About

Urbit is an operating system and a peer-to-peer network of personal servers on the cloud. The system was built from the ground up and consists of three components: Urbit OS (Arvo), which functions as a personal computer; Urbit ID (Azimuth), which employs an Ethereum-based PKI for ownership of network identities; and Urbit Network (Ames), which facilitates peer-to-peer communication. Together, these components forge an integrated toolkit for community-focused networking that inherently precludes ads, tracking, or centralized data capture. Open source and decentralized, Urbit simplifies computing to offer durability, privacy, and digital autonomy.

History

Urbit's development began as a personal research project in 2002. Reimagining computing for a network-focused world required a clean slate and the creation of a simplified programming language. Urbit's foundational programming language, Nock, took six years to develop, culminating in 2008 when the language was operational—coming in at about 32 lines of code. Four years later, in 2012, Urbit's functional programming language, Hoon, compiled itself to Nock, initiating another phase of development.

After Arvo, Urbit's OS kernel, booted for the first time in 2013, a working prototype for the entire system neared completion. An effort to advance the project from concept to construct lead to the establishment of Tlon Corporation in 2012, which helmed Urbit's development until 2021 and which continues to build on Urbit today, along with several other organizations.

As the system matured, demonstrating Urbit's viability, Tlon received seed investment from a16z, Founders Fund, Tim Draper, and several others. They hired a team of developers, remaining under eight employees for the next four years. In 2015, Urbit's web interface went live, allowing for command line communications and an urbit to act as a web server for urbit.org for the first time.

Urbit's growth continued to accelerate through 2016 and 2017, when the first address space sales transpired. Both sales, the first in 2016 and the second in 2017 after Urbit's test network ran successfully without a reboot for ten months, sold out in under six hours. The development of Urbit ID progressed over the next two years and in 2019 Azimuth, an identity registry on the Ethereum blockchain, launched.

An Urbit ID is an ERC-721 non-fungible token—a single 32-bit number—translated into a pronounceable and unique name for use as a personal identity on the network. In practice, Urbit IDs are NFTs that function as a key to the network. There are just over 4 billion total identities (2^32).

A network hierarchy exists to provide governance and maintenance: galaxies are root nodes; stars are infrastructure nodes, and planets are nodes for everyday users. Because reputation persists and follows each individual Urbit ID, good network behavior is inherently incentivized. Similarly, because there are a finite number of Urbit IDs, they are valuable and therefore eliminate some inadequacies of the current internet structure, like spamming, scamming, or spreading malware.

In 2020, Tlon Corporation declared the network as stable and released OS1, an improved, user-focused interface that facilitates collaboration, communication, and commerce. In 2021, an independent audit vetted the network architecture, finding it generally secure. In the summer of 2021, a Bitcoin wallet was released as an update to OS1.

As an integral component of Urbit's network structure, Urbit IDs are fundamentally untethered to any single organization's control. While Tlon Corporation controls roughly 23% of the network's star address space, other companies build and contribute to the development of Urbit's kernel—these include: the Tirrel Corporation, an Urbit-focused payments processor; urbit.live, an over-the-counter marketplace for Urbit IDs; urbit.host, a server hosting provider; DCSpark, a product-focused startup building on Urbit; and Uqbar, a project engineering an Urbit-native blockchain.

At the beginning of 2022, the Urbit Foundation officially bifurcated from Tlon, which incubated it as an internal protocol for most of 2021. The goal of the Urbit Foundation is to maintain the network, educate users, and support the growing community of developers and operators. Tlon continues to focus on interface and building out a robust toolkit for use on Urbit.

Simultaneously, in an effort to reduce transaction fees due to the increasing price of gas, Urbit engineered and deployed its very own Layer 2 rollup, making planets more affordable for everyday users. Transactions are performed on Urbit, submitted to a roller, which then gets processed on-chain in batches.

Urbit's growth has accelerated rapidly since the public launch of Urbit ID. At its core, an ethos of human-centered computing remains Urbit's guiding principle. As a network, Urbit gives users control over their data, their privacy, and their digital autonomy. Urbit ID is an integral feature of Urbit's value proposition: owning your digital identity is the first step to reclaiming those rights. As the network transitions from a community of early adopters to a network for a variety of digital communities, the value of Urbit ID provides more resources for developers, which advances the network's utility for everyday users and stimulates further expansion.