Urbit Community Update - November 2024

We invite you to a first look at what we’re building. Welcome to Piraeus, a portal to your digital world.

Piraeus is a new, zoomable tiling interface. It’s a 2D piece of paper that allows you to navigate your digital world spatially. With infinite resolution, you can zoom in to see specific content, and zoom out to see everything.

What’s inside Piraeus? This single UI unifies 4 different kinds of experiences:

Wallet Apps that interface with data on the blockchain.
Captive Apps that bring the traditional Web2 world alongside your Web3 apps.
Landscape Apps, the Urbit apps that we know and love today.
Shrubbery, our experimental application framework that unifies data and apps into one, all under a globally addressable tree structure.

Piraeus is just a demo right now, but the team is working hard on making it fully come to life. We look forward to bringing it into your hands.

Naming the World with Urbit ID

Notice that these experiences in Piraeus are behind a single sign-on with your Urbit ID. Our quest is to make Urbit ID the decentralized identity standard for the whole world. What does this mean?

People need identity to make contact, conduct business, accrue reputation, and more. This identity should be decentralized, so that the power to issue and govern it belongs to the world. Any identity that takes off is likely to become a standard, becoming more useful as it gains more users.

Why is Urbit ID well positioned to become this standard? We have a secret weapon that no competitor in this space has: Urbit comes with a standard stack of services.

This is the Urbit OS.

Imagine that an unfamliar address sends you some ETH. You’d like to send them a message and ask why, but this just isn’t possible. ENS (the decentralized identity on Ethereum) only standardizes names, and nothing else behind it.

With Urbit ID, you know that each address comes with an operating system that is capable of sending and receiving messages, and much more. If ~sampel-palnet sends you some ETH, just open up your Tlon app and ask why.

The internet has never been more important, and its content is increasingly generated by bots and AI. As the world realizes the necessity of digital identity, we will be at the forefront of the movement to give people a more secure and human internet.

Ambassador: Bridging Between Blockchains

Our founder, Curtis Yarvin (~sorreg-namtyv) has penned a series of essays articulating new thoughts and direction on the interface of Urbit with the blockchain world.

Azimuth is the system we use to register ownership of Urbit IDs. Currently, it’s hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. Ambassador is our plan to expand Azimuth, to allow ownership to be attested by any possible blockchain. This will accelerate our plan for Urbit ID to become a universal decentralized identity. Read more about it here.

Curtis wrote two more essays on these topics. In Five Kinds of Coins, he classifies the different types and uses of cryptocurrencies, and posits a new type called “Landcoins”, of which Urbit could be a prime example. In The Zero-Fee Blockchain, he puts forth a thought experiment on how to create a digital consensus system that is both safe from state actors and practically free to use.

Fourth Wartime Address:

Address Space and Blockchains

Next Friday, November 29th, at 8:30PM EST / 5:30PM PST, Curtis Yarvin (~sorreg-namtyv) returns to talk to the Urbit community. He will explain designs for address space and Urbit’s interface with the blockchain world.

To ask questions for Curtis and participate in live chat, join us in the %radio app on Urbit, in channel ~dyl. You can install the %radio app from ~nodmyn-dozrux.

If you’re new to the network, you can get an Urbit ship preloaded with %radio using this Red Horizon link.

Otherwise we’ll also be streaming to Youtube and X. To get a reminder when we start, click “Notify Me” on the Youtube event link.

Want to watch the last livestream? You can find the recording here.

From Around the Network

Markdown on Urbit

The path to publishing and note-taking on Urbit just got a lot easier. Community member ~wispem-wantex recently released an Urbit-native implementation of Markdown.

Markdown is a simple, minimal language for writing formatted text. It's widely used across the web for blogs, personal sites, READMEs, and much more.

The implementation by ~wispem-wantex builds a full pipeline for you to write Markdown, store it on your Urbit, and publish it to a site. If you’re interested, check out the Github repository, which includes an example app that shows off the full functionality.

Tlon Public Profiles

Users of Tlon, Urbit’s main communication app, can now publish a self-hosted, public-facing profile.

Easily setting up a web page that you own and control is a major Urbit use case. We anticipate that this is the first step towards customizable, self-hosted, personal and professional sites.

If you’re curious to try it out, check out the directions here.

Booting an Urbit Moon

Community member Ben Brown (~nordus-mocwyl) continues his video series that explains Urbit in a simple and friendly way.

His latest video explains how to boot an Urbit moon, which are sub-identities that are created from and owned by planets (the standard user-level identity).

Thanks for checking out this edition of the newsletter. In case you’re not on Urbit yet, you can get a planet and join the UF General group here. As always, we look forward to being on the network with you!

–The team @ Urbit Foundation

Jeremy brokers the sale of galaxies and stars. To purchase or sell a galaxy or star contact him at [email protected]

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