the-arena
a place for builders who ship
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Coming back to the arena for old time's sake. Since the seasons of /the-arena ended, I went rather quiet as of late, and I thought it would be fun to come back here, to bring the arena to the rest of you all! 🚢
I've been talking about Quilibrium 2.1 and Quorum Mobile's upcoming releases, which have taken an absolutely ungodly amount of effort to bring to the finish line, but what I haven't quite nailed down, is the message. There are a lot of folks (s/o @gmfarcaster) who have asked what exactly Q even is, and I admit, most of my posts have been very technical. So tonight, as we are on the cusp of 2.1's release, I thought it would be nice to not just tell, but _show_.
Quite a long time ago at this point (well over a decade), I wanted to go on to do other things – I saw myself easily becoming content with building in finance and retiring a quiet life, but I knew there was so much more potential to what the rapid growth in cryptography research was producing. Verifiable computation, secure MPC, mixnets, group encryption – these were all really complicated things to explain, and at the time, basically infeasible to put in common practice. And these things were for absolute fucking nerds (pot, kettle, black).
In that time, I got really hooked on teaching people how to code, so I ran a weekly stream, walking through building things for massive scale, with examples. And there was one I kept coming back to – a Discord clone. But as I built more into it, there were things it did that they couldn't, or wouldn't do. And the itch of crypto grew stronger again. I needed to do something. Meanwhile, crypto communities organized on telegram and discord, which was rife with scams, hacks, and just never really hit the right angle on how to natively organize communities.
People aren't going to move to a "better" Discord, and with the massive amount of social change: censorship, surveillance, advertiser-driven suppression, I started building towards what would be a hybrid: the privacy-preserving strengths of Signal, and the friendlier and more feature rich experience of Discord, one I at the time named "Howler". At that point, the stream changed – it moved deeper into cryptography topics, on how exactly to make this possible, and good god did I have a lot of ideas.
And as those ideas matured and more people got word of what I was doing, it opened a lot of conversations with other social founders and their needs – "Amazon was a threat," from some, "building a decentralized social platform without DMs doesn't work, but DMs need cryptography to be on a protocol" from others. And it became even more clear, when it wasn't just being heard from social founders, but those from other spaces, that the tools I was building could serve so much more. So the stream pivoted finally, into the beginnings of Quilibrium: a protocol to let builders build censorship-resistant, privacy-preserving applications.
The thing about hard tech, is that even when the value prop is clear, understanding how to build against it is incredibly hard. So the final piece of the puzzle was revising the design until it was not only easy to use, not only that the value props were clear, but that it conferred new value propositions – how does one sell "permissionless composability"?
So the Howler project came back, as Quorum. We launched the initial beta of Quorum late last year, and after an initially rocky start, we grew to thousands of users, many of which remain active daily. This helped set the tone. Even with the full feature set of Quilibrium not yet released, it was still possible to create incredibly powerful applications. 4 replies
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