Urbit

PROJECT URL: https://urbit.org/ INVESTMENT ALLOCATION: NFT blue chip REQUESTED SPEND: 15.0 INTRO/BACKGROUND Urbit is a new OS and peer-to-peer network that’s simple by design, built to last forever, and 100% owned by its users. Under the hood, Urbit is a clean-slate software stack compact enough that an individual developer can understand and control it completely. The key innovation of Urbit is complete sovereign data ownership. Because Urbit is a P2P network, your data never rests on a single centralized server. Your keys, your data. Today Urbit is a fully functional VM that looks like a fairly simple but growingly sophisticated productivity suite. With a more sophisticated UI, this is the Web3 Slack we've been waiting for. P2P Video call is currently supported along with shared notes, message boards, etc. Urbit IDs are distributed by a sponsorship tree. At the top of the tree are 28 (256) galaxies. Each galaxy issues 28 stars, making a total of 216 (65K). Stars then each can issue 216 planets, making for 232 (~4B). You can also call stars ‘infrastructure nodes’ and galaxies ‘governance nodes’, since those are more descriptive names for their roles. Stars help route packets, kind of like an ISP. And galaxies are a bit like DNS root servers or ICANN members. The difference, of course, is that Urbit IDs are owned cryptographically by many different people and accrue reputation independently. INVESTMENT It is this infrastructure (Stars) that I propose we invest. They are available on OpenSea as well as through a WSTR token swap on Star.market. The price of stars briefly exceeded $25k per star but is currently down to $11k per star. This is largely due to the wider crypto market pullback, but also difficulty around the launch of WSTR, the liquidity mechanism for Urbit address space we’ve mentioned in the past. The token did not launch with a liquidity mining reward program, which has led to the pool remaining fairly illiquid. This is being addressed over the next 30 days in the buildup towards a large Urbit event in NYC in late May. A significant number of projects and new companies are actively building on the network at a scale that we’ve never seen before. The largest of those is Uqbar, the Urbit-based layer 1 blockchain, which is ushering in renewed institutional interest to the project as awareness spreads that Urbit’s federated network is an ideal backbone for any decentralized application. DAOs are increasingly courting Urbit due to the real operational struggles they have faced in using a variety of fragmented platforms to organize themselves. Holium, backed by the Urbit Foundation and venture capital, is developing a suite of integrated applications for DAOs that will leverage Urbit’s unique primitives to offer a unified, extensible solution. Among many other active efforts, there is also a substantial campaign underway to update messaging around the Urbit value proposition and streamline user onboarding. My expectation is for all of this to increasingly create upward price pressure on Urbit assets. DISCLOSURE I have owned address space (stars/planets) both directly and indirectly through funds since 2016 through today. WHEN WE SELL I'd like anything over a 2-3x either heading into or out of the Urbit event in late May. If we don't see price action there (bear market continues) it's an asset I'd be very comfortable holding. I think there's 100x possibility here on a 2-3 year hold. PROPOSING MEMBER: Marcus Dorsen