyone in the entire network will hear about it. What's important though is this doesn't solve the double spend problem. So the double spend problem is what Bitcoin was trying to do, which is like saying, hey, we need to very quickly find out if like someone you know, I only have 10, 10 Bitcoin in my account. I can't send 10 Bitcoin to John and 10 Bitcoin to Mark. Right. That's, you know, I'm spending more than I have. So the bitcoin architecture was designed to find these issues very quickly. When, when people send conflicting messages, you resolve them very quickly. And what that needed was you needed everyone in the network to agree on something like what is the canonical version very quickly. And that's why they had to create these consensus protocols. But these are not very scalable. These have scalability. Like consensus protocols have scalability limits to them. Secure settle. But said is, hey, with a social network we don't care about solving the double spend problem. Like, what are you, what, what are you going to double spend? Oh, you told one person you liked a post and the other person you didn't like a post. It's like, okay, yeah, like, you know, you sent a conflicting message, but it's like not the end of the world. Right? What will happen if you send a conflicting message? Okay, your reputation score just goes down because you're like being a bad actor at the network. But like, it's not like you're not creating money out of thin air or anything. So in a social network solving the double spend isn't as important. What's more important is solving the scalability. And so that's why this like architecture of a DAG based system was designed. Okay. And so it was meant to be a social network and it's running and stuff. Let's put secure scuttlebutt on the side for now. So I hope everyone gets an idea, understands what this DAG network is. Okay, let's go back to Bitcoin for a second. Bitcoin also wanted to solve a problem which is this money system and they created this new decentralized data structure called a blockchain to solve that. Ethereum comes along and looks at Bitcoin and says, oh, that's a very interesting decentralized data structure. What if we put a generalized VM on top of it? So now you take that same data structure instead of just using it for a specific application. Bitcoin was the original app chain. It says, hey, let's build a generalized thing that people can build other applications on top of it, including the original money application, but we can build more on top of that as well. I think the best way to conceptually understand URBIT is it takes something like secure scuttlebutt and says, hey, this is an interesting decentralized data structure for a specific application. But what if instead we put generalized VMs on top of it? So that way you can, you know, build this many different applications using this peer to peer DAG network. So if you want to build a new decentralized social network, if you want to build a decentralized chat app, if you want to build a decentralized Google Docs competitor, you want to build, you know, a decentralized gaming infrastructure. Like you can do this using a single, same way that Ethereum made it. So you don't have to build new blockchains for every single use case. Urbit says, hey, you don't have to build new decentralized networks for every single use case. We can build one decentralized peer to peer application network and then people can deploy applications on top of it.
**B** (12:37):
So essentially, to wrap it up a little bit here, so essentially the idea is to have a DAG style system where communication is enabled via gossiping. So to stick to the social media comparison, it's like having a gigantic Facebook group where you are with a couple of friends and you rely on the principle that eventually at some point your photo or message will be forwarded by one one of your friends to another friend, to another friend, to a family member, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, and then this is like from scuttlebutt, that's like the one main chain, the first chain, the standard chain. And then Orbit comes ahead and says, hey, let's, you know, enable more applications on top of that, not only social media, but messaging tools, services. Is this the right conclusion?
**A** (13:32):
Yeah, I think that's the right conceptual framework for it. Now if you tell this framework to Urbit people, they'll get upset because actually urbit's been in development for far, far longer, it's much older. So Chronologically, my story isn't accurate because Urbit's actually been in development for like over 20 years, secure settle, but's only been around for like 10 years, I think. So it's not like Urbit literally looked at secure Scuttlebutt and said that, but it's a nice analogy to see, like, oh, Ethereum is Bitcoin as Urbit is to secure Scuttlebutt.
**B** (14:04):
Yeah. And we will talk about the history in a couple of moments. But you also said that you have an explanation for people who are in Cosmos that might find it easier to learn about Urbit or understand Orbit with another analogy much quicker.
**A** (14:20):
Yeah, I think another way of thinking about it is Urbit works as. Imagine everyone has a personal blockchain, a personal cosmosm blockchain. So I have sunnychain, you have Yuri chain, and they all can be connected via IBC with each other in order to deploy instead of having a single chain. If I want to deploy a messaging app that me and you can use to talk to each other, what I'll do is I'll publish the code for the messaging app Cosmos code, and I deploy that Cosmos contract on my chain and you deploy it on your chain. And when we want to send messages to each other, we send it over ibc. I say, hey, Yuri. Then, you know, it sends it. I make that transaction on my chain. Then it takes an IBC message, sends it to your contract, and then you can read it from your chain. And then, you know, we want to get a third person involved with our, you know, we want to get John involved. Right. He can install that app on his blockchain. And now we can create like a group chat that, you know, every time I want to send a message to both of you, it just sends an IBC packet to both of your chains. So it's like, you know, obviously this is not a good. This is not. You can't build every application in this architecture. Like a Dex would not work in this architecture. Right. But a messaging app can.
**B** (15:50):
Yeah, I think, I think actually I find this analogy much easier to understand. I think if you ignore the different IBC channels and that you need like a client on every chain. I think that makes sense if we ignore like some details, but. But from a very high level this makes a lot of sense, but maybe also to get like a better overview. So I think we are getting closer to the point where we understand the elementary concept of urbit, that it's like rethinking how we communicate generally on the Internet. That we try to remove the middleman, that we try to remove centralizing forces and then we can build various applications on top of it. So I think we're getting into right direction. But let's do a quick history lesson. You mentioned, mentioned. Urbit is much older than 20 years old, so not so. So it's, it's. I think it's almost the same age as bitcoin and blockchain generally. So it's like not too far away from each other. So can you talk a little bit about how Urbit, you know, got invented? Who invented it? What was the first Urbit community? Like, how did they react to the blockchain developments? Were there synergies? I mean, obviously today there are.
**A** (17:10):
So.
**B** (17:10):
Yeah, maybe to give like an overview of the history and where we are today.
**A** (17:15):
Yeah, sure. So the history of Urban is, you know, a very contentious one because. So it was founded, like I said, about you know, close to 20 years, almost 20 years ago by this guy named Curtis Yarvin. He is a computer scientist. Yeah. But he's what he's more well known for, even more so than Urbit is his political writings. He used to write under a pseudonym called Mencius Moldbug. And he is, you know, one of the leaders of what, what, what's termed the neo reactionary movement, which is a very, you know, relatively, very pretty fringe right wing like movement that's like considered a lot of like some of the bases for some of the alt right, but basically like it's like a very monarchist. He's like straight up monarchist, basically, you know, without going too deep into like the actual like political things. You know, I think, I think he has some interesting points. I think some points just don't make any sense to me. But, but yeah, because of that he's like a very controversial like figure in the political realm. But like you know, he was writing political workers under a mold bug name then you know, Urban was just this like side project that he was doing as courtesy Arvin. Eventually he got public leaked or something that, you know, hey, it's the same person. And that caused a lot more like contention and infighting, like not that caused a lot more, you know, drama around Urbit. Even though Urbit is like pretty distinct from you, you could see that this components of his political philosophy that kind of bleed their way into Urbit's architecture, which I think is always the case. Right. I think like all Crypt or decentralization projects or like always like have some reflection of the political ideologies of like the creators. So you know, there's always sprinklings of like the political ideology that leak into the architecture. And so urban takes a very hierarchical view to like how the system works. So they have this like, you know, we call it like it's almost like a semi feudal system where you have this concept of galaxies and then stars and planets. It's funny actually, if you read the old urban code, like they were actually, before they were called out, they were actually like kings and dukes and earls or something like that. So it actually, you know, I think he changed the name to like, you know, away from the feudal stuff to be like something more futuristic seeming. But yeah, so you know, the urban community kind of grew. They were originally very you know, anti blockchain for a long time. Like they kind of saw like, oh, you know, blockchains are so unnecessary or like very anti non bitcoin. At least like there they didn't see a need for Urbit for blockchain. In Urbit they're like, yeah, hey, bitcoin is useful and cool and like, or blockchains are cool. But like, you know, that's a completely distinct technology. Like we have, we don't need, we don't need blockchains for URBIT at all. And so they were kind of very resistant to it. Eventually then they kind of gave in. And so Urbit also has an ID system. So you call these your Urbit identities, which are honestly the easiest way to explain it to a blockchain person is it's like ensuring it's like, oh, here you get a nice name for your account. The difference between urban IDs and ENS is that they provided Urbit put some scarcity on them. Ens, they can be as many ENS names as we want as long as it can be any combination of characters that hasn't been taken. You can go mint that ENS name. Urbit. They actually said, hey, we're going to have a limited number of urbit IDs so that you know, they take, they put scarcity on it at that level. You know, all projects want some level of scarcity to provide value. Instead of creating a token, Urbit did it via identities. So yeah, that's where that's what they have scarcity. And so what they eventually gave in was originally they were managing all the urbit IDs on a GitHub file. And like, you know, so back when I first got involved with Urbit, it was one of my friends, Keaton Dunsford at Berkeley. He started working on the project and got me interested. And I was always telling like, you guys need a blockchain to manage these ids. And Curtis's response always was like, oh, you don't need. He's like, blockchains are for fast finality. Remember the analogy I was doing at the beginning for coming to consensus on stuff quickly? And he's like, the selling of urban IDs should be like, as rare as, like how you sell homes. He's like, oh, treat these as land or real estate. The urban community loves this analogy. They love to compare urbit IDs to land. And so they're like, oh, land. When you transfer and buy and sell land, it should be such a infrequent thing that, that we don't need to come to consensus quickly. We'll just let social consensus have a way to do that. And I think of, you know, they were kind of proven wrong about that. They eventually move the entire ID system onto Ethereum. So now the Urbit ID system is managed on Ethereum blockchain, but the rest of the architecture doesn't make use of blockchains at all.
**B** (23:15):
Yeah, and to be very fair, this was really when I lost the plot. So I remember the first time I explored URBIT was with Chorus one with good friend of mine Xavi in Milan. And he said, yeah, let's watch. Let's check out this keynote by Urbit at East Milan. And I kind of understood the concept. But then when they introduced what you mentioned, the planets, the galaxies, the stars, I completely lost the plot. Because for me, like, I mean, obviously also URBIT thrives for mass adoption. And my identity in the Internet, like in the web 2 Internet on Google is my Google address. With my Google address, I open my account, I match my emails, and so on and so forth. It's like my identity. But if we now go ahead and say, okay, those identities are limited, so let's pretend email addresses are limited, then we are running into the problem that this is, you know, that, that we have an ending resource that shouldn't be, that shouldn't end at all. Because imagine if we would just have like a million email addresses that would, you know, freak out the entire, entire world. So, you know, what is like precisely the idea behind that? If we make the identity on Urbit like kind of, you know, limited or. I think we will also talk about it in a sec. Yeah, how can I join? Urbit is another way than buying an nft.
**A** (24:46):
Yeah, so this is definitely a tricky, like, so, you know, Urbit has a lot of Portions to it. Right. There's like the idea of like the vision of this like decentralized web system. There's the architecture, there's a technology behind it, then there's this like id, there's a specific network. Right. So you could say like oh I'm you know, as an analogy you could be like say hey, the EVM is a great technology but I don't like Ethereum's tokenomics. Right. And so you know, so far what I've been talking about. Yeah. Is mostly been like oh like urban, has like, you know, oh this EVM kind of thing. Right. Here's this like system now. Okay. The actual tokenomics. Now once again it's not tokenomics, they're not tokens. They did it as the IDs thing. Yeah, I agree that I'm a little bit skeptical about it in the sense that like so they have, so there's three levels, like you like I mentioned galaxies, stars, planets. There's 256 galaxies, there's like 69,000 something planets and about 4 billion stars. Now let's, let's look at the stars for a second because that's what they expect normal people to have. You'll notice that there's a bigger bit of an issue. There's like, there's only 4 billion planets but there's like 8 billion people on in the world. So it's like there's not even enough for one for everyone. So that's like I think that it's kind of silly that you're like literally like cutting your, you know, if you want to build the next Internet. But you're saying oh, I want to cap the number of people that are on this Internet. I think it's a little bit silly, the whole gap. Stars and galaxies. This once again I think is just coming from the Curtis's political ideologies where he's like oh, okay, we need to have some sort of hierarchical feudal esque system where the people who like the galaxy holders are will be responsible for like onboarding everyone else. Right. So it's like oh, the galaxy holders will like find good people in the community who will be good at onboarding, like finding you know, community leaders. And so you know, galaxy owners are like the ultimate owners of the system. Then they find stars holders, give them stars and say okay, it's your job to go find planets and find people to buy planets. So like they kind of use this like top down system for how to onboard people into the network. I agree. I think at some point it's going to hit limits when you, when you cap it. But, you know, the idea that they have is that they're saying that, okay, one way you can think of it is that you actually can technically use URBIT without having an id. It's just, you're not going to be able to like, okay, here's an analogy. Actually Twitter verified, right? So you know how like, Elon is basically, you know, anyone can create a Twitter account, but he's basically like making it so, like, oh, you have to like, pay that $8 a month to get verified. And then like, you know, we're going to have a version of the. You can see the version of your newsfeed only from verified people. Right? And this is meant to like, deal with bots and spam and all this kind of stuff, Right. I think URBIT is saying the same, has the same kind of approach where it's like, technically, anyone can use URBIT without needing a id, right? These are actually called comets. So there's a, you can, you can have a version of the chain that you don't. If you don't have an id, you can have a comment which is not a planet, but you're not actually the. And if you're running Urbit, you can see the messages from comets, but they're going to show up in like a different feed. They're not going to show up. You know, you're gonna have one version that's like the verified version, which is coming from people that actually have planets. And the idea is that because planets have economic value, they cost money, that it acts like a good spam filter versus. And so that, that, that, that's the trade off here. It's like, okay, with email or something, you can build open systems, but you're going to have to deal with spam or you have to build closed systems or something that costs money. And then you can like have a spam filter, basically.
**B** (29:07):
Okay, so we have comets, stars, galaxies, planets. Planets are the most valuable ones or the rarest one. Right? Okay, galaxies are the rarest one. Second, rarest one are planets. Then stars and comets are essentially endless.
**A** (29:28):
Galaxy are at the top is, are the biggest, stars are the middle, planets are the smallest. And then comets are just this, like, you know, you're the ex. You know, you're this like, external thing that's not part of this hierarchy at all. You didn't even buy anything. So, yeah, there's infinite comments.
**B** (29:45):
Infinite comments. Okay, yeah, I totally understand this Twitter analogy where you basically say, okay, everyone can join Twitter, like endlessly. And then you have like the premium version, like the, the golden check mark for you know, big projects. I think osmosis could get like such a golden check mark. Now then like for people who want to make sure that their Twitter profile does not get, get, does not get copied, they use the blue one. And if you are really the end boss, like the President of the United States, then you have like the gray one and all the others, they don't have a check mark at all. Nonetheless, at the end of the day there is no limit, neither for the blue ones, nor for the gold ones, nor for the gray ones. Theoretically. I mean, cool that there's no limits for the, for the comet ones. But for me it also reminds me a lot of, you know, how Internet companies work because essentially most people use Google at the end of the day to interact with the Internet in what way whatsoever. So I think it's like an early adopter reward where like people who, you know, buy a share of Google, the company would get like, I don't know, extra benefits when using Google. I know Google plus for free or I don't know what. So it reminds me a little bit more, more of that actually.
**A** (31:10):
Yeah. Like I said, I'm, I will admit I'm not the biggest bull on the actual tokenomics of the urban network. I think the ideas are extremely interesting. The vision is very compelling. I think that if you could redo the tokenomics today, you probably would. Yeah.
**B** (31:36):
But can we like touch base once again like on these different NFTs? So what precisely is now the difference between a planet, a galaxy, Stars like comets. Okay, just to join the network you can get yourself a comet to get started. But what does it help me to have a galaxy and not only a planet? Why am I worth more in the network right now?
**A** (32:01):
There is no reason. That's one of the like weird things right now. The only reason is the name. The length of your name changes. So if you have a galaxy, your name is only three characters long. So it could be like Zod or Mar. Or like you have a three character name. If you have a star you get a six character name. So it's like Mars. Odd. It could be your name or something like that. If you're a planet you get a 12 character long name. So. Or each kit or they do it off of syllables. So you have like each syllable is three letters and so it's like, okay, so for example, I only have a planet, I don't have anything else. And so my name is Rip LED Lignup. So it's like, okay, those are four syllables. But if I wanted a shorter name, I could buy a star. What also happened is how the network was created was there's a star out there named Ripled and it owns all of the plan. It has an allocation of about 70,000 planets. So when you buy what's called a full full star, you also buy all the planets and you get the right to sell 70000 planets to someone else. Once you've sold that, you still own the star. But like it's called a naked star because you don't have any more planets attached to it now at that point. Yeah, it's like I don't know what the difference between a star and a planet really is other than the size of your name.
**B** (33:31):
Okay.
**A** (33:32):
This is one of the things trying to figure out is how do we provide to the higher tier stuff.
**B** (33:42):
Okay. And say, I like this idea. Now I want to get involved in urbit. So actually Brian from Chorus one told me at Urbit Summit to go to this one website. I will also link it in the description below where you can just put in your email and then magically you are part of of urbit. Did I just get onboarded as an asset comet in that sense? If I just do the email part or what was happening when I just, you know, joined with, with the email. So what is like the go to action plan to just join?
**A** (34:17):
Yeah, I think it's. I think so. Chorus one has a product called Red Horizon which I think they use to onboard people. I assume they're probably just onboarding people onto comets. They. It's possible maybe they are giving you a free planet just like an onboarding thing because planets aren't worth that much. I think planets are worth like $3 or something like that. So it's pretty cheap. And so maybe they might just be giving away free planets right now as an onboarding strategy.
**B** (34:47):
Okay, and, but let's say from, from another perspective, what is now the advantage of holding something like this at all to be active in, in the AirB ecosystem. Are there some services I can just use? Because we talked about this briefly, like I say, like, I mean, maybe that's a good starting point to talk about the urban ecosystem and what services it offers. Like other services that are just allowed for people who hold, who hold a planet or star?
**A** (35:19):
Yeah, free service. Right. Requires at least a planet. There's very few services that I think you can use as a comet because like I said, it's a spam Issue. Right. If you let anyone just create infinite comments and start using these applications, your applications are basically going to be filled with spam. So I would say like the vast majority of applications I've seen on URBIT require a planet at least. So now the question, will that change in the future? Maybe. Right? Like if URBIT shifts away from this and like says, hey, you know what's interesting, I've always noticed is someone can build an alternative like network to urbit but using the same stack, the same technology, the same way that people like. But it's even more, it's a little bit different. I was going to say, like, oh, it's how people like fork the EVM to build new network. But I would say it's almost even a little bit different because like here it's still, oh, okay, here's an example. You can build a cosmos chain without being part of the Atom economic zone. Right? You could like cosmos. You can say, hey, I love this technology but you know, this whole atom aligned system, I don't care about that. I want to go build my own cosmos chain. But I'm still, I can still use IBC between these two things. Right? Right. I think there might be a world where people go build alternative networks and stuff, still using URBIT Stack, still using the same messaging protocol, still interoperable, but saying, oh, your ID system is stupid. I'm going to build a new ID system. I think that's very possible. To your point. Now what kind of applications are there right now? I would say a lot of them are mostly messaging apps and chat rooms, a lot of chat rooms on different sorts of things. One of them that I really like, probably my favorite application that I use to show people to just get that wow moment for them is it's an application called Realm R E A L M where it's a shared desktop os. So what that means is so you know how the Google Docs is like, hey, here's a Word document and everyone can be typing on it together. Realm is like an entire desktop, like a OS that everyone can work on together. So you have one shared desktop and everyone, let's say you and I and John are all on it. We have like three different cursors and we're all able to move things at the same time. It's really cool because it's like you try it and it's like, whoa, this is like we're all sharing a computer. That's really cool. So I think that was probably the application that I like or very unique application that is just very cool. And there's other ones as well. There's. What do you call it? There's poker games and anything that can be done as peer to peer stuff. Another cool use case actually is you can use it to. So we actually do have an osmosis app on URBIT right now. So like I said, this app, it's basically something you can install onto your URBIT machine, so that interacts with the osmosis blockchain. Cool.
**B** (38:45):
Yeah, I think it gets more clear now all what we have discussed in the beginning until now. So essentially you have this. Can you call it an ecosystem actually? Or is this a right, a wrong term? I mean, it's the Internet ecosystem. Okay. An ecosystem. So we have this.
**A** (39:08):
I feel now the Internet is so big, it's like calling ecosystem weird. But yeah, I think in the early days that you could probably say, oh yeah, the Internet ecosystem.
**B** (39:16):
Okay. So as of now, for now, we call it like an ecosystem. So the urban ecosystem there, like some applications, chat rooms, shared desktop, essentially everything. But what can be done peer to peer. And the pitch is, okay, you don't need like a server in between. Like all of the applications you use in URBIT are permissionless, peer to peer, no intermediary included. And to get started, you need to get at least a planet for around three bucks. Or let's have like at another point, a closer look at chorus one's application where they maybe like also give out planets for free. But now the question is like, why? And I think like now we're getting more to this question. What are the bottlenecks, you know, for mass adoption? Because, like, obviously we are in crypto and for us, decentralization, removing intermediaries makes sense and it's very interesting. And I think in the terms of, in the case of blockchains, there are also a lot of advantages that can be applied, like faster transactions, a more open Internet, as soon as people can open a bank account, like creating an email address. So there are so many benefits in terms of crypto world. What is like the pitch for urbit? Because even if you have like no money at all, like most likely you can also open a Google account for free, you can access the Internet. So URBIT is like really interesting for people who really care about privacy. But if you just go through your Instagram feed, you will see that the majority of people, especially my generation, your generation, they do not care that much about privacy, owning your data or not giving away too much data. So can you talk a little bit more about Those bottlenecks. And if you see this as like one of the bottlenecks that, you know, Urban's pitch is actually very good, very nice, but that there is a future where people just don't care.
**A** (41:19):
Yeah. Honestly, I think you're. You're kind of spot on. I think ideologically Earth makes a lot of sense, but, like, will most users actually care about that? I'm not sure. I think the biggest thing that, I mean, I actually disagree that I think a lot of people do at least nominally care about, like, data privacy. And I think the biggest thing here is I think it might just get bigger and bigger with AI that as you. As AI like is, you know, the more data you give away to these companies, they can like, just better and better model you and like, create like, they can use your data to like, create artificial versions of you that could be used to scam or, you know, do all, all sorts of things. Right. And like, I think in a world of AI data privacy just becomes more and more important. And I think as we start to see more nefarious uses of AI technology, I think that will maybe potentially cause the general public to be more and more conscious of data privacy. Just that, you know, I think there's a lot of things today that we are, you know, I think a lot of people care a lot about financial privacy, right? They would not be very happy with, like, anyone having access to their financial data. And I think it's going to be a similar thing. You know, this is just my hypothesis, right? Is this how. How society is going to play out? I don't know, but I think that is like, probably the. If I had to bet on why data privacy will become more important, it will probably be because of that.
**B** (43:07):
Yeah, I totally agree on this, actually, because the more I think about that's also a pitch for blockchain, because AI completely has overtaken it right now. And I think it's the same for source courses. So I, I think especially like blockchain comes in to verify data and the origin of. Of. Of data. So this is where the blockchain aspect comes into play and to not end up that AI completely imitates us, control and controls us. I think like URBIT could come into play to really, you know, make sure that AI does not know everything from us, which is like, on the Internet, since the Internet can be this decentralized in that way. So I totally see the pitch here, actually. But since we now talk about, you know, blockchain AI, I remember one keynote that you have held at the Urban Summit 2023 in Lisbon, which was about the idea that Urban could own or could have its own blockchain. And also to reflect on that, you mentioned in the very beginning that you were the first one who said, okay, you can't just give out planets and Galax via a file on. On Reddit, you need a blockchain for that. So you have been one of the first advocates to talk about, okay, we need some blockchain aspects here. So can you talk a little more about your keynote and the context of the Cosmos SDK that you have essentially pitched?
**A** (44:36):
Yeah. So there was a couple of goals here, right? So one is like, I respect what Urbachron do, but I do think that there are portions of the stack that need a blockchain and they, they came around to that as well. Right. They put the name service on Ethereum. But I think this, you know, like I mentioned, Urbit very focused on just purely peer to peer applications, which I think is actually pretty limited on the types of applications you can build, right? Yes, I can build my messaging app, but like I mentioned, there's a poker app on there, but it's actually kind of centralized because you need to trust one of the people in the game to be the dealer. But if you actually had a like blockchain, you could actually get rid of some of the like, trust things. And like, or another big one is like, finding applications on Urbit is extremely weird. Like what? You kind of have to just know where to find it. There's no equivalent to like a search engine or like, or there's these like centralized registries where you have to know how to find the registry. And then like they have a list of, oh, here's all these applications. But it's like, oh, now you built the discovery of new applications in a centralized way. And now what if those just start censoring applications, right? Like, it would be nice if the, if the app registry also existed in a decentralized way on a blockchain or something. That the point is that this, you are restricting the type of applications you can build. If you're only touch. Doing everything in a purely peer to peer way. If you combine. Now I think that a lot of things in crypto in blockchain world, too much data is put on chain. It's just very bad for scalability, right? You want more of that data to not go on chain. And anything that can be done peer to peer should be done peer to peer. Now my take is that like, okay, Urban should be people who Design Urban applications should be incorporating blockchain aspects into them. And I think people are starting to that. Like I said, that's what we did with our osmosis app on Urbit was like, yeah, it's on Urbit, but it's still talking to the osmosis blockchain. So I think this is inevitable. Anyone who's building peer to peer apps, you're going to want a combination of blockchain and peer to peer components. Why should URBIT build its own blockchain? Now that's a, you know, more interesting question. One is so one thing I didn't mention is one of the things Urbit uses a very, very custom stack. So this is actually another one of the things I'm not super bullish on about urbit where they are functional programming maxis, they built their own custom VM and everything. It's not the most easy for a new developer to just jump in. There's always been a meme in urban community like oh, let's just rewrite all of this in Rust and make it so easy for people. Actually so abstract is doing. So if you guys know the abstract team in Cosmos, you can think they're actually doing a lot of the Urbit vision, but they're trying to do it all in Cosmos basically instead of using this very weird stack. But anyways, so the thing is the urban community loves their weird tech stack and so it's. And, and so my point to them was like, hey, if you guys like your custom VM so much, wouldn't it be nice if you had a blockchain that also was running the same vm? So if you're building a application that's peer to peer and blockchain based, right? Instead of having to write in solidity or something for the blockchain component and then your custom stack for the peer to peer component, you should just use the same language to write the whole application end to end. This is like why Node JS became so popular in web services, right? Like Node JS was, you know, the client side code in web apps was always written in JavaScript but then before that you should have to write the server in like Go or Python or something like that, right? But Node JS became popular because like oh, I can use JavaScript for both my front end and back end. So that's the pitch to Urban. It's like, hey, build the. Make a blockchain that uses the same stack so your, so your app developers can write the same language for front end, which is the Urban Side and the backend, which is the blockchain side. So that's one of the use cases. The other was, I think it's a way of providing more utility to the address space. So, you know, I think these IDs have like, you know, as you mentioned, I don't think they have a lot of intrinsic value right now and I think they're very easily forkable. I think it's very possible for someone to build competing ID space to URBIT right now. This will, if, if you can build more utility to the current address space ID space, that will make it more sticky. Why do I care about that? I mean, I don't. I'm not a big address space holder. Like I told you, I only have one planet. I mostly hear of it from an economic experiment. I like crypto economic experiments. And I think the URBIT ID space provides a lot of interesting opportunity for new mechanism designs because you're put into this constrained space. Most blockchains today have a token and you can use that token for proof of stake or you can use it for rewards, or you can use it for like fees. What I find exciting about URBIT is because there is no money token, they only have this NFT thing. It's like, okay, how would I design it? A blockchain with NFTs. Okay, how do I pay fees in this kind of blockchain? How do I do proof of stake in this kind of blockchain? Like, to me, it's just a very exciting mechanism design opportunity and that's kind of why I got really excited about the problem.
**B** (50:43):
Yeah, and also I think it makes a lot of sense because right now all of this is deployed on Ethereum. And since Urban is all about independence and stuff like this, I think makes sense for URBIT to also have its own blockchain and not rely entirely on Ethereum. Even though I'm a big Ethereum fan.
**A** (51:01):
Exactly. It's like you're trying to build a sovereign system. Right. Like you should it. It's kind of silly that the first step to onboarding onto URBIT is go make an Ethereum account and buy it. Right. It's like these should. This should all be like vertically integrated. I should just be able to onboard onto URBIT directly. And so I think that, yeah, that's another big component of it.
**B** (51:23):
Yeah. And I think also, I mean, now that we talked so much about URBIT and as we get to the end of this interview, maybe let's talk exactly about this, how to onboard people, how to get started. So for people who say okay, I found this conversation super interesting, I want to get started. What are some call to action plans? So obviously I guess like buying a planet. But yeah, maybe can if you could map out how to get started in Urbit with creating an id, finding all of the urban dapps, how to join the community, things like that.
**A** (52:00):
Yeah, I would say my recommendation would be to go try Realm. I think it's probably like the best beginner app that like I, I think works like give you that wow moment of that like shared desktop os. The same company Holium that builds Realm, they're also building a messaging app where like it's a group messenger app that like. But like along with having this like peer to peer messaging happening on Urbit, they also like let you have a sub a dao on Ethereum at the same time. So you're, it's like your group chat can also like own NFTs together and stuff on Ethereum. So that's, I think that's another really cool app you can try out. So I think those are probably the two that I would recommend trying out.
**B** (52:49):
And last question, is it like really something like an explorer where you can access all of these dapps? You said there isn't one. But do I ironically need to google those applications or where do I start?
**A** (53:04):
Yeah, so no, when you like go on to or like if you use Red Horizon, so what will happen is like there's different people who kind of maintain app stores you can call it. Right. So Realm, like when you download Realm it has its own little app store built in. But then if you go to like course one site they have a, they have their own registry of apps. So you can go to the, or you can just go to the Urbit website and they have a list of apps there as well. This is what I'm saying. There's like whole like set because it's so centralized or the, the app registry, it, it causes this like divergence where it's like oh you know, of course one maintains their own version. They maintain and it causes this fragmentation. That's why I think like oh, let's put this all on a blockchain so it's like globally discoverable.
**B** (53:54):
Okay. Yeah. I mean here we have another reason why I think for Urbit having its own blockchain would make a lot of sense. But yeah, I think we have enough starting points for people who are interested. And as always you can find all of the mentioned links in the description below. And with that being said, Sunny, thank you so much for shedding light on the Urbit ecosystem as of now. Let's hope that we don't have to call it an ecosystem in a couple of years from now, but just Urbit, like we say, Internet. I think that would be a lovely outcome. We at Friends will have a very close eye on Urbit and try to cover this. Yeah. Again, ecosystem as much as possible in the next coming weeks. And yeah, once again, thank you, Sunny, and I hope I will see you on the show very soon.
**A** (54:45):
Awesome. Thank you.