Hello World

Welcome to the Tari blog. We are very excited to tell you about what we are building. In this post, we’ll answer the questions, “What is Tari?” and, “Why should Tari exist?”

What is Tari?

Tari is a new open source, digital assets focused blockchain protocol.

Tari is a new open source, digital assets focused blockchain protocol that is being architected as a merge-mined sidechain with Monero. We chose to focus specifically on digital assets – things like tickets, loyalty points, in-game items, and crypto-native assets like CryptoKitties – because we see a huge opportunity to revolutionize the way these assets are owned, managed and transferred. We chose Monero because we care deeply about decentralization, are passionate believers in the ideology that drives the Monero community, and think Monero is a great fit for a foundational security layer. We hope other projects will consider leveraging Monero in this manner.

Why should Tari exist?

The purpose of Tari is to fundamentally change the experience of owning, managing, and transferring digital assets. Every day, millions of us employ familiar patterns to acquire the digital assets we love. Here’s what that process looks like today:

• Loyalty Points: Fly all over the world → earn points → achieve status → get free upgrades & free flights → tell all your friends

• Tickets: Wake up early → load up ten browsers → reload ticketing site repeatedly → get the best seats in the house

• In-Game Items: Burn hours farming → earn currency and experience → get amazing items that enhance your gameplay, and help you beat your friends or the game

Unlike the manufacturers of the physical things we own, the issuers of digital assets often try to create and enforce rules governing what we can and can’t do with the digital assets we own. For example, sometimes issuers don’t want us to be able to easily transfer or resell the assets they create. And when reselling is permitted, the user experience is often terrible and/or the fees that are charged are exorbitant.

In the video game industry, game publishers often build walled gardens to prohibit or heavily restrict the transfer of items. This often leads to thriving black markets, rampant fraud, and Rube Goldberg-esque user flows.

In the ticketing industry, the original economic participants in the sale of a ticket (usually the venue, artist, team, or promoter) often don’t directly benefit when their tickets are resold. As a result, they charge as much as they can upfront – through VIP packages, high priced premium tickets, and high fees – knowing that ticket resellers will make a fortune on the secondary market by charging as much as 25% of the resale price split between buyer and seller.

And with many loyalty points programs, there may be blackout dates, restrictions on the number of seats or rooms that can be purchased with points, and significant restrictions on which 3rd parties will accept them.

Our current world of digital assets is incredibly inefficient and frustrating.

Our current world of digital assets is incredibly inefficient and frustrating.

What if there was a way to design a digital assets ecosystem that works better for both issuers and consumers? An ecosystem that enables issuers to create rulesets around their digital assets and trust that they will be enforced without creating walled gardens? And an ecosystem that makes it much easier for consumers to transfer or sell their digital assets while respecting the rules set by the issuer?

Tari will become this new digital assets ecosystem. With Tari, creators of digital assets will be able to issue them as programmable non-fungible tokens on the Tari blockchain and trust that their rules will be enforced. Consumers will be able to use applications built on top of the Tari blockchain to more easily transfer their digital assets while respecting the rules set by issuers. Ultimately, our intended result is a more frictionless, lower cost digital asset ecosystem that benefits all constituents.

A common question we’re asked is, “Why not build something like Tari using an existing protocol?” There are many blockchain protocols that currently, or plan to support some form of digital assets. However, many of these protocols also support the development of decentralized applications. Due to the many tradeoffs involved, we think it’s harder to build a scalable, decentralized applications focused protocol, than a protocol that focuses only on digital assets. We also think that protocols that will ultimately change how our world works will combine great technology, and a great go-to-market strategy. We have plans for both that we will be detailing in future posts.

Join Us

If you are passionate about digital assets, blockchains, and building new things, please check out our open internal contributor roles here. We’d love your help making Tari a reality.

In future blog posts we will talk about how we are architecting Tari, our funding model (there is no public token sale and we aren’t accepting any investment), how our economy works, and more. Thank you to everyone who has supported us on this journey so far.

 

- Naveen, Riccardo and Dan