Check out this fleet full of apps and groups from the team at Red Horizon. If you don’t yet have an Urbit ID, this is the perfect way to get started. Just a few clicks and you’ll be on the network with a potpourri of groups and applications to explore. We’ve even seeded it with your very first %pal on Urbit. Enjoy!

Core Strength

It’s shaping up to look like 2024 is going to be a big year for Urbit.

The core team has been working hard this year to make Urbit better than ever. While a lot has been shipped this year, the biggest and most exciting projects have taken the better part of 2023 to implement and are slated to land in Q1 of 2024. Here’s what’s coming:

• Network Scalability (January 2024): eliminates scalability constraints on galaxy-level packet routing

  
  

• Encrypted Remote Scry (January 2024): enables scalable P2P content distribution for encrypted data

  
  

• Ares Runtime (Q1 2024): delivers an overall performance boost and elimination of data storage limits

  
  

• Network Overhaul (January 2024): increases network throughput by multiple orders of magnitude

  
  We just updated our roadmap to provide implementation details, release timelines, and a summary of everything that’s been completed so far this year. Check it out!

Updates from Tlon

Tlon recently pushed a big update to their desktop and mobile app.

Technically, the update is a “backend refactor that merges channel types into a single agent, while separating agents for publishing and subscribing.”

For laymen, that means that things are getting a whole lot faster. Read the full thread from Tlon to learn more.

Assembly Lisboa Hackathon Winners

Our Assembly Lisboa Hackathon was our best Urbit Hackathon yet. Winning projects ranged from a browser-based text editor for Urbit to a WebAssembly interpreter to a decentralized marketplace where you can buy or sell goods and services. Check out this blog post from Hackathon organizer Jack Wang (~tamlut-modnys) to read about the other winners.

Find the winning Hackathon apps pre-loaded onto your ship when you onboard via the Red Horizon fleet.

Assembly Talks

We’ve now released nearly all Assembly Lisboa talks on YouTube. Stay tuned for a few more coming out this next week. If you didn’t make it to Lisbon, or if you missed some of the talks while you were there, we highly recommend browsing the videos and listening in to what the brightest minds in the Urbit universe are working on. From an Urbit exchange for tokenized assets to a conversation with NEAR Foundation CEO Illia Polosukhin on the NEAR x Urbit partnership, from a roundtable on the future of sovereign AI to an investors’ panel on Urbit, crypto, and markets—there was some excellent alpha to be heard.

Highlighted Media

Odds & Ends

Some quick hits from on and around the network this past month:

• ~tiller-tolbus is building %token, an Urbit application for sharing a transaction ledger of a fungible digital tokens. Follow along at ~tiller-tolbus/token.

• Check out the whitepaper for Octu Ventures, a DAO for investing in teams building on Urbit—led by Kenny Rowe, Nick Simmons, & Taylor Ahlmark.

• Ares, the new Urbit runtime, is so powerful that it now has its own Twitter account. Give it a follow to stay up to date with this momentous improvement to the Urbit network.

• Native Planet has released urtty, a tool for funneling a shell on a ship's host through the %lick vane to allow shell access to the host via urbit webapp.

• West Martian Press has released The Arvo Book, a compilation of the core components of Urbit’s Arvo operating system. Check it out.

As always, we look forward to seeing you on the network!

–The team @ Urbit Foundation