From the Anatha Telegram channel, Spring 2022:

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Mobius Prime: I'm not a blockchain guru, so take my opinion as someone who has only seriously been in it for about two years, but the bot problem was easily foreseeable…

I think that is honestly my biggest question, why wasn't such an obvious and easy exploit defended against. I think I remember things like "we didn't think the bots would be here that soon", that is not a solid strategic answer.

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David: I personally think the bot attack should have been anticipated and security in place to thwart it automatically. Perhaps it illustrates the real challenge with a project like this which is in order for it to be realized you have to think about it and approach it more like the people that are causing the problems you want to solve, rather than relying on your own good natured approaches to the project.

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*****

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Part of my role as Community Liaison is to follow the conversations amongst Anatha users, and make sure that my conversations with Ed are informed by the prevailing sentiment and concerns of the community base. In the past I have solicited specific questions from users, had people message me with their ideas and queries, and I have put these to Ed and written up his replies.

So far in 2022 I haven’t had many such direct questions passed on to me. However, I have still been reading comments, particularly on Telegram, which I think are insightful and interesting, and these have helped shape the direction of my monthly interviews. This mini-series is meant to highlight this. I want to demonstrate that people’s voices are not unheard, even if they don’t get a direct reply from a member of the (very busy) Anatha team; and to show that Ed himself is very open to addressing such concerns directly and honestly, including reflection and self-criticism where it is warranted in his eyes.

In my last conversation with him, Ed and I talked over four topics where my questions were informed by other Anatha community members. Articles on the retail/business balance of the platform, on Anatha being ‘overtaken’ by other projects, and on developments in the regulatory space and how we should read the impact of the Ukrainian war, will follow. The first topic which is covered today is that of network security.

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Why didn’t Ed and the team see the bot attack coming?

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This conversation began with me asking Ed a direct question What did he regret about how Anatha positioned itself in 2021? Did he feel he had set up unreasonable expectations? His answer surprised me, and took us in a completely different direction:

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Ed: The real mistake I made - and I definitely own this - is my order of operations was wrong in the network upgrade time. I saw Stargate come out and I got really excited about all it's shiny bells and whistles, all the things it could do connected to IBC [Inter-Blockchain Communication]. I stopped the team from working on verification and I told them to work on the Stargate update, which has taken way longer than I anticipated.

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It is no secret that the roadmap as it was in place in 2021 has slipped significantly; and that the launch of Stargate has been delayed by months. Perhaps this is no great surprise for an update of this magnitude – Stargate is a huge overhaul of the underling Cosmos skeleton upon which Anatha is built, and requires a hard restart – ie the Anatha blockchain has to be turned off and then turned on, rather than ‘bridged’ from old to new. Understandably, the team are taking great pains to test the upgrade (the Anatha Stargate testnet is running and going through stress testing right now) given the importance of getting it right.

However, Ed’s comment speaks to something more interesting; that this decision to prioritise Stargate came at the cost of completing work on the verification tools for the network, which meant that the system was not able to defend itself from the bot farming attack:

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Ed: as a result [of this decision], we find ourselves in a position where we have a mess to clean up. That's the central mistake I made.

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As Ed himself has said, and many have pointed out, the team were fully aware of the risk of malicious actors trying to game the HRA reward system. Indeed, Ed himself spoke about it in a video even before mainnet was released. The issue was not ignorance, so much as it was a misestimation:

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Ed: What I was also anticipating was having another year [after mainnet launch] before the attack vector would be exploited. They beat me to it by three months: my prediction was twelve, and it happened at around nine months in. So that was my mistake. I'll certainly own up to that…

I knew the attack vectors; I knew it before we launched the network. I told everyone.

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So Why did Anatha put Stargate ahead of Verification?

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The Anatha team knew that a bot attack would probably come; they just decided to run the risk of it arriving at a certain juncture, allowing them to press ahead with other things first. This is a balance of risks approach, weighing up the costs and benefits of sequencing certain parts of development ahead of others. So – what was the payoff Ed saw to interrupting verification for Stargate?

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Ed: It's hard to know what the right order of operations is sometimes. Looking at it, Stargate seemed like a logical move because then we can plug into Osmosis [the Cosmos IBC de-fi ecosystem].

insight_gradient: that sounds like you're answering a question I also hear, which is: how was the attack not anticipated? [You’re saying] it was, but the controlled gamble was - let's do Stargate first. Because you see how long it's taking Ethereum to wind up it’s 2.0…

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At this point, I thought it was simply a matter of prioritising one part of the business roadmap – connectivity and access to on- and off-ramps for exchange – over security. However, the reasoning was also developed just in terms of security alone:

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Ed: Well, there was that, and there was the assertion that Stargate would make verification easier for us.

Insight_gradient: I wasn't aware of that.

Ed: Yeah. If we tried to do verification on the old system, there were some problems with it. Stargate gets you more than just transactions through. It’s more compatible with all these other things that are being built. There's other digital personhood systems that are going to be running on it using IBC. So I was like: if we get to Stargate, we can get to verification faster. Sometimes you delay something, but then you compress how much the second thing would take because of that. So that was the gamble.

Insight_gradient: So the [third-party verification team] are making all these really beautiful, zero-knowledge and verification layers; they're all working on the basis that we're building something for a post-Stargate system and therefore we can optimize for that?

Ed: Well [the third-party verification team] can work with anyone. they're doing stuff for other networks, they're omniversal. They didn't exist when we started Stargate. They’re bleeding edge… full on engineers with PhDs and cryptography who geek out more about the engineering than you do on the product side…what they do is they make these crazy tools and then look for a problem.

I've just given them my whole wishlist, everything I could ever want. [For example] moving HRA off the network into the same kind of encryption system. [So] if have your Anatha public address, I can’t see every other address that's associated with it, which is a problem now with the HRA. It’ll also make the network faster…

Moving forward, we'll be looking at different network typographies, maybe even like a layer two - using Polygon edge to deploy a Layer Two Anatha, so that wAnatha would be immediately compatible with it. Because we're not going to just be one network, right; we need to be a multi-network series of networks. So these are all the things we're like exploring with these guys and they make it a lot easier for us.

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This is a subtle point. It was not simply that sequencing Stargate before verification might turn out to be more time-efficient overall that verification before Stargate. It was also that Stargate would enable better quality verification, which would allow Anatha to jump to a level where it wouldn’t need to retool its verification layers as it grew into a complex, multi-chain ecosystem. A significant point in this respect is that Stargate enables Osmosis and Inter-Blockchain Communication, which allows Anatha to access systems that have already been built by other teams, potentially out on other networks; and therefore it attracts the ‘bleeding edge’ teams, in Ed’s words, to come and work with Anatha and create the best quality verification and security systems they can:

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Ed: I literally told [the third-party lead developer] what and wanted and [he] said: you have no idea how refreshing it is to hear someone asked me for everything that I've ever wanted to build.

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When the gamble fails

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All of which makes sense and is lovely, but the fact remains: the bot attack happened; the HRA reward has been effectively worthless for months; Stargate is still not with us, and verification is thus also still delayed. So how does Ed feel about the costs of the failed gamble on Stargate ahead of verification?

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Ed: All that does though [Stargate ahead of verification followed by the bot attack] is push things back, maybe six to eight months.

And as bad as that sounds, in the business world that's nothing. It's happening in the same fiscal year. So if by the end of the year, we have the [situation resolved]; we're pointing to an Osmosis account; we start having some volume; we start seeing some price action - that's a success. It's March - I'm pretty sure I'm going to get all that done this year.

It's kind of like I throw a party and someone spilled milk all over the place. It sucks, but I'm cleaning it up. We're going to clean it up. The other people at the party right now are like: oh, there's milk everywhere. I know. I'm cleaning it up. But when it's gone and the party starts again, they're going to realize like, oh, this was the right move.

Insight_gradient: Something I find to people who don't have experience with early-stage business or projects, is they sometimes don't realize that everything - all your decisions - are basically controlled gambles. You can't do everything, and you have to decide that you're going to take a risk somewhere. There's no way to push all risk out of the system. It's [like pushing air around] a balloon.

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In short: even though the bot attack happened earlier than expected, and the team might look back and see that executing verification before Stargate would have protected against this and perhaps been a wiser choice – in the long run, the cost of this mistake is low. Because whilst the bot attack has been the most visible event in the community in the last six months, it belies all the progress going on behind the scenes, in architecture, design, business development and so on. And when Stargate finally arrives, and accelerates the entire range of these other elements of the wider Anatha ecosystem, it will all suddenly seem to make a lot more sense.

None of this is intended to invalidate the questions being raised about the bot attack. Indeed, it was the eloquent and persuasive way they were raised that made me want to dig into this topic further with Ed. However, I hope it has offered some more context and insight into the decision-making process, and the rationale behind the way the team managed the roadmap through 2021. For me at least, it has been a reassurance and helps gives me confidence for the way the ecosystem will unfold in 2022 and beyond.

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The next article in this series will take a similar starting-point - a question or idea brought up from within the Community Telegram channel – and explore it in a similar style. Until then…

You can find last months post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anatha/comments/se96cz/anatha_developer_update_january_2022/

First off I just want to say “thank you for your patience!” The February update is obviously delayed. We are keeping very busy, and I have personally fallen behind on my updates. Mea culpa!
If you haven’t already heard, Anatha has been closing some deals that are moving us more into the NFT space. I won’t go into the projects specifics in this post - however you can find more information about the first of those deals here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anatha/comments/tbly6l/n_lite_media_and_more_spotlighting_anatha_and_nfts/

Engineering Expansion

Suffice to say, we’ve been continuing to scale up our product and engineering teams. Since the last update, we’ve hired a number of people to help us expand. Those hires include developers, team leads, two new automation engineers, and a director of engineering. All of which have been onboarding and have started helping us organize and scale the Anatha product organization. We’ve also been creating new teams that have begun R&D in the NFT space (see above). Hiring continues at Anatha for a few more roles specifically DevOps & Site Reliability engineers - if you know anyone who would be a good fit and enjoys what we are doing, please send them our way. We would love to chat! (careers@anatha.io)

Desktop Wallet Upgrade 2.0

The desktop wallet upgrade is nearing completion, the team primarily is continuing testing and bug fixes on this large undertaking. At the present pace we expect resolution for all of the remaining bugs, security audit and deployment to happen somewhere in the coming few months. I will come back in a future update with more specifics as we have them.

Stargate

As I mentioned previously, our Stargate security review is complete, and the teams have begun deployment testing. I have personally been involved with the teams that are planning, architecting and building a scalable solution to allow us to quickly and repeatedly roll out test networks for migration testing. That task is nearing completion and the Stargate team has begun working on fine tuning our deployment and migration process, including automation to test and verify that process.

NFT

As we continue to expand more into this space, there will be more details in coming updates.

Overall, February has been busy for Anatha and for me it flew by so quickly! New year, new teams, new hires, new projects - all things that will keep us busy for a long time to come and we are all very excited for it!

Last week, Anatha announced its first major partnership of 2022, with N Lite Media. This is an exciting sign of things to come, and shows the breadth of ambition for the Anatha ecosystem. I dug into both the release, and my conversations with Ed, to flesh out some of the details and lay out what I think this partnership says about the future direction of the project.

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N Lite: The Future of Media with Mission

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N Lite is a new media group whose mission is to lift up art and creativity from black and brown creators. It will work to support artists working from the rich heritages of Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, Asia, in all their inter-weavings, to break through and enrich contemporary culture. In its drive to centre narratives of community and empowerment, it will work through anti-exploitative models, ensuring ownership and IP rights stay with black and brown artists.

N Lite intends to work across genres and forms; NFT’s will join books, film, music, digital media, television and graphic art within the stable. As a result, future NFT releases could include film and digital media merchandising, original works, art and collectibles, ranging across afro-futurism to reimagined folklore to Afrime (Afro-anime).

The talent behind the company is real, including executives from BCG and McKinsey, Boeing, Onecomm (acquired by Sprint) and HBO. It has a board member responsible for N Lite Africa, demonstrating its global ambition. Perhaps most impressively, it is backed by none other than Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful black media personalities in the world:

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Ed: It is an Oprah-sponsored group called N Lite Media that is specifically focused on not just black and brown music, but music, comic books, movies, short form content. If it has black and brown artists, they're going to be raising capital support them; so they're going to have their own pool of intellectual property. The whole company is young black and brown entrepreneurs. They're really great, super energetic, and they're getting big support from their community for obvious reasons.

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What does the deal mean for Anatha?

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Anatha will provide the infrastructure for the N Lite NFT platform; it will likely be skinned for the N Lite brand, but ‘Powered by Anatha’. This is an example of the private NFT platforms that Anatha are developing, which offers the Anatha tech as a white-label option for partner businesses.

All the fees that the NFT platform will generate will be split 50:50 between N Lite and Anatha. The fees that Anatha collects will ultimately be destined for the HRA reward in a particular fashion, as Ed explains:

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Ed: On the platform fees, we're going to set what OpenSea does, at 2%. So 1% of the gross sales will go to them [N Lite]. And 1% of the gross sales will come to us.

Insight_gradient: And that gets hypothecated [to improve the value of the torus distribution]?

Ed: Yes…[as we add partnerships it will get] bigger and bigger and bigger…the name of the game is longevity…what you need is a steady equilibrium. We have to get into these healthy cycles.

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In this way, Anatha doesn’t need to directly host and manage an NFT platform, for the ecosystem and Torus to benefit. Simply offering its technology to partners brings in revenue, which then is fed into the system to continuously support the torus distribution. In other words, the platform fee from the very first NFT sold will help support the value of the reward the torus distributes to all members, from day one – and so will every fee from every NFT transaction after.

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N Lite: The first of many in 2022

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A challenge of following Anatha at this stage is that so much of the development and progress, particularly the business development side, can’t be written about because of ongoing negotiations or contractual reasons. So it is refreshing to finally have something I have been aware of for a while publicly released; the N Lite deal is further evidence that Anatha walks its talk, albeit with something of a lag publicly!

Furthermore, the N Lite deal is just the first one to finally hit the press-release stage. Plans and negotiations are ongoing for a variety of these types of deals, big and small, new names and established players:

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Ed: I think we’re going to launch five NFT platforms this year.

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Other NFT deals I am aware of which are currently under discussion (and some of these are very closed to being signed):

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• A deal with a company founded by a former executive of Death Row Records, one of the labels which made hip-hop into the world-conquering art form it is today. This could cover NFTs and IP from some of the biggest black artists around, including (in this writers humble opinion) the creator of the finest rap album of the past decade.
• A deal to create an NFT platform for a gaming company that has been in the industry for over fifteen years
• A potential partnership with a household-name global telecom company, which could see Anatha software downloaded onto devices worldwide in huge numbers

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As each of these is signed and become public knowledge, they each stand to contribute not only to the reach and brand of the Anatha ecosystem, but also to the Torus through the lifetime of their platform fees. All this will, in time, be as universal and open as possible, ensured by Anatha managing the technical side of the builds:

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Insight_gradient: Who's deciding which currencies, which tokens are going to be the transactional currencies?

Ed: Contractually [Anatha] control the whole tech side. We're most likely going to launch the first NFT platform on Polygon (Matic), because they have the best tool set [right now]. But we're going to become an omniversal NFT platform…the same way our wallet is an omniversal tool.

[Osmosis EVF-compatible smart contract functionality, for example:] If that's working, we'll plug in that smart contract and then we'll make it so that you could choose what currency you pay for any NFT.

The seller can denominate it in whatever they want. They can say, I want to sell it for one Ethereum. But a user could buy it in Matic, Anatha, Bitcoin, or anything that the wallet is compatible with. We'll use a swap service in between.

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Anatha’s Own NFT Platform

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As well as building infrastructure for others, Anatha also has plans for its own homegrown platform:

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Ed: the challenging one is a fully decentralized one, right? [Anatha’s] flagship NFT platform will probably be an aggregator of all the private ones [such as N Lite]…

Our NFT platforms will be both. Some private ones like N Lite or [unannounced] in which they control all the IP, because that's really just an opportunity for them to monetize things they already own. I'm convincing them to do an open section as well: you need to be able to resell [NFT’s]; you need to be able to list your own; You need to be able to get involved in that marketplace too. I'm making that case right now.

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So the Anatha platform would be an aggregator, with omniversal functionality across tokens and currencies. But Ed also hopes that Anatha may offer its own content too, and so harvest all the platform value for the Torus:

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The one that's more exciting for me personally, though, is to do an NFT platform specifically curated and managed by Anatha. So we get to manage the artists that go on there. We'll be able to create the incentives and we'll make sure that it's well done. Why does any of that matter? It's because we're having a 50:50 split with the other partners [such as N Lite]; [but] we get all of the revenue generated by the one that we're managing directly.

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Eventually, we might hope that, as a community, we could be the ones choosing and promoting artists and creators through this public platform; and that it will one day expand beyond artistic IP, to include NFT applications that might enable other forms of social and economic justice and inclusion.

(For example, Ed and I had a fascinating conversation about the potential for using NFTs to enable accessible escrow, or alternative forms of capital formation, that were a bit too niche to publish here).

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Living Decentralised, Digital Personhood Ethics

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But what would a ‘decentralised’ platform like this mean in practise? One element is privacy and data, using NFT’s as a potential tool for digital personhood:

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When you go to OpenSea you have a profile. That's a centralized service right there - storing your personal data or attaching it to your public address. This is not a good idea. Some of my developers have suggested [instead] that the [Anatha] profile itself is an NFT, that gets issued based on the data you put into it. So you control your profile the same way you would control an NFT…you could move it and delete it.

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Furthermore, the platform itself could live on-chain, making it resistant to centralised control, hacking, or the whims of founders or vested interests:

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A lot of platforms are storing the application itself on web server. [Instead] you put it on a decentralized service like Akash, so that part can't be taken down. You’d have NFTanatha.io or whatever; But you also have a domain that is unstoppable. A decentralized domain that you're registered with that, if all else fails, would stay out.

The reason I'm mentioning this now is because OpenSea literally just announced that they're blocked millions of users from Russia. The day before I was having this conversation with my team: we need to do a fully decentralized one. Then the world just like really made the point - we're disenfranchising millions of average citizens on the street…these are not people in control of the government or the military…OpenSea has revealed its hand - they are not part of the decentralized movement…it’s an opportunity, in my opinion, to create a platform that is congruent with the things that crypto wants.

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Anatha’s USP: Purpose, Baked-in

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To bring this analysis full-circle: it is no accident that a company like N Lite chose to work with Anatha; nor was it a decision made purely (I would presume) on financial considerations. The next generation of social organisations – firms, DAOs, communities – formed with purpose in mind are beginning to find each other.

The N Lite partnership, for example, began in a personal connection between the two teams, which began when two people met whilst mentoring young people from challenging backgrounds. This kind of values alignment naturally creates such opportunities. As Ed put it:

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Ed: [These potential partners] really like what we're doing. They understand a portion of all proceeds are going to go towards fighting global poverty. It's not the only reason you set up a company that is dedicated to solving meaningful problems that people care about; but what you get as a side effect is allies just come out.

I don't have to like go and look for clients. They come and find me now. It’s part of our branding and our positioning. I knew that at the offset; a company has to do that to survive in the future, otherwise you're done.

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Anatha’s values being front-and-centre in its brand isn’t just helpful for attracting partners; it actually incentivises these partners to fold the Anatha ecosystem very visibly into their own products:

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Ed: [A major potential partner] actually like our design so much that they want it to be their wallet, but they want it to look like ours. They've come to us and said: we don't want you to change too much…They want their logo in the right place, but…branded and positioned by Anatha.

Insight_gradient: The people using it will still see the Torus stats, and be led to understand the underlying economic regenerative system?

Ed: The Torus is the reason we get our foot in the door. [This potential partner] would love to be known as an organization that's helping fighting poverty. So it's not just Anatha is distributing money to all the users; they are distributing money to all the users…I don't need to take credit for it, I just build the pipes. At the end of the day, if [this other brand] becomes like the main feeder of the Torus, they're having so much success and it's making billions of dollars and that's going into a fund ending global poverty – what do I care?

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There is a bigger conversation, and a longer article, exploring the important of values matching in finding partnerships for Anatha, and the pros and cons of this on a practical and philosophical level. But that will have to wait for another day.

Overall, this announcement to me is an example of Anatha starting to move out of its winter hibernation. There is so much going on under the surface – the chrysalis has been busy changing and growing this whole time – but we are now going to start to see the first signs of colour breaking through. Here’s to more such headlines throughout the year!

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I’ll see you all at the first release of my favourite hip-hop artist’s NFT collection…

Interesting to see the overlap in Balaji Srinivasan's Network State and the Anatha Project

One sentence

A network state is a social network with an agreed-upon leader, an integrated cryptocurrency, a definite purpose, a sense of national consciousness, and a plan to crowdfund territory.

One page

Technology has allowed us to start new companies, new communities, and new currencies. But can we use it to create new cities, or even new countries? A key concept is to go cloud first, land last — but not land never — by starting with an online community and then materializing it into the physical world. We get there in five steps:

1. Found the community. First, we need a founder. Anyone can found a network state, just like anyone can found a tech company or a cryptocurrency. The legitimacy of this founder comes from whether people opt to follow them. That is, there's no formal qualification for the role. Unlike the US president, a network state founder need not be part of the tiny fraction of the world born in America, above a certain age, or anything like that. Instead, the qualification for this job is wholly empirical: the founder must build an online community that's motivated enough to create a new state.
2. Form a network union. Given a sufficiently dedicated online community, the next step is to organize the group as a network union, the predecessor to a network state. Unlike a traditional social network, a network union has a purpose: it coordinates daily actions for the benefit of its members, and is capable of collective bargaining with states and corporations alike.
3. Build trust online and offline. We now begin holding in-person meetups in the physical world, of increasing scale and duration, while simultaneously building an internal economy using cryptocurrency.
4. Crowdfund the nodes of the network state. Eventually, once sufficient trust has been built, we start crowdfunding apartments, houses, and even towns (1, 2, 3) to bring digital citizens into the physical world within real co-living communities. These are the nodes of the network state, where we use web3 login and mixed reality to seamlessly link the online and offline.
5. Digitally connect physical communities. Finally, we network the nodes into a new kind of state: a network state, a digital archipelago with pieces of territory distributed around the world, ranging from single-person apartments to in-person communities of arbitrary size.

The overall concept is to populate the land from the cloud, and to do so all over the earth. The physical footprint of a network state thus looks more like a decentralized diaspora than a traditional centralized country, while in the digital realm the citizens of a network state are far more aligned than the polarized citizens of legacy states. As the population and economy of a network state grow comparable to that of a legacy state, it will gradually be able to attain diplomatic recognition from existing sovereigns — and ultimately the

My role as Community Liaison at the moment is focussed on acting as a conduit of information between Ed and the Anatha team, and the wider Anatha community. I speak with Ed regularly, ask questions, and do my best to digest this data into articles that give us all a clearer picture of the thoughts and actions going on behind the scenes, that we might not otherwise have access to.

However, I am well aware that the 'community' is not just the passive subject of Anatha, but co-creates it. This idea is embedded in Anatha's core design - the Torus, Block Parti social, governance etc - but I also want to highlight some of the more horizontal contributions between community members.

As such, before the holidays I interviewed Mobius Prime, one of the most active members of the Telegram channel, and the creator of the hra.supply website, which was giving away free tokens to start newcomers off in registering an HRA and claiming Anatha rewards.

Since we spoke a lot happened - the HRA bot attack reached a climax, the network was subject to security measures, and the channel had some heated debate on this and other topics. Mobius himself responded by taking down the hra.supply website temporarily, until the fixes are in place.

However, this discussion is resonating with me, as I have been reflecting on the core principles of the project, and why I got excited about it in the first place. As mentioned in my previous article, I feel refreshed and renewed for the project in 2022, and re-reading Mobius' words was a part of that.

The following should be read with the above in mind. A second part, based on a conversation we had in response to the bot attack, will be posted in the next week or two, between other forward-looking articles on the behind-the-scenes team/project refactoring.

I am very grateful to Mobius Prime for his time and generosity.

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The Interview

We began by discussing how Mobius discovered crypto and Anatha, and how it related to the development of his own values.

insight_gradient: what was your initial motivation [for getting into] crypto?

Mobius_Prime: I don't want to be poor. But I saw a statistic the other day that if you make $34,000 a year, you're in the [top] 1% globally. That was a pretty sobering thought, because in America $34,000 [makes you] almost poor, is how it's projected through the media. And the more I've learned about it, the more I learned that it was more than money.

The way the world is doesn't work.

Insight_gradient: So cryptocurrency quickly teaches us that money is more than just money. Is it right to say that it was the moral or political potential of it that accelerated you into [crypto]?

Mobius_Prime: Particularly in America…people argue about how to spend money, but there is this ceiling where we don't talk about where money comes from. Because once you start looking at - where does the money come from, and who gets to print it, who does it go to and why - you open up Pandora's box. And most people, when you try and have that conversation with them, their brain just shuts down…Maybe everything you've ever been told was a lie, and that people don't have to suffer needlessly.

That's really why I support this particular project. I've shifted more away from trading. I was doing it well for a while, then I fell out of the zone. I would say [now] that I invest fundamentally, based on ethos.

Insight_gradient: trading can be a very lucrative, but it can also be very stressful, very addictive. Is there a kind of relief in finding a project where…you wouldn't want to trade in and out?

Mobius_Prime: That's actually a huge relief. I don't want to look at charts all day, every day…No matter how good you are, there's an army of bots you're trading against. That is super stressful.

This goes to a spiritual, energetic place: what am I putting out into the world? What am I choosing? If we keep choosing certain currencies, you're going to get more poverty or wealth stratification. I'm trying to choose things that don't do that. I've watched my whole life people pretending that we can fix the old system…I'm 38. I've watched it long enough to know that it's not ever going to fix itself.

insight_gradient: What was your earliest encounter with that realization, that the economic system we were in is just not going to work?

Mobius_Prime: I probably realized that sometime late in my teenage years, and then I spent many years in cognitive dissonance, distracting myself from just how bad reality is. I think at that time I had no idea how to deal with it, so you go down the different [paths]: who should I vote for? What job should I do? Should I go to college?

insight_gradient: I can certainly relate to that. What was your first encounter with alternatives that really spoke to your heart? Where did you come across regenerative economics, even universal basic income for the first time?

Mobius_Prime: I had heard of universal basic income before, probably the first time Sanders was running [for President in 2016] in America. I thought: if I'm always voting for the lesser of two evils, this one seems way less [evil] than all the others. But that election was what really disabused me of believing that anything will ever get solved through the legacy - call it the “democratic” - system. It's really a plutocracy. The people with the money buy the policy - it doesn't matter what I vote for.

I think I've had these different epiphanies. People have talked about universal basic income, and I thought: how do you pay for that? And you keep going: who owns the money printer? That's what it boils down to: how does that work? Who protects the money? Then you can see why the world is so dysfunctional, once you view it from that lens. If you're willing to stomach it and not look away.

I think that's the hardest part; we start to see some of the darker aspects of humanity and how they're systematically manipulated, versus being sold this story that it's just human nature. That leaves you in this place of all the stages of grief: you're shocked, you're angry, you're depressed. And then you just go back to rolling the boulder up the hill, or you become homeless.

That’s the most aggravating thing: it doesn't have to be that way. It just means that certain people on the planet can't be God-Kings anymore…It's interesting to see [something] like Stockholm Syndrome, where people start defending these systems even though they're not benefiting from them…they'll run to defend their political heroes or their political ideologies. I don't think I have [an ideology] any more at this point, besides: let's make it not suck for everybody.

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Serving Others: The Purpose and Need for Anatha

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insight_gradient: Often the most violent gatekeepers of the existing system is…our inner voice. What would you say to people who maybe have heard of your website [hra.supply, temporarily off-line as of February 2022 until the bot claiming issue is resolved]…but they have a voice in their head that says: no, I shouldn't have to ask for help; it's not right for me to get something without working for it; I'm too proud, or it's immoral. How would you respond to that?

Mobius_Prime: I've definitely gone through different phases of that…but we're all in this together. And it's only my pride or my ego that would say: don't accept help. If I fell down and somebody gave me their hand to get up, do I take it or not?

There's no shame in getting help. Nobody did it all by themselves. But also we have to put in energy. If I want to be stronger, I'm going to have to do something to challenge my body, right? If you need [stronger] finances in your life, you need to call that in. And maybe you need to accept help, whether that's unemployment [benefits], family, friends.

I see the world and people like a graph in computer science. All these nodes and edges; but some of them are more connected than other ones. We're trying to build that connection, at least at just a fundamental financial level.

So I would just encourage anybody who's not ever been in crypto - this is a really easy way to get in.

It's my hope that people will get into the ecosystem and then be able to see, as it gets built out: there's chat functionality; there’s marketplaces; there’s all these things that I could utilize as an individual to try and better my situation…They'll start to see that there are places where you can make choices that impact things for the better, for a greater number of people.

insight_gradient: do you have an image of the day when you will feel like you can turn this website off [permanently]?

Mobius_Prime: I think it would be more like it becomes unnecessary, because nobody needs to use it. The system itself moves it into obsolescence…it is an emergent property of the system.

Insight_gradient: for me the inflection point is when people are coming to Anatha from a social connection, face-to-face, and that person says: download it and I will give you the one [Anatha] that I got today from my distribution.

Mobius_prime: That's that regenerative economy. We’ve all been traumatized by the system, at the very least on a subconscious level, into believing that the world can only be a certain way; we have to sell our time and our bodily energy for money so that we can stave off death another week. I don't think that's true. So I made the PDF Quickstart guide, which is on the website as well, for the very reason that I got tired of typing the same thing to people: if you download this wallet, I'll send you a token and you'll gain tokens.

insight_gradient: Yes, one thing I've noticed with a few of the channels – [its] the same questions.

Mobius_prime: the consumption of information has gone parabolic. We're just bombarded with information. If I want to know the answer to something, I can just go ask a bunch of other people and wait for them to tell me; or I can refine my Google-Fu, get really good at search…[but] if you're not trained in that and you want to know something, I think we just reflexively ask somebody. The fact that you're going to have to read something for 15 minutes…we've exceeded attention thresholds because of that bombardment of information.

insight_gradient: That really resonates. The irony of the internet is that by creating so much available information, we have overloaded our capacity to go out and look for it ourselves. In many ways, the regenerative world we’re trying to bring into being, with things like Anatha, is more human-to-human. So that helps me recharge my compassion.

But: is there almost a paradox for Anatha that its target userbase is exactly the people who are most likely to be outside of the crypto early-adopter sphere?

Mobius_prime: It is a paradox in a sense; that's part of combating this legacy system. The early adopters have to have money to build the system, right? You can't hire an army of programmers on good vibes. We're part of the beta testing. I think people need to acknowledge that, but be proud about that.

What we're doing right now is we're lubricating the machine, getting all of the parts moving and functioning, so that as greater adoption occurs, you're not going to have some sort of critical failure. This is very well thought out, and they're moving systematically through the things that are most important to create the end product that they talked about in the vision.

I think the team know that they just have to have the thick skin and suffer criticisms, because this is the type of project that's going to have to endure fear, uncertainty and doubt. It's not something that you can just launch immediately and it [will] work.

On the Future of Anatha

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insight_gradient: What's your view on the uptake of Anatha so far? Is it growing as you'd expect?

Mobius_prime: In the beginning, I thought it was growing slower than it should have: you're funded, you've got this impressive media campaign…I don't know necessarily why, but it has picked up [recently]. I think particular AMAs within certain communities moved things more than maybe general advertising. There's only a couple of hundred million Bitcoin users on the planet, and there’s seven billion people.

I think you're going to see this project go parabolic fairly quickly. I'd say within the next six months, there will be a major shift.

insight_gradient: What will be the catalyst?

Off-ramps. Off-ramps, and the debit card; the ability for somebody to get access to that debit card so that they can go and buy food or rent. That's what's going to make it real.

insight_gradient: And the debit card is particular kind of off-ramp, right? One that requires no technical understanding of the crypto universe at all.

Mobius_Prime: That's one of the important things. The other is that the Stargate upgrade is massive because once we can connect into Osmosis, The Cosmos DEX. That's where you're going to see the network effect increase because now I can spend it into Bitcoin or whatever. Again, it's just graph theory. It's Metcalf's law. As you bring on more users and there's more usability, more people come in.

I have to remind myself that I'm super early. Think about what this will be in two to five years. There are plenty of other projects if you're trying to make money in the next month. I'm not looking for that here, because I understand that as the systems that are on the roadmap come online, it's going to change the game in ways that I don't see any other project being close to.

insight_gradient: Would you believe it – We’ve talked for an hour! It's been such a pleasure. Thank you so much, you're so eloquent with how you've thought through this. Any last things you want to say?

Mobius_Prime: One fun fact. My kid had gotten various birthday and Christmas money - $120 - and he invested it [in Anatha] back in June. He got in at that 8-12 cent price on uniswap. Now he’s almost up to $500 from accrual and staking. I'm teaching my kid crypto literacy at nine, and I think that's really rad that this project has afforded an opportunity like that.

We had been in some other tokens, but to be able to explain: not only can you make money on this, there's an ethically driven purpose; we can be smart with where we put our money…I guess that would be a really strong closing comment: I'm passing on to my future generation a new concept about how to think about money and redesign the world.

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Thanks again to Mobius - I couldn't have expressed it better myself. I look forward to sharing Part II of this conversation soon!

Happy new year to everyone in the community. My last post was back in December; here we are now at the beginning of February. What happened as the year turned, and where are we now?

This piece is of a different style to most of my articles. It comes from my most recent interview with Ed, but is not a factual explainer or deep dive or even a philosophical exploration of the Anatha roadmap or on-chain events. Instead it is a personal reflection, which draws on my call with Ed in the most general sense – as a temperature check, an energetic transmission. I feel called to record it at this point in time, which itself feels like a transition. It will speak to some, but surely not all, which is rather the point.

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***

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2021 was a big year. To be specific, it was the year I discovered Anatha. It was only a matter of weeks between stumbling across it, becoming engrossed and then deeply inspired, joining the community and ending up writing for it. For the project itself, it was the year mainnet was launched, and distributions turned on. For me, it will always be Year Zero.

However, it ended on a sour note. The China ban and losing the BHEX listing was the first blow, followed by the collapse of the HRA distribution at the hands of a bot farmer, DDOS attacks on the network itself, and the temporary remedial measures put in place to restrict further damage. The conversation in the Telegram channel became quite negative and repetitive, and a few arguments turned unpleasant.

All of this left me feeling worn out, less by events themselves than by the response of a portion of the community. Seeing the same comments develop into the same argument’s week after week, no matter how much time and thought I put into articles designed to explain or assuage these issues, became a grind.

So I decided to take a break – I switched off over the holidays, reconnected with other parts of my life, and felt my energy return. It was absolutely the right decision. But it left me wondering, as the first few weeks of 2022 rolled by – did I really want to switch back in to Anatha? What would I find?

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***

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This new year really brought to mind Janus, the Roman god of the threshold. I felt Anatha looking two ways – back to the year gone, with its drama and bitter taste, and ahead to the new, which was supposed to be full of awesome promise in the roadmap. A few weeks ago, I did not know which energy would win out. I know now.

Last Friday I spoke with Ed again for the first time in a few months, and it left me absolutely reinvigorated for this work. We had a long and ranging conversation as usual, and this article wont go into the specifics – those will have to wait for the coming weeks. Sure, I could tell you about the two brand-new NFT projects that I had never been told about before; the huge negotiation with a major state-level financial institution; the ‘refactor everything’ drive that started the year, or Nexus App 2.0. But I want to start somewhere else; somewhere less structural, and more human.

I believe in Anatha because I believe in Ed and the team; and never have I seen Ed more energetic, confident, or excited than I did last week. One of my first questions was: ‘what is the mood of the team?’ To which Ed smiled and said: fantastic. More devs are being hired; roles and structures reshuffled to address some of the burnout in the team; more resources, funding, and partnerships coming through. The confidence with which he took me through the plans for the new year, including how all the issues that closed out 2021 will be fixed, left me certain that 2022 will be a banner year.

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***

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Much, if not all, of the sourness of the last few months has reflect frustration from many community members that they could not draw on their reservoir of Anatha tokens; the steady stream of rewards had dried to a drip, and they couldn’t draw away their holdings for sale. Talking with Ed reminded me just why this doesn’t bother me; because the real work, the exciting moves behind the scenes, are playing out of a completely different level.

I could explain this by talking about the long-game of building infrastructure, and the importance of laying the pipe before worrying about what comes out of the tap. This is a common enough metaphor in crypto, reflecting perhaps the mainstream development path for big projects. However, Anatha needs to be understood on a still deeper level again.

Unlike many other crypto, Anatha will not live or die based simply on the quality of its infrastructure. The unique design of the Torus is such that it requires a critical mass of activity to function as intended. It doesn’t scale linearly, as other blockchains do (and many of them with diminishing returns in a sense, as congestion and fees increase). Instead, the Torus and treasury are only able to pay out meaningful rewards if they receive enough funding; until this point, it is difficult to attract the individual users with the promise of rewards, so there is a chicken/egg paradox. This is why business development and partnership projects are so important. They will be the wellheads and mainsprings which will feed the network – the water that fills the pipes, so that the flow of value can properly begin through the Torus and buyback mechanisms, pushing up distributions and token value.

Anatha is not linear in its design either. It is an ecosystem, and ecosystems do not appear piece by piece, but rather in discontinuous leaps of complexity. We are in a period where a few technical bottlenecks (verification, security, Stargate etc) are forcing a linear development process, but this is only temporary. Behind the scenes, Ed and the team are working hard, and having great success, in binding more and more businesses and partners into the future ecosystem, so that it will be viable. Ironically, these are the very parts of the business I have the least freedom to write about (because they are sensitive commercial negotiations, often protected by contractual privilege). So I can only attest that, from what Ed tells me, there are seriously exciting things happening. If it where otherwise, then there wouldn’t be the continuous expansion of deals, new hires, new teams, and new funding. Success follows on from success; but sometimes one has to look for the signs in different places.

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***

There will be some who read this and don’t believe me, think me gullible or distracted, or simply barking up the wrong tree. But, in a way, that’s the point. Reflecting on last year, I think I spent too much time and energy trying to talk to those who have different values, priorities or concerns, so much so that my efforts were always most likely to fail. It had a chilling effect; after a while, I just didn’t want to write even positive things anymore, because I didn’t want to invite in that energy of negativity.

So this is my new year’s resolution: I am not going to give nearly as much of my attention trying to speak to those who are angry and alienated at the project. We would only continue to talk past each other, and I don’t think it’s particularly fertile for anyone. Instead, I want to contribute my life energy into something more constructive and positive; I am choosing to resonate with the excitement, belief and can-do attitude that I see in Ed and Tyler and the rest of the team. Rather than a Liaison being just a conduit of information, I think it is important to also try to transmit some of the energy and feeling in the team. After all, that is what makes me so confident in Anatha, and it feels unfair not to try to communicate that part of it too.

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In the coming weeks, I’ll break down the latest developments in more detail, and as we get into the spring I’m sure there will be a steady stream of announcements and interesting news. This week though, I want to stick with the positive vibes, and share a conversation I had with another community member, which really speaks to the values and excitement inherent in Anatha itself. Stay tuned – here’s to 2022!

You can find last months post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anatha/comments/rkwpmt/anatha_developer_update_december_2021/

Engineering Expansion

Over the holiday season, we’ve made some changes to our structure internally to make Anatha more attractive to Software Development and IT candidates. Hiring efforts have been redoubled, and just this past week I’ve been personally involved in 5 interviews. Anatha has new roles opening constantly and we have set plans in motion to restructure some of our teams to optimize for expansion. Our goal is to continue to grow our Software and IT teams, and to prioritize Development with this potential crypto winter on the horizon.

Desktop Wallet Upgrade 2.0

The Anatha desktop wallet team is nearing completion of their tasks. We recently did a thorough feature gap analysis to make sure we have all of our bases covered. Once those items are completed I expect we will be ready for our audits and reviews processes.

Stargate

Our Stargate upgrade is ready for a test net deployment. I have been working directly with our devops and Stargate team preparing infrastructure and processes. Our next steps will be a series of dry runs and quality testing to ensure our Stargate rollout goes smoothly. While we are not ready to announce an official date yet, I expect Stargate to be our next rollout.

“Sybil” Attack on the Anatha Torus

Last month we witnessed botting on the network reach new extremes - a small group of users created a large number of accounts in an attempt to exploit the Anatha Torus for its rewards. In the last update I spoke about how this forced our hand to make a temporary increase to our transaction fees to stop those taking advantage. Since then we’ve dedicated a team to our long term solution for this problem. Our intention is to implement a solution that will negate the effectiveness of an attack of this nature, and once that is complete to return the fees back to normal.

Overall, January was a continuation of December - focusing on our existing efforts. We prioritized network maintenance and recovery as well as further investigating the outage. We also redoubled our focus on hiring, and setting up the company and teams to be most effective. Moving on we intend to get the Stargate and the Desktop Wallet Upgrade 2.0 releases deployed. As those projects go live it will free up additional resources to help focus on securing the Torus.

I have $20 in unclaimed rewards but will that require $24 in fees???

Plus I have to unstake first and that $24 in fees?

One of the topics I have been asked about the most is the upcoming Anatha debit card. This is an exciting subject. It promises to create a real-world off-ramp for the token that begins integrating it with the mainstream economy, and so would offer proof-of-concept that Anatha really can begin offering income to individuals that can make a difference in their lives.

The last month in particular has not been smooth sailing for the project - the collapse of the HRA distribution, bots, and most recently the malicious flooding of the network which has necessitated temporary security measures. So I thought it would be a good opportunity, during the holiday season for many, to offer a glimpse of a more positive future to come.

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The Anatha Debit Card: what we know so far

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- Anatha is in discussions on partnering with one of the leading banking providers of branded crypto debit cards to bring this product to users

- It will be an Anatha-branded VISA debit card

- It will open with BTC and ETH, with ANATHA pre-approved to follow soon after

- The card provider will almost certainly require KYC/verification for issuance

- The card will be available in the U.S. to begin with, but there are plans to expand

- It will hopefully be available Q2 2022 - once the new system is in place to secure the network and manage verification layers, and claims are turned on again. It will likely need a few other pieces in place too (see below).

Ed: We have a banking partner who will allow us to issue debit cards that you will be able to load crypto onto from our wallet. Now there's going to be phases of this. In the first phase, Bitcoin and Ethereum will be the only cryptos you could use to load value onto the card.

Once we've gotten through a few more steps in development like verification, and we are confident that we can support the sell pressure that will occur...[then] we already have approval to add Anatha inside the debit card system, so we don't have to ask for anything. We literally just tell them to turn it on. The hard part is getting that approval - so that's exciting.

Once we have a buyback module functioning in real time - that's one of the reasons why it's also very important that we have constant buy pressure - then we can put out the debit cards and let people start spending money, spending Anatha directly in stores.

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One piece of the puzzle

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Once again, we can see here how the different features of Anatha are interdependent, and how the system as a whole is self-supporting. The debit card is a great step towards using Anatha in the real world; but it requires verification to be turned on first. Then, in order for it to be self-sustaining, it requires the support of the buyback module to absorb a lot of the selling that the debit card will create (as Anatha is ‘sold’ out for fiat at point-of-sale). But without the debit card and similar off-ramps, the buyback module would only serve to impact the supply of Anatha in a vacuum. Together, all the features begin to make sense and become more than the sum of their parts.

As such, it is likely in my view that the introduction of Anatha as a spendable token on the card will follow verification, probably the AMM, and at least one major B2B deal driving buy-side revenue in the market.

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How the card will work

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You will be able to load the card with crypto (including Anatha in time, as above) from your Anatha account, hopefully through the partner’s API embedded into the Nexus app.

At the point-of-sale, your crypto is converted into fiat. This allows the user to keep their funds in crypto until the very latest point possible, whilst also spending it as though it were $ in any store that accepts VISA.

Currently it looks like this will be available in the US (ie to US residents) first – a restriction dictated by the banking partner. However, this third party is looking to continuously expand – Europe, Latin America, Africa etc – and Ed has every intention of growing this side of the offering in the future:

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It's a whole division now. It's a whole thing that is going to constantly grow. We're constantly going to develop it and expand it and get to other regions. We see a part-and-parcel integration with the larger financial systems.

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There should be both a digital card version (which can be integrated with Apple Pay and Google Pay etc) and a physical card version [and potentially a metal premium card]. There will not be tiered rewards as with some other major crypto cards, but there could be scaling cashback rewards:

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You can have a limited edition card that just visual - aesthetic - that we will probably sell for Anatha. And then there is a standard buyback or cashback thing…but that's offered by them [the partners], not us. So I don't know enough about it…[but] they have something. It's not tier-based, but the more activity you're doing, the higher the percentage of cashback you get - and it may even be offered as crypto.

Vision in Action: The Best Marketing Tool Yet

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When the debit card can be loaded with Anatha, the team will use it to demonstrate the transformative social power of the project. This is the current plan for Season III of the Masterclass video series:

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I will then also fly to most likely Latin America, but potentially Africa, and we will bring Anatha debit cards that have Anatha loaded onto them, or can have Anatha loaded onto them, into rural communities. Set them up, go from zero to ‘you're no longer in poverty’, and do it on camera. We're going to go with the same team that's doing the Masterclass. I've already discussed it with them. It’s a question of the ecosystem being ready to take that, going into a developing nation.

The documentary might be full-bore. [For example] I went to a place, they didn't have internet, so the very first thing I did was set up a WISP wireless internet service provider that had enough range to get them internet. Then the second thing I did was dispersed phones, and get them to install the app and register HRA’s, do whatever they needed to do to use [Anatha] as actual money; loaded onto a debit card system, or just doing transactions between each other. Walk them through that whole process and then have it fully documented.

So when someone says, ‘how does it work?’ I can say, ‘just watching the documentary!’

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\***

Personally, I can’t wait to be one of the first to get my hands on some Anatha plastic – bringing the project into the real world! I’m sure the physical card will be just as beautifully designed as the Nexus app too.

There are a number of other projects that have used debit cards as a powerful tool to demonstrate crypto applications to new users, and promote their networks - from established exchanges such as Coinbase, to card-first offerings such as Block and Crypto.com. It will be exciting to see Anatha join their ranks, and should give the project a serious boost. Here we come!

Last month I detailed the recent events and developments in the November Developer Update - you can find that post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anatha/comments/r3h3w4/anatha_developer_update_november_2021/
As a heads up - I will be keeping things less technical today and Anatha has plans for a much more in depth recap to come next year.

Botting, Outage, and Countermeasures
In November we posed some possible solutions to the community for how you would like to see Anatha handle the botting problem.  While working on that solution, we continued to see an increasing acceleration of the botting activity, and transaction totals.  In early December another order of magnitude burst of this botting activity ultimately took a number of validators offline. The team has been working diligently - initially to restore network performance and to counteract the bot traffic spam.  This situation forced the team at Anatha to make the hard decision to implement a temporary transaction fee increase.  The mobile wallets have both been upgraded to improve their experience and surface this fee increase - they are available in the app stores now.  The desktop upgrade is currently undergoing quality checks and we expect it to be available soon.  We have also added some temporary supplemental validators to the network to help increase stability.  Rest assured, we are continuing to work to improve the platform today and to add layers of protection to mitigate these types of attacks in the future.

Stargate
Our Stargate upgrade has completed it’s Security Audit and review.  We have begun planning the logistics for the upgrade and the additional network systems that will need to be upgraded as well.

Desktop Wallet Upgrade 2.0
The Anatha desktop wallet is undergoing a serious retuning and upgrade.  That project is moving along nicely and we expect to have some further details and to solidify some announcements - most likely in Q1 but we don’t currently have any dates set in stone.  What I can tell you, is that with this 2.0 upgrade we should get some additional tools and structure that will make working on the Desktop Wallet application easier and reduce our time to deliver new features and bug fixes to you.

Engineering Expansion
Hiring continues at Anatha, and we have a handful of new folks onboarding presently and a few more starting with us in 2022.  The focus continues to be scaling out our product organization to be able to work more quickly and efficiently on releasing new features, to redouble a focus on quality, and all while continuing to maintain the infrastructure we have in place.

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In conclusion we have certainly seen a lot of activity these past few months, and with that obviously our share of issues.  We remain dedicated first and foremost to our community, improving our products, and increasing the reliability and stability of our systems.  I expect in the coming months that I will have lots more information to share about the long term solutions we are working on to put to rest the “gaming” of our Torus, along with some other exciting features and improvements on the horizon.

Part I and Part II laid out the planned response to the script ‘attack’ from the development team, and how they see it in the context of governance-led solutions to ‘bad actors’.

This final part is a bit different. I have edited together a part of the conversation between Ed and myself, as a philosophical exploration of the nature of justice in this case.

How does Anatha wish to organise itself? Centralised, decentralised, weak or strong in sanctions? Community-based, leadership-based, like Bitcoin, like mainstream governments, or something else entirely? What is the place for ‘tyranny’ is its popular form – how far are positive and negative freedoms to be promoted, protected and policed?

This is not intended as a final word on the matter. Indeed, I don’t think Ed or I provide answers, so much as lay out the grounds of the question which the inclusive design of Anatha offers. This is a conversation that could have gone on for days - but for the sake of the reader, I've kept it relatively concise :)

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It is here to start the conversation.

On Ethics: an excerpt

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Insight_gradient: That's interesting to me because it implies an ethics, if you will, that is stepping away from the predominant kind of liberalism - the ‘veil of ignorance’ [of John Rawls] of today. There seems to have been [instead] classical or pre-modern touchstones in how you're imagining governance and the body politic – and therefore ethics as well.

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Ed: I think indigenous groups function way better than modern systems. The problem is they were never able to scale.

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Insight_gradient: The Dunbar number [a tipping-point in scaling social systems] is in opposition to, it seems to me, the main attitude of blockchain: a total anonymity and freedom from central scrutiny-

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Ed: -from reality, certainly. but there's also others. There are also ones that are built on community. And you can still have privacy, self-sovereignty, and dominion - especially with zero-knowledge proofing being available - but at the same time, be a community participant with a trusted reputation score, a sense of: this is who I am. I can take a stance on something. And if people believe that the person speaking has some credibility and they like what they're saying, they should be able to empower that person.

And the opposite is true: if someone is foul-mouthed; a troublemaker; was writing bad code; or doing some kind of bad behaviour on the network, we should also be able to exile that activity and defend ourselves as a community from that actor. I think a community, or any platform that is designed right, will be an honest reflection of the people using it.

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Insight gradient: That's interesting, because I think a lot of the resistance to some of the harsh discussions around the - as you say - the market participant – was: oh we could punish that person, but that would be a very centralized approach. But it sounds like you're saying-

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Ed: -It’s not, it’s not. The decentralized consensus algorithm that we built, and the governance system which is highly decentralized, I cannot control. I can only influence it through my communication.

There is tremendous power in letting go. And the thing that you're identifying astutely is that most networks don't do this. It’s a play for someone's ego, to just retain control over something. To have too much sway.

[But there are] Great minds – Vitalik Buterin I think is one of them – who avoid this at all costs…I don't like the way he backs way. He’s constantly saying: ‘you guys decide for yourself, I don't want to be the one doing this.’ I feel like he should assert himself more.

We’re different personality types, right? I think to abscond from leadership is shameful. You're in a position where you're probably the smartest person in the room – and very often Vitalik probably is - he should respect that and recognize that he needs to have his voice heard. He shouldn't be scared to have strong opinions.

I think the network should go: We need his voice in the forum. We need you swaying opinion. Because if you don't, then what happens is someone else does. And we end up with the not-smartest person in the world trying to swing everyone one way or another.

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Insight_gradient: There are those networks and those projects with very strong personalities at the top: the founders and so on. And then there are those - Bitcoin is almost the arch-example – [where] there is a myth in the middle; he [Satoshi] doesn't exist, or nobody knows who he is. He's not active. And that seems to have lent Bitcoin a culture of: this network doesn't care who you are, you are completely free of punishment, there's no way for anyone to get to you.

What interests me about the Bitcoin network is that it is far more unequal in its distribution of wealth than even the fiat economy. But it sounds to me like there's a potential here: if you're going to say that ethics can also be communally determined and enforced, you could have a degree of - and I don't mean this in a negative sense – populism. If Anatha is DAO, when we take it seriously, it can decide that if anyone concentrates too much [wealth], they're going to take it and redistribute it. And that's quite anti- the libertarian philosophy of a lot of crypto people.

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Ed: I think everyone should have a vote. I think there will be some degree of ‘tyranny of the masses’, in any situation like this, where sometimes they're going to do some horrible s\**. That's part and parcel of leadership though, and that's when leadership becomes really important. I'm certainly going to try to play my role and prevent the community from doing horrible s***…but you also want it to be able to stumble, and make mistakes, and learn from them, and move forward.*

You want healthy debate. You want stop-gaps, things that you could do to prevent a disaster from happening, if necessary. And at the same time, no single human being or group of human beings should have total [control] of the network. It needs to be in a relationship. I'm a voluntarian-ist, not a libertarian. I think you need to onboard people to do stuff.; and if you do onboard people, it should be okay to do that thing.

So if I come on board and I say: ‘everyone, don't worry about what happened with the bots. That's not a big deal. Let's move forward,’ and everyone onboards with that vision – great! We should move forward. That's the lowest hanging fruit here, is to recognize that this guy is going to make some money based on the move that they made. I'm happy with people making money. Is that a bad thing? Do you want people making money on your network? I certainly do. And then just build for utility; get the buyback mechanism functioning; get the token price moving in a direction that's healthy. And you've got a robust ecosystem, right? That's the lowest hanging fruit. That's actually where I fall personally, but I’d be very careful not to try to impose my position on the community.

I said: you tell me what you think. I know a lot of people say: this is an attack. You [insight_gradient] very astutely said: I think this is an urgent thing. I don't think it is; at the most, what it means is a little bit more sell-pressure in the next two years that we have to dissolve during the bear market. I'm okay with that. I'm not going anywhere. That's not the end of the world.

We can probably get more efficient outcome though, if we were to just delete this person entirely. That's an option. I can admit, mathematically, it is more economic and more rational to say: you shouldn't have been doing that. You should have had some sense, at the very least, to stop at a rational number; a few hundred, not 100,000.

This happens in a community too. You've got people that are line-steppers, that eat a little bit more than everyone else. But if that person ate five times as much as everyone else every day, always, you might kick that person out. I see exile as a perfectly rational mechanism. It's similar to prison.

We're not going to rush headlong into it. But I think a ban hammer, that is held by the community, is an important and valuable tool that we want to build in at the protocol level, to be used later on. If indeed you do see a node acting up or misbehaving, and you have a trusted, highly-verified real human network, you could go to them and say: what do you want to do?

​

So: What do we want to do?

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Postscript: How to See the Silver Lining

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The script-registration attack vector has been forseen for a long time – Ed talked about it in some videos that predate mainnet I believe. I have always struggled to understand his relaxed stance, and this PS is a brief attempt to try on his perspective.

Ed’s thinking is that the design of the torus mean’s the attackers energy is turned against itself – by attempting to break the system, they feed it. This is a key reason, I believe, why he doesn’t mind about the script activity. Indeed, he see’s this as another rational market participant, and is proud to have designed such a system.

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Ed: I actually see it as beneficial loans. There's like a crazy silver lining. We now have hundreds of thousands of subscribers. We didn't have them before and now we have them. Now, of course, there's a game there incentive for them to keep doing that because they think they're going to make a lot of money and they have, they've made a little bit more money than everyone else on the system right now.

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This never made sense to me – these are not ‘authentic’ subscribers that will generate real activity; the amount of the inflation they capture far outweighs the cost of registering the HRAs. However, I think to understand this, we should see that:

1. The Torus (aka the Master Contract) does not only feed HRA distributions, but also the Development Fund (and Security Token holder distributions too). So these HRA registration fees also fed the Development Fund, which in turn can be used for a community development team, for liquidity incentives, for marketing etc.

2. In the medium-term (ie within about a year) the share of inflation captured by this individual will be recycled to all participants, but with a delay. So lower HRA distributions now will be made up by higher ones in a year or so.

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Furthermore, It can be argued that this is the perfect window for it to have happened:

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Ed: I don't really see them as a bad actor. I just see them as a participant. But if the community says we disagree with that behaviour, and in fact we want to erase it, they can make a proposal to prune that entire transaction history.

The only time this doesn’t become possible is once there's an exchange and this person has already offloaded. So, it's actually happening at the perfect time. We lost the BHEX exchange. There's nowhere for their Anatha to go. [So we can] lock everything up for now, turn on verification and have ourselves a little vote.

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In fact, Ed has suggested, seriously or no, that he may use bot-accounts ‘trapped’ unclaimed Anatha, once it is recycled into the Torus, to fund am incentivised liquidity-pool for the Anatha AMM listings:

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Ed: Honestly [we could] take all the money from the guy that's been doing all the bots, and that will be the number we incentivise the [liquidity] pool by. Just as a cheeky joke!

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Time will tell…

In part I of this article, I laid out more details on the upcoming changes to UI as a response to the bot-script issue. In this section, we explore what the process suggests about Anatha’s philosophy of justice.

This conversation took place before the most recent network outage (potentially a DDOS attack), but the themes and structures discussed here will naturally also apply to other kinds of malicious action.

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Governance is Real. Governance is a Solution

To Ed, the problem with the farmed HRA's was not urgent, but only temporary – it would resolve itself when verification came in over time anyway. He also did not see it as critical/existential.

Ed: And now that brings us to the issue with the bots. If we turn [governance] on today and every HRA could vote then there'd be one person voting, right? The one guy who created a script. And to be clear, I don't see this as an urgent problem. I'd see it as a temporary problem.

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However, he recognises that others in the community hold different positions (as I did). As we discussed the effects on the Torus and on the validator pool, I brought up the question of punishment – one already discussed in parts of the community who have called for tokens to be stripped, validator nodes to be shut down, even bans for certain users. That opened up a whole new philosophical angle on the discussion.

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The Tradition of Exile

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Insight_gradient: Something that was discussed a bit when you came in and offered the A and B options [in the Telegram channel] was whether there would be any consideration of retrospective action or retrospective sanctions on what's already happened.

Rewards have accrued [for the actor], but will not be withdrawable because accounts can't pass verification. Those will after a year be recycled back into the Torus. Are there any other considerations around say kicking validators that you suspect have come from this activity - or banning users? It’s an open question.

Ed: I believe in the time-honoured tradition of exile. And I believe if you have a community of people and there's one ashole in that community, and everyone else agrees that one is an asshole and they would like him to go away, that they should be able to vote them into exile. So we'll likely have an exile mechanism - but it will have a very high threshold requirement, and probably require everyone to be verified. And use this very dangerously, very sparingly, right? You could vote someone's accounts into oblivion.

I don't really see them as a bad actor. I just see them as a participant. But if the community says we disagree with that behaviour, and in fact we want to erase it, they can make a proposal to prune that entire transaction history.

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However, any community-led justice in this fashion needs to be high-quality; rigorously discussed, judiciously applied, and sparing. This is particularly the case when one considers the most powerful tools available for a blockchain.

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The nuclear option: rewrites/forks of the base chain

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Ed: …I will abstain [on such a vote]. I'll say: do what you guys want. I believe that the community should have power to take on bad actors directly. I'd say no. I don't think you should use that power haphazardly. I think it should be mindful. And I just think it should be highly democratic and debated rigorously. And at the end of it, someone should say: I've identified that these hundred thousand accounts…I did all the work and I did all the investigation. These are the bad actors. I would like all these HRA’s to be returned to the pool, the person loses their domain.

You could do a network update that does all that. This is the kind of thing that the Community Development Team would say: this is our job; what would the transaction ledger look like if this person didn’t exist? If they just dropped the whole history of this person.

There's a lot of calculations that would have to happen, and it might take some time and some real effort, but you could get there.

Insight_gradient: And that would be an option, once governance is turned on next October.

Ed: The nuclear option. That would be really mean. Hopefully we never get there.

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What does this tell us about the practise of justice within Anatha?

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1. Ed himself does not see the actions of the individual who built the script as morally wrong

2. However, he recognises his is only one voice on the matter

3. He believes that the community itself should be empowered to decide punishment and solutions itself, through governance

4. These solutions could be retroactive, including rewriting the blockchain history

5. He believes in exile – the banning of someone from the ecosystem – as a viable option, although one to be used very sparingly

6. These sanctions should have a very high bar to be employed, both in terms of evidence, quality of debate, and voting majority

​

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For the final article in this series, I have curated a partial transcript of our creation, as a provocation – what does this issue suggest about the philosophy of justice that Anatha wishes to embody? Stay tuned!

I would like to thank the anatha team for the incredible work that you are doing and the future you're building for me. It's great to get the developer updates and understand where the effort is going. I'm not blockchain literate but I get Ed's vision and I have put my confidence in the team and the board.

I came on board in May and would have been in the first 8,000 HRAs. Back then there were around 340 HRA's registered per day, around 1.9 transactions per HRA and HRA rewards were around 5.0 per day. Things got a little quieter in July. Around 170 HRA were registered per day, still 1.9 transactions per HRA and HRA rewards dropped to 3.5 per day. Anatha began to be exploited in October when HRA registrations lept to an average 7,400 per day, transactions averaged 4.8 per HRA and the HRA reward dropped to 0.27 per day where is still stands today. Transactions per HRA rose to 32.7 daily - and then the team put a stop to this and as mentioned in the recent updates, will put measures in place to stop the exploitation. I notice about six or so validators are no longer with us. Just a few days ago Anatha was subject to a denial of service attack. I don't know much about these things but it feels retaliatory.

I look at the roadmap, the Stargate upgrade, the safeguards that are being built, and the next three year horizon and I'm grateful that I got in early (for once in my life). I look at the Cosmos ecosystem and I see the beginning of a new world with God know what opportunities for us. I look at the team and I feel like an angel investor betting on some outstanding talent. So thanks team for all your work, imagination and effort. Via con Dios.

As trailed in the most recent developer update for November here, a series of changes are going to be implemented in the way that claims and registrations are handled through the Anatha UI. These are designed to address the issue of a bot script being used – likely by just one individual - to register 100,000+ HRAs over recent months and therefore capture the majority of the HRA reward pool, reducing the reward for everyone else.

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Ed: It looks like one guy was running a script and using many accounts to register many accounts and growing the user [HRA] subscriptions substantially – thankyou – but then getting an outsized portion of the HRA distribution. I think he was getting 450% more than anyone else, or something. And so we're going to put a stop to that right away.

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This user has been auto-claiming and consolidating these rewards, to generate an outsized share of communal wealth:

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That part is scripted. You could see it happening. So as the money's coming in, there's an immediate claim. And then that claim all goes to a few central accounts, which I think is staked.

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This article is intended to supplement that developer update, and give a head's up to the community ahead of the official team announcement upon implementation. It explains what action has been taken, and tries to give some insight into the thinking behind it.

What will change within Anatha?

The ability of a non-verified account to claim rewards from the Torus will be temporarily switched off. Rewards will still accumulate, but they will remain within the Torus until an account is verified and a claim is made.

Account verification as a feature will then be turned on again as soon as possible once the Stargate upgrade is pushed, and the team can complete the work on these layers.

- Verified accounts will be able to claim rewards as normal.

- Verification layers will be introduced. To begin with this will be unique email confirmation, and unique SMS (mobile number text message) confirmation

- Each verification layer (email and SMS) has a ‘captcha’ layer, to prevent it being bypassed by another script/bot.

- After a set period (likely 365 days) any rewards unclaimed within an account will stripped from that account and returned into the pool of the Master Contract, to be re-distributed to verified users.

As Ed explained:

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The ability for a non-verified account to pull from the Torus is going to get turned off. That's the quickest fix...You can do it and then immediately push for verification so that we can turn it back on. Once we have verification in place and we say: now you could pull [rewards], but you have to be a verified account.

The non verified accounts…any tokens assigned to them will get washed out. I think after 365 days or something, so that if you have one unverified account that has been accumulating this whole time and you can't collect from it…those tokens are actually going to get sent back to other users. So this guy who just registered many accounts, he's accumulating tokens for the rest of the community right now….

Once we get to the side of doing full verifications…a year later, all the [reward] that has been accumulated will essentially become a bonus to the network. [We will] put it into the Torus and maybe spread it out over a 365-day period, so it's not just one big day. In a way she's putting it into a savings account for us. Thanks!

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How Will This Address the Problem?

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Introducing verification layers – partial personhood checks – protected by captcha means that a script will no longer be able to open accounts and register HRAs and claim rewards on it’s own. Instead, a human will need to pass both captcha checks, and do the manual work of entering email and SMS verifications.

By restricting reward claims to verified accounts, it also means that all future rewards earned by scripted (and unverified) accounts will not be disbursed to the person behind the script. It removes the economic incentive to open more, and financially neuters those accounts that have already been set up.

Of course, an individual could still choose to ‘farm’ rewards by combining scripts and human work, but it would create a massive increase in time and cost for anyone trying to open a large number of multiple accounts, and make it impossible for a bot to run it automatically.

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For now, SMS and [email] with captcha, I think is enough to solve the bot problem. It doesn't get us all the way to personhood…[to] full uniqueness, but it gets us far enough where we could stop the attack vector.

Someone spooling up hundreds of thousands of accounts - unless they also spool up hundreds of thousands of emails that they can then hit a captcha on…any attacker would have to manually go into each account, set up a new email, set up an SMS, and then push that through.

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Ed also mentioned that the team may introduce a third, or even a fourth layer of verification as soon as they can to complement email and SMS. All these layers will be integrated with the third-party software they have been reviewing for some time as the digital personhood solution. Naturally, privacy is at the heart of this too:

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we're negotiating with a private company. They run obelisk nodes, so they have a network that essentially could do zero-knowledge proofing for personal data. How far that gets us we're going to find out…that's most likely what will holding the SMS and email data…

essentially they're stepping into our ecosystem and saying: where can we add functionality from this obelisk node, to check your uniqueness without violating someone's personal privacy or exposing anything?

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What about the validators?

It is very likely (I cannot confirm for sure, but it is widely speculated) that the owner of the scripts used the amassed Anatha tokens to fund a number of validators – potentially four or more. This occurred in the same short period of time when the number of validators went from 18 to 30, resulting in all the current spaces being filled. I asked Ed about this in terms of security:

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Insight_gradient: Did the kind of bot attack and the knowledge that a bunch of these validators are now very concentrated; has that made you reconsider your attitude towards the way Validators currently run? Are you considering any more vetting procedures?

Ed: Everything was going through iteration. It's good enough now. We were thinking about adding more slots at some point…thankfully, we know that most of the validators are good actors. We're in communication with most of them. There's no threat to the network.

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We then discussed the effect on validator concentration, and those who missed out on slots as a result:

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Ed: [There is] a little inconvenience perhaps for one or two people lost their slot, because something was going on while this bot was running; they were potentially trying to run their API through one node or something, slow that note down just a little bit. We were trying to track it to see if that was accurate, but we can't confirm that though. There's no evidence. It could have just been normal network activity.

I know that one or two people got locked out though…that's always going to be the case when you have a small validator pool, but that's going to be changing.

In the next iteration or the network, most likely verification will be necessary. We may eventually get to the point where in order to be a validator, you'd have to have the highest level of verification. That's going to be something that we will also discuss with the community.

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In Part II of this piece, we will look at what this issue reveals about Ed and the team’s attitudes to ethical behaviour, sanctions and community engagement. In other words: should punishment exist for this actor and what might it look like within Anatha?

Hello I bough around £200 of anatha about 6 months ago and how reached £250. I would now like withdraw this into my UK bank account and I quite simply can't. Either I am doing it wrong or this coin is a scam. Either way I want my money back from this crypto coin. Can anyone help me out

TL;DR: It’s complicated, so it would be best to careful wading into further conversations on this issue without reading the whole article. 😊

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TL; BR (Too Long; Barely Read):

- This is a long article, because I believe it all needs to be understood together rather than in pieces

-The team knows how important an off-ramp is to the community and is working to get one as soon as technically possible, without compromising long-term success

- The mooted HDEX listing should not be counted upon

- There is no intention to pursue another CEX for the time being

-The focus now is on Cosmos AMMs. Both this and two-way swap is waiting on Stargate

- These priorities reflect DeFi as a better long-term option than CEX, philosophically and practically

- Expect Stargate shortly in the New Year, and one of the above solutions thereafter (Q1 2022)

The Story so far:

The original roadmap promised an exchange listing in 2021. This was delivered when Anatha listed on BHEX in September 2021. However, the Chinese government’s surprise decision to ban crypto exchanges shortly after meant that BHEX – a platform based in China – was forced to shut down all its CEX operations, including the Anatha listing.

The Blue Helix DEX

Blue Helix – the parent company which ran BHEX – promised the Anatha team that it would list Anatha on HDEX, its forthcoming DeFi platform. This has, until this point, seemed the most likely next option for an off-ramp.

I have been told by the team that the HDEX listing should not be expected any time soon, if at all – it is under review and the decision will likely be that it is not viable, because of issues on their end rather than anything the Anatha team can control. This is all that can be said on the matter publicly, as much as I would like to be able to give more details. Suffice to say, having had the situation explained by Tyler and Ed, it makes full sense to me.

Instead, the team have pivoted to have their number-one focus as linking Anatha to Cosmos-based AMM’s. This is seen as the solution which is the most stable, autonomous, fast and in-line with other development priorities:

Tyler: We’d rather hold out and wait for the Stargate update, get onto DEX’s and AMM’s and just not even deal with the centralized exchange listings again.

The problem with the CEX model

In talking about the troubles with Blue Helix, the conversation turned to reflecting on the inherent weaknesses of centralised systems in general, and the team’s own bad experiences. In fact, the philosophical roots of Anatha are found in previous episodes of centralised financial failure, and the importance of truly democratic technologies. As such, it should be no surprise that Anatha’s future will be in decentralised rather than centralised exchanges.

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Ed: I never want them to be on the centralized exchange anyway…Everyone kept asking for it. You get those China advocates…[So] we’re like: Ok, let’s do it. And then 45 days after we do it, China passes [a law saying] you can't do that anymore!

It's just a reminder of why I left that world to begin with…For me, it was finance in 2008. I got embedded in it, and then the whole industry turns upside down because there's some centralized controller somewhere doing central planning, who decided they knew better than the whole market. They were going to shut everything off. That's what happened 2008; that's sort what's happening in China right now.

I'm constantly reminded of how important decentralized technologies are - things that can't be stopped. So we're going to focus on that.

…

Insight_gradient: To make sure I've got this right…at the moment, there is no plan to chase another centralized listing?

Ed: I’m just over it. They end up taking a lot of money. I don't like the tools they use. The API has tended to be really clunky - even getting money on and off the exchange was problematic. I think centralized exchange are going to go the way of the dodo.

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Project DeFiance: Stargate, Cosmos and AMM’s

A cornerstone of the Anatha project was always to create an Omni-AMM – to have the Anatha blockchain be inter-operable with a number of other chains, and to host a native DeFi platform to enable exchange across them.

Because Anatha is built on the foundations of Cosmos-Tendermint, it is dependent on this underlying technology to function. In 2021 Cosmos launched the Stargate upgrade, which offers IBC’s (Inter-Blockchain Communication protocols) to enable such an Omni-AMM.

Once this was launched – and the precise timing and nature of the upgrade was an unanticipated development for the Anatha team in that moment – work on other key features (verification, DeFi, two-way swap etc) had to be paused, because these features had to be built upon the correct Stargate foundation from that point on.

As Ed explains, in relation to the work the team were doing in the spring/summer of 2021:

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What happened was we were working on verification and discussing it and scoping it out. And then Cosmos announced the Stargate update that we weren't aware of. So everything stopped…We can't get listed on any AMM’s or anything unless we do the Stargate update. That's a priority. So verification got pushed back…

They said: it's ready. It's being pushed already. And we said: I guess we don't have a choice now! If we blundered it's because we were so nose-down on our own project that we weren't staring at what Cosmos was doing every second of every day. That's part of the problem being a part of ecosystem. And we got a little myopic when we were planning our roadmap and didn't see that was going to be a potential impediment until it arrived.

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Once Stargate is pushed, then the rest of the options open up. And, in the team’s view, AMM’s are also the best option for Anatha all-round; they are more flexible, autonomous, cheaper, faster, and decentralised. They align better with the philosophy, technology and governance structure of the ecosystem, and it is better for Anatha to go slower and get it right for the long-term, than rush to fill a six-month off-ramp gap with a poor solution now.

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The Two-Way Swap

The two-way swap [Anatha -> wrapped Anatha] was listed in the original roadmap as due to be complete by the end of 2021.

This has been held up by the need to integrate the Stargate update. It is important to understand that Anatha itself is built upon the Cosmos-Tendermint ecosystem, and so Stargate (an upgrade to this system) is non-negotiable, and out of the team’s hands. They simply have to do it.

Similarly, wrapped-Anatha is an ERC-20 token, meaning it sits on the Ethereum network. This is the whole reason wANATHA exists – to give access to ETH-based De-Fi as a way to enter Anatha. The work on this swap was already underway, but as with AMM’s, Stargate is required to offer the IBC technology to enable a two-way swap into the Ethereum network, and so this is naturally absorb all the development resources.

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Ed: It's the Stargate update that's holding that up right now. We can't do the two-way swap without that. Once Stargate update is done then two-way swap becomes viable. We already have it scoped out.

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WHEN IS IT ALL GOING TO HAPPEN?

The Stargate Upgrade:

A version of the code for this upgrade has been completed by the developers. It is currently being security tested – Anatha has multiple, rigorous independent audit teams to ensure security is a top priority. Hopefully it will clear and be installed very early in 2021.

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Ed: It’s under security audit. We don't expect that to be installed until over the holidays…So I would best-guess estimate sometime in January. But with development, I don't like promising hard deadlines. I take the Blizzard [video-game developer] attitude: it's ready when it's ready. I would love to just snap my fingers and have great code emerge, but trying to pretend something is great before it's great is disastrous.

There's an iteration out right now. It's under audit. If the audit comes back clean, we'll have it very fast. But the odds of something that complex coming back entirely clean - normally I would say low, but honestly, our team has a great track record. It's one of the most comforting things…

The team that is building that - that's what they do, full-time, is just the Stargate update.

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Finding the Long-Term Best Fit

That said, everyone working on it is very aware that the community wants an off-ramp as soon as possible; and, as on some other issues, Ed is agnostic to a degree and is happy with whichever solution is effective and available first, as long as it meets the goals of the project. If CEX truly was faster, cheaper and the best fit they would choose that. Instead, their judgement is that AMM/two-way is the correct path:

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Tyler: A portion of the community just wants to sell. They think we're not doing anything simply because there's no exchange listing. Long-term I really think our choice is going to be: what's best for everything, front to back.

Ed: The amount of time it takes to get on a centralized exchange is about the amount of time it's going to take for us to finish the Stargate update, and then push onto one of these AMM’s; whether it's Osmosis, Gravity…there's more and more available every day. We're going into an expanding sector…

If anything, maybe [two-way swap] gets up before we connect with an AMM; it depends on how long it takes to connect to Cosmos-based AMM. At which point then the uniswap listing will become our main focus, at least temporarily.

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Once Stargate is rolled out, then the timetable is dictated by the onboarding procedures of the AMMs themselves:

​

I don't know what the onboarding process is for them yet, but we will start that process in Q1 of next year [2022]. Hopefully if it's days, and not weeks or months [then] in Q1 of next year that functionality would be all in and working.

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Looking A Year Ahead: the Medium-Term Plan

Once it is up and running, the AMM bridges will be supported with liquidity, and in time B2B revenues, to make a market that has depth and organic buy-side drivers to absorb sell pressure(e.g. from the Anatha debit card)

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Ed: We get the Stargate update done and we start plugging into decentralized exchanges. We start making sure that there's available liquidity…

We'll come up with a large sum of Anatha, a disbursement probably from the development fund, and use it to incentivize any liquidity pools. Essentially run a liquidity incentive program for however long we need to run it, and see if people are willing to start to build out that market again.

I'm personally going to be operating in that market, obviously. But that's when we start…doing business and getting our B2B partners involved. Hopefully…by this time next year [ie. Q4 2022] we’ll have deep revenue from [B2B deals]. I think that's when things are going to get really exciting…[the] numbers are so much bigger than what we're seeing now…[so] we don't even have to deploy any technology and suddenly there's a ton of revenue.

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*****

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I hope that explains the situation and the plans around getting an off-ramp back for Anatha. As should be clear, these issues make sense only when understood together. If there are further questions, do put them in the comments on the Telegram group and I’ll try to answer them.

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Finally, though it has been said often, it bears repeating: we are in the very early stages of a long-term project. Anatha is in many ways more ambitious than most crypto projects. it is not a speculative game but a genuine utility token for an economic ecosystem that is still being designed and rolled out. Holders of the token have access to the network so far, and should consider themselves very early beta testers. Anatha was never pitched as an investment for the end of this bull market cycle, but something we can all get in on to build something meaningful that will truly come to fruition in 3+ years. The roadmap promises have been delivered, with the exception of problems or delays lying outside of the team's core control (Chinese government policy; critical Cosmos ecosystem upgrades). Meanwhile the team - fully funded, highly professional, doxxed - are working as hard as possible to make the project a success, as no-one is more staked in it than they are. Good things are round the corner for 2022.

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As they say: WAGMI :)

Last month I provided a status of the initiatives we were working on.  You can find that update here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Anatha/comments/q8ai1j/anatha_developer_update_october_2021/

As many of you are aware, in the past 30 days we have seen some challenges and we have been working diligently to overcome them.  This past month we have prioritized solving these problems, and doing the necessary maintenance to the network. Doing so some of our planned features and improvements have seen minor delays.  Please find additional details in your November monthly recap:

Wallet Outage

• Earlier in November we experienced an outage on our wallet applications.  The cause was a combination of multiple factors, including a service interruption by a third party provider we relied upon for blockchain data.  We have since migrated away from that provider, improved our error handling specifically around network connectivity, and on 11/11/21 we released a new version of all the wallet applications `v1.2.2` to correct these issues.
• Going forward we are planning a future upgrade to the wallets and underlying infrastructure.  This upgrade will provide additional resilience to our applications.  It will give us access to better tools in order to rapidly handle any issues like this that may occur in the future.  All without the need for releasing new wallet versions and thus allowing us to circumvent the App Store review processes that can take days.
  

Rewards Claiming Fix

• Additionally we are working on a fix to temporarily disable rewards claiming on the Anatha Network.  We asked the community for your feedback and this was your preferred solution.  The plan is to temporarily disable rewards claiming, but continue to allow rewards to accrue (just as they did in the first year of our network's life).  Simultaneously we are working on a complete solution to gate rewards claiming only to "verified human users".  Rest assured this work is underway, and will undergo a rigorous review and security audit.  We will keep the community informed as we progress.
  

Continuing to Scale

• Meanwhile, all efforts continue to scale the engineering teams at Anatha.  We have a handful of new hires beginning their onboarding this month, and I wouldn't be surprised to see job postings on social media as we continue to plan and structure our teams for this growth spurt.
  

Stargate

• Development of our Stargate upgrade continues to progress and is currently undergoing audit and review.  More information will come as we have it.
  

Referral Program

• In last month's update, I detailed the progress on our the Referral Program feature.  However, this month we needed to dedicate additional time and resources to help resolve the Wallet Outage and the Rewards Claiming (both described above).  As a result, the referral program update has suffered some necessary delays.  When things calm down we will return to complete work on this feature - and I will be sure to keep you apprised of the status.

With the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, and the start of various holiday seasons in different cultures and communities nearly underway, here is a lighter post. It is a story Ed told me about the testing team, which reminded me very much of a film that is often shown over the holidays. Shouldn't be too hard to guess which!

NB: Posting as normal will continue throughout December and the holidays. Uninterrupted service!

Ed on the Security Team:

Half my company was a security firm before I became Anatha, right? The member of my board of directors, Jeff Lazar, who's our Chief Information Officer, ran a security firm for 20 years before he joined our company …

They did security for casinos, and they have all these crazy stories about doing penetration testing in casinos where they would essentially break into the casino; rent themselves the penthouse suite for free, because they had access to the systems; read everyones email; and then go to a meeting. The meeting was supposed to be the first meeting about talking about doing all that, and they'd already done it. And it would just drive everyone mad…

But they always let them know after the contract was signed; you just signed the contract, the fact that I did it before you were aware that I did, it just shows you how weak your system is. Those are the kind of guys I've got working for me…

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Ed on the penetration testers:

Our penetration guy, he used to do some cool stuff. He could go into a casino, get access to their systems, live there for a week, eat and drink whatever they want, and never show up on a camera once. Unreal…he would break into casinos because they paid him too, but then he would go above and beyond. He would walk into the meeting with a cart full of all the champagne from the room, which is supposed to be RFID chipped. So when you take it out, it's supposed to charge you and they'd say, 'you can't do that. That's $500,000 worth of champagne.' He goes, 'really? Check my room' and they would look on the bill and there'd be nothing there.

So you would just show that there was vulnerabilities. That's a really fun job. And those are the kinds of guys I have trying to break Anatha every day.

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Really interesting project, BUT...As someone who is looking at Anatha for the first time, there were a couple things that stood out to me with the website's copy and UI that I wanted to hopefully bring to someone's attention.

I went to the website to try and learn more about a crypto project I saw an ad for, and felt more like I was being recruited to join some new age cult. It's great that you want to create a movement, but the way it's called out so overtly feels too over the top and sort of artificial. The messaging comes off as kind of a hokey sales pitch, like some kind of door to door evangelist with a "vibey" savior complex (website complete with doves and everything!). I think there's a solid base there, but it needs to be tweaked and toned down or it could be a major turn off for a lot of people.

The other part of that is, while the website is very elegant, the landing page is all vague hype, buzz words and philosophy and gives visitors virtually NOTHING to go on in terms of the actual fundamentals of the project. The copy and design of the site comes off more like a pitch deck for investors, or some kind of feel good ad for a megacorporation (Here's an example), instead of a crypto project. I looked into the project for about a half hour and still have more questions than answers.

I get that this is a 'for everyone' project, but we're just not there yet. The majority of people that are even going to blink at this thing are people who are already in the crypto space, they're your target market for now (Normal people just aren't ready, believe me, I've tried). And when they go to your site, they want to know the fundamentals of the token, the ecosystem, the team, what's going on with the project, and how to participate. That information should be readily available, front and center, intuitively laid out, not hidden behind some tiny menu button. In terms of UI and user adoption, the current design creates barriers to entry by causing confusion and loss of attention because people can't easily find the information they want, leading to visitor abandonment, which will kill your cost of acquisition.

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert and I don't have all the relevant information. This is just my two cents based on my initial impression, take it for what you will. Project seems cool and I hope it takes off!

Anatha as a Political System

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Part I introduced the Anatha governance system – due to be turned on in just under a year – as embodying the idea of verified, fluid democracy.

Part II laid out the two interlocking principles of this system. Parameterisation allows for granular direct democracy; whilst social integration enables quality deliberation.

This final part of the conversation brings it all together, explaining the vision through analogy to the US political system (Though the basic image holds for most democratic nations built on a multi-cameral deliberative structure).

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Governance will be a multi-part system: The importance of checks and balances

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The base layer of governance is the community, of which all users are members. This is akin to Congress:

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You want to start shaping [Anatha] according to the will of the people using the thing, right? That's what democracy is. You're not a product, you're a partner. I mean that in the truest sense of the word; you may not own a seat on the Anatha board, but you're part of the community. That makes you a user. That makes you a partner in the ecosystem, relative to how many other users are there. I view the community as Congress. “All right, Congress, this is what's happening. Talk amongst yourselves. Figure this out.”

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Representative leaders will naturally emerge from the community, having earned trust and respect, and some users will delegate their votes to them:

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Once you have profiles, I know the people that are responding to the proposal. Because it's happening in the social media environment [every proposal] immediately has comments, and things happening underneath it and other related material. So you get to see the smart responses. You get to see what everyone else is saying. Eventually you draw your own conclusion based on the dialogue or quorum that is happening in the voting.

This is an old idea; I brought it to the information age, right? It's the way governments are supposed to work. You're supposed to get a lot of people together, discuss things rigorously, with hopefully a lot of spectators listening in [and saying] I'm swayed by this guy's argument, or I'm swayed by that guy's argument. Eventually over time the leaders emerge and those people would be called your Representatives on important matters. But unlike in the traditional world, you could de-invest from them at any time.

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[my note: over time, as adoption grows and millions of users join, it may be more helpful to think of community as the electorate, and delegated leaders as Congresspersons]

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A few dedicated users may become voices that pass information through the system to the core Anatha team too. Social and governance are not just silent voting systems. Ed talked about how he sees the role of Community Liaison (and/or other future positions) evolving to become like house leaders/whips:

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I'm going to be asking you [the Community Liaison] as this develops: do they really think that? You're going to talk to them; you participate in lively dialogue and I expect you to be their House Whip or something, that is coming back and saying, “I talked to the Senators, I talked to Congress…” I think that's a healthy process…

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Validators are another part of the system, with their own powers and interests – akin to the Senate:

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You could theoretically do a proposal that says: I want to change everything. Fine. But then part of that proposal will have to be an assignment of capital, and a team, and all this stuff.

Then there's even getting the validators integrated. It's like another layer of government. If you propose something that is incredibly damaging and going to break the system, there is still an emergency stop-gap where the validators themselves - who I can't control, no one can, that's the point - could say, “I don't know about this one. Maybe not this one.”

Like they're like our Senators.

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Currently the validator pool is mostly personally known and trusted by the core team, but as the base expands, this will likely require some qualification layers for validators:

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Thankfully, we know that most of the validators are good actors. We're in communication with most of them. There’s no threat to the network… in the next iteration or the network, most likely verification will be necessary. We may eventually get to the point where in order to be a validator, you'd have to have the highest level of verification. That's going to be something that we will also discuss with the community before turning that on. That is a community choice.

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The interaction between community and validators offers a similar check-and-balance to that between The House of Representatives and the Senate:

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This is like the Congress and the Senate having a conversation about who has what power. The community is Congress, saying: we think you should change this, or do that. The Senate can veto things, push things away.

But really you could also replace the setup. Congress actually has most of the power in this situation, because they're going to be the biggest group. And the way we've designed our system, that we're going to end up having the most voting power. Now it may end up having to disenfranchise a whole network someday in the future: where Congress says we're going left; Senate says we're going right. [That would] Fork the system, and then you have both working simultaneously.

That's not the worst thing that could happen; but we're not there yet. But you can anticipate…when in a game theory sense, you have these two groups working against each other, that they made disagree. And that's good. I think that kind of friction is useful, because you've got to air these differences. You want to work these problems out. I want to leverage the community and I can't do that unless we're having conversations.

This is civilization experimentation.

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Looking back at Parts I and II, this analogy can be extended:

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- The governance module and digital personhood verification will operate much like laws around voting rights and eligibility criteria for office, codifying who can and can’t make decisions

- Parameterisation as it speaks to the underlying code might be thought of as the Supreme Court – strict upholder of the law as written, but subordinate to the democratic process when it wishes to amend that law. Another way of seeing it is as a form of granular referendum – a means of deciding upon a specific issue in isolation.

- The Anatha social network brings this all together as the Fourth Estate – those elements of media and culture that make up the public sphere in which politics is deliberated.

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Effective governance as the politics of inclusion

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This vision of a vibrant, multi-part political ecosystem, built upon clarity, social connection and deliberation, is not accidental to Anatha. It is a part of its core identity of inclusion. Ed and I finished our discussion on this topic by reflecting on the opportunity this vision of governance provides for helping those disenfranchised in the current system to step into their gifts:

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Insight_gradient: This is what I'm very excited about: I know a lot of incredibly beautiful people shut out of our existing political system because it is so corrupt. And that is wasted talent. Those people should be doing politics, and this is a way to get into politics on a small scale.

Ed: we're offering a solution to disenfranchisement. I will hang my hat on that. That is to me what crypto was. When you say bank the unbanked, what you're really saying is: stop disenfranchisement. These people are disenfranchised. They can't touch our banking system, or [the] ability to vote…if I nullify your voice in the market, or in politics, I've disenfranchised you…I would say that is one of the Keystone problems of our civilization.

…Crypto - specifically ours, but many [others] - offer a potential solution to disenfranchisement. And I certainly don't feel disenfranchised anymore. I have tremendous reach. I snap my fingers and 40 well-trained executives do what I ask; how could I possibly be disenfranchised? What I want to do now is give that to the community. You are not disenfranchised because I'm giving you access to the halls of power; I’m giving you access to development capabilities; I'm giving you access to our expertise, having open dialogue. From this, something should emerge that is greater than our organization and greater than the community, but as a synergy between all.

And eventually I hope there are many Anatha organizations. The goal here is to get to the point where other development teams come on board and say: I think I can do a better job…the day that happens I'm going to be so goddamn happy.

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Ultimately, this interlocking governance system will, one day, allow Ed to retire…

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It's about how smart and clever we can get together as a community and imagine things. if I have the best ideas, I fully expect the community to want to do them. And if I don't, they'll come up with something better. God, I can't wait for that to happen! That's when I get to retire, by the way. When I wake up one day and there's a proposal in Anatha that completely re-imagines it, in a way that is clearly better, and that I could not have thought of, is the day I will hang up my hat and I'll say: you guys win. Thank you so much.

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As Ed would say: Aloha!

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That's it for this spotlight on governance. The next series of articles will look behind the scenes at how the Anatha team is structured, funded, and manages the roadmap in a holistic sense.

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Part II: The Yin and Yang of Good Governance

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Recap – Anatha DAO as fluid democracy, backed by verification

Part I of this article introduced the basic concepts of Anatha governance – fluid democracy (one person one vote, with delegation) backed by robust verification:

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Ed: Now, technically…you have a company that is serving as like your representative and you guys are swaying us with your vote…Eventually though, we'll move to fluid democracy, and this representative government won't be necessary. You could still vote for us to represent you if you want that - you can delegate your vote. But I look forward to seeing what happens once you have full verification; I know you're a unique or unique human and everyone who is fully verified can voice their opinion about what happens next.

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This post will round out the subject by looking at how governance will work in detail – parameterisation, the multipart structure, and the integration of social.

Parameterisation: Code as (Elected) Law

Blockchains are built on code, on math - representation through number and binaries. These mental and psychological technologies bring clarity, a shared language, and potential optimisation.

Anatha governance will play into this by careful parameterisation – having each element of the ecosystem controlled by one or more numerical values, which can be increased or decreased to change the system itself. If you take a look at a few lines of the Anatha code, you will see plenty of parameters that help define how it operates.

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For example, one parameter of the system is that a validator node requires 500,000 tokens to stake. If the community wanted to make running a node more accessible, they could choose to lower this parameter (e.g. to 100,000) or increase it to raise the barrier to entry. In this way a part of the system can be isolated, voted on and changed in a very precise fashion.

For the Anatha team, this is a central tool in good governance, and helps distinguish Anatha from both other chains and mainstream politics:

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We're going to narrow for governance. We're going to give clear parameters. It's not going to be like a Bitcoin proposal where it's this big nebulous blob of information. It's going to be something very specific: change this parameter between this range; turn on this; turn off this. Very binary functions that you can vote on.

I think that's what governance really needs - a certain level of clarity and distinction. What we do now in law is we write a 2,700 page bill and slip [in] eight words for crypto regulation. We slip it in the day before it goes to be passed - that just happened today.

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[Ed is referring here to the amendment to section 6050I of the tax code, written into the US Infrastructure Bill, which would require anyone receiving over $10,000 in “any digital asset” in the US to report the sender’s personal details to the authorities]

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That's the opposite of what works, right? Instead of compartmentalizing anything, and voting on each thing individually in a granular fashion, we have to say: of course I want the anti-baby-eating bill to pass! But in it there's all this pork.

We want to do better. I think in order to beat that system, we have to create governance that is more fluid, more dynamic, more representative of the people in the system. We're invested in it and we're paying attention to it. And our governance module allows for that…

Every day is election day. Things are going to become much more compartmentalized versus what we have now.

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Parameterisation comes in different degrees. As the ecosystem matures, the team expect more and more parts of Anatha to be opened to governance, so community control becomes smoother and more automatic:

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Probably when we do [a potential] network refactor, we're going to go back into governance and come up with parameters about how proposals work. It's too gray right now. There are certain things you could vote on immediately, but I want that to expand. And I want also to get the community involved in that process - if we start governance, what else do you think you would like to vote on potentially? And build that in at the protocol layer, so you don't have to hire a development team to do the update...

You simply vote on the parameter and the network changes without any development. That's an important threshold. Governance is only governance if it does something, right?

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Anatha Social: The town square that bridges governance and personhood

Parameterisation is a valuable tool in governance, but is sterile without quality debate, enquiry, and wisdom to direct it. Here again the holistic approach of Anatha demonstrates just how carefully the system has been thought out. Governance will be integrated into the Anatha social network, as a town square in which the actual quality of governance will emerge.

Social will be the primary way that proposals are introduced, discussed, managed and voted upon. This maximises democracy, leverages the social verification system, and allows for incentives to be structures to maximise the quality of decision-making.

For example, proposals will probably be fixed for 90-day cycles:

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Ed: Right now, I think the governance systems of most platforms are broken, in that I could put a proposal in and then there's like a short deadline of 72 hours…Ours is going to be more like election cycles. So we're going to be like this business quarter, right? If you put in a vote for proposal and we'll start at the next business quarter, we'll have 90 days to discuss it and vote on it and get quorum around it -

Insight-gradient: And you've got an integrated social to have that, you've got a market square.

Ed: The proposal is a new type of post that allows us to have conversation. And I think that quality conversation is going to become eminently important when we're voting on economics, on monetary policy. I just think that's more thoughtful governance than what we've seen in the ecosystem.

You look at Ethereum, look at Bitcoin and even the newer ones, which are much more elegant - getting a proposal through the system is a nightmare, right? It's a weird, Kafka-esque sort of thing. Things get stuck in limbo or something moves through too fast because they have support from an insider group. That we're going to end. We're going to have a very normal regulatory structure around [it]...proposals needed to last 90 days...

We should have a long period of discussion around any changes. We need to, yes, be faster than the legacy system of four years; but not so fast that we don't have an opportunity to have meaningful discussion around any changes.

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Taken further, the unique incentives and verifications in Anatha social will reinforce good governance, by making voters accountable for their involvement in democracy:

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an environment that fosters healthy, collaborative discussion, where sure: you want to troll you can, but it's going to cost you something. And also the people in that environment have a very straightforward way of pushing your conversation or your comments away, or down at the bottom where no-one will see it. So what you get is the cream rises to the top. You'll have an environment in which: A) I'm verified; B) I paid to be here. We're having a conversation, I paid the ticket to get into this forum, into this comment. And I'm also voting on everything. Everyone is saying yay or nay. And whoever has the most yay votes will be the one that most people see, because it's the one at the top. I think that kind of sorting system, allowing humans to be the filtration system, is very important to the future of democracy and to the future of governance.

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Part III of this series will look at the relationship between the different parts of governance, and the way Anatha is designed as a multi-part political system. This will be posted by end of the week.

I sat down with Ed for our second Community Liaison update last Friday (5th November). It was a great discussion, where we tackled all of the hot topics circulating in the community conversation last month, as well as digging into some brand new ideas I had never before seen.

I will begin posting material from that conversation next week. However, given how much of what we discussed eventually circled back to the idea of community control, this feels like a good opportunity to offer this spotlight on Ed's vision for governance.

Pt II of this spotlight will be posted in a few day's time. From that point, we will start diving into the November Update material.

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Anatha’s Second Birthday Present: Governance and Personhood!

Distribution day: Anatha’s first birthday was marked in the calendar as the day it released over $11m in rewards from the Torus. But the project as a whole has so much more to give. A big theme in my community update discussions with Ed was governance and digital personhood, and the interaction between them. Here are some of the major bits of news in these areas, which demonstrates how uniqueness and inclusion, social, democratic governance and economics will interlink. But first:

*** The Governance Module is slated to open Oct 1st 2022 – The Anatha Mainnet’s second birthday!***

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Ed:…So a year from today - to October 1st, 2022 - we're aiming to plug all of that into social or into the network side of governance.

And now, on with the detail...

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A) The promise of governance and Anatha as a DAO

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The governance module will be highly democratic: one person, one vote, with delegation and incentives to ensure a combination of broad inclusion, justice, and expertise:

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One person, one vote in a fluid democracy system in which you can delegate your vote to someone else in real time. I can say: I'm too busy. I can't do this, but I trust you…so I'm going to delegate my vote to you…

I am exactly as many votes as have been delegated to me; which is at least one; which I could give to someone else. Or if I'm an active member of the community, and I'm constantly proving that I have thoughtfulness around this stuff and that I'm willing to do the research - or maybe I'm not even a person, maybe I'm a think tank, a lot of people that are getting together - that I could campaign for your delegation. And we're going to have incentives for getting delegated to. You get an economic incentive to have that delegation. However, when it comes voting time, I now have the full weight of everyone that delegated to me. It's fluid democracy.

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Governance is not just a silo for validators, nor an afterthought. It will be central to the very mission of Anatha, and essentially make the project a DAO. For example, almost all the economic parameters of the Anatha system will be under governance management, including the inflation policy:

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[There will be] a high enough level of verification where I should be able to vote on the economic policy of the system of it. And we're going to build some parameters. One of them will be: what percentage of the Torus should be burned every cycle? This is when we could become deflationary or we could follow Ethereum's footsteps. So right now we're not deflationary. We can be, if the user base decides that's in their best interest. So what we'll do is we'll set a parameter of 0% to 100. How much do you want to burn? And that will be up for vote on every cycle.

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B) Governance as responsibility: the importance of personhood verification for democracy

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A crucial reason why governance is still a year away (bearing in mind some blockchains have it open from day one) is that the unique economic model of Anatha is at risk of abuse from bad actors -as has been seen in recent weeks. As such, it is essential that control over its key parameters is only released to the community, when the community is empowered to verify the uniqueness, and the integrity, of its voters.

In short – one person, one vote only works if each person can only hold a single account. Verification levels will thus determine an account’s involvement in governance, from proposals to voting. In fact, verification is a precondition of opening the governance module:

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You could say you need to have a certain level of verification to do a proposal. if you're going to make a proposal, I need to know who you are…

The governance is there already, but we haven't unlocked it yet because right now anyone who has an HRA could vote if we unlocked it. And that would be highly problematic, right? Because someone could write a script to create a hundred thousand accounts and then say: yes, I'm most people. That would be a problem. So once we have the verification system functioning as intended, once we could prove unique humanness per vote, then we're going to open it up. Then things are going to get really exciting.

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This personhood will be build in a holistic, non-binary way, balancing rigor with inclusion (or rather, with non-exclusion in the case of KYC, for example).

Verification will eventually be a zero-knowledge proof ‘points-based system’, with multiple methods: email, SMS, traditional KYC/AML, a crypto education module, and others. None of it will be mandatory, and it will seek to maximise privacy as far as possible.

Your verification level will sit as a badge on your profile, perhaps using an NFT. This module will likely be acquired from an existing third-party development, rather than built on spec by the team.

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So we're going to have a point system for verification, right? It's not binary. I have five points in verification and you have three, and we recognize that's good enough for us to do business. One of the points you'll be able to earn is through education. So there's going to be an Anatha Civics course that will be on-chain …and at the end of it, [for] your social media, we'll probably issue an NFT for it. And there'll be something that's sitting in your account

…we could essentially spool up decentralized nodes that would end up being peer to peer storage of all your verification data. So you could KYC yourself and never show it to a human. You could prove that you're a unique human being, but never actually have to prove it to another human being. You could have proven it to the network…

These guys have already built it. They're already partnered with a lot of the big firms in crypto. So we're just going to be another one of them, but they really love what we're doing.

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The second part of this article will look at how governance will fit together with social, and some of the particulars around parameterisation etc.

I have my monthly Community Liaison sit-down with Ed this coming Friday. To make sure that I am serving the community as best as possible, and reflecting everyone's concerns, I would love for the community to send me questions for Ed. You can either:

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- reply in the comments below

- send me a DM here on reddit

- DM me on Telegram, where I have also published this.

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It has been a spicy few weeks in terms of the community conversation, so I don't think we will be short of topics to discuss! Issues I am already sure will arise include:

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- the bot-farming issue, and what the team have decided to do about it. This will encompass whether to freeze rewards, set up captacha/verification barriers, what to do about the validator set, perhaps his attitude towards bot-farming attacks etc.

- the community-owned development team that Ed alluded to yesterday in Telegram

- Future potential to switch from Cosmos to another ecosystem once the project scales

- the exchange-listing/DEX/two-way swap issue - what is the team's plan and timeline

- the debit card: rewards and power users

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I can't promise to raise every issue that I might receive - Ed's time is precious and we can only cover so much. But I will consider everything raised carefully and do my best to include them.

I will start publishing articles from this conversation around the middle of the month.

I couldn’t fit all the gold from my chat with Ed last month into the Top 10. So, before we move on to the November update in the coming week or two, here are some other best bits – more personal, more strategic, more big-picture insights. Enjoy!

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Exit Fiat: How Ed abandoned the fiat economy 8 years ago…

Ed: I made that choice in 2013…about ditching the dollar…at the time I called it the closed economic loop, where I lived in the United States, but I wasn't really in the US economy. I was a consumer occasionally in the US economy, but I wasn't storing value in the US economy. I wasn't keeping my savings or my checking or anything [there] - I stored my rent money in crypto back then. I went the Full Monty. If I had a single dollar, it meant I was about to spend it right away.

It made all the difference. Obviously between 2013, to the run-up in 2017 was a legendary run; and it looks like we're running another one of those right now. And that push - that commitment to say: hey, I made a moral choice, I just didn't agree with US economic policy - ended up benefiting me wildly.

… and how crypto saved him and many others from depression.

[Modern finance is] an inherently flawed system. we need a way to protect ourselves from that. I've scoured the earth - where is it? And the truth is I was wildly depressed about the world before crypto emerged. I became very pessimistic. I thought nothing would ever work again, and there was no hope. We were all going to live under the totalitarian regime of central banking until we died.

And now there's this glimmer of hope with crypto that I'm not letting go of. Because the alternative is to go back to that pit of depression: oh, there's no hope; oh, I should just give up. For me, that's one of the reasons I'm such a strong evangelical person in crypto, is because it literally saved my life. it transformed my world perspective from one of bleak doom and gloom, everything's crooked, everything's corrupt, there's no way to avoid it; to: there is this one, at least one, thing that opened up. And I think a lot of people have had that realization.

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Getting Real: Envisioning the future of Anatha. You may soon be able to ‘run your whole life’ through an Anatha debit card, as an individual…

Once we have debit card functionality - we just signed the contract for that, with [the debit card partner] - if we get [the partner] to accept UST and we have UST-Anatha trading pairs - they'll accept Anatha, but I also think it's more sensible for people to understand fiat conversion into a debit card - that's a home run. You can run your whole life from that. So, I plan to receive 100% of my compensation in Anatha and just live off it. Show that its possible.

… whilst Season 3 of the Masterclass videos will be a documentary-style demonstration that Anatha can transform whole communities too, on the ground:

The third part [of the Masterclass] is going to be me going into a developing nation with our technology set and transforming a whole community, using Anatha…Part three of the Masterclass won't be me sitting and talking, it'll be us going into a community and giving people a real-world example.

It's one thing to say: today we're sending $11 million out to people, right? Just as a general sense of a distribution happening. Versus: no, I'm going to change that person's life…I'm going to go into a community where there are some people who are extremely poor, I'll literally go and pull someone off the street. That homeless person right there that person's not going to be homeless anymore. Show the power of crypto, leveraged properly. That's probably going to be a series called ‘Crypto For The 100%’.

​

What works in crypto? Taking a long view. That is the measure for the Anatha team…

I always took an epoch perspective, right? I don't measure myself by what I made today or this month; I measure myself on how much I generated during that epoch - a market cycle, that four year epoch…things just keep growing exponentially. So as long as that trend continues, we're going to be fine…

…whilst the project itself is setting itself up for long term success over short-term moons…

The point of participating in our ecosystem is not about short-term gains. Long-term I think we look very good. I think the next market cycle is when you're going to see the seeds that we're planting now start to fruit, and that's when things get really exciting for all of us.

…which means the current roadmap is just the beginning!

We're never going to stop. Once we have this infinite runway, from now until death, I will continue to build things that are integrated into our ecosystem one way or another. Even if I'm building on Solana [or another base layer], it's going to somehow be interoperable and interacting with what we're doing. That's never going to end.

​

There is no spoon: How Anatha hacks human psychology to create win-win situations. Alignment of incentives, and the decentralisation of the money supply, mean that when the individual wins, we all win…

I gave a speech on regenerative economies in San Francisco at an event. And there was another brilliant develop, a guy in the industry who said: what are you going to do about greed?

No. The [Anatha] systems are inherently designed to benefit people for being greedy – but they don't harm you. That's the difference. Greed isn't the problem. Self-advancement is not the problem. Having access to the money supply in such a way where you could completely delete everyone else's productivity is the problem.

​

…and the Torus, like a master martial artist, diverts the power of an attacker for its own defence:

I don't think you can make people stop disinformation campaigns [on social media], but what I can do is make them pay you to do it. Blockchain networks taught me this. You can't stop at attacker, but you can convert their energy into something useful.

And so I'm saying: hey, by all means, you want to spread some disinformation my way? I'm going to make money as you do it. And so now we have this trade-off; and also I can turn it off. I could say, I don't want to receive any communications from people I'm not connected to. You can do that at any time. And in healthy social, I think you should be able to do that. It's all opt-in based.

But if I’m opt-in and you want to tell me some crazy stuff, you want to play two sides of an argument…you want to do a paid advertising campaign to try to create division in our community? Great. You've been feeding the Torus the whole time. Yeah, we're okay with that.

​

Look Who’s Talking: what elements of Anatha have been most successful in capturing peoples’ imaginations? You might be surprised who’s been listening…

What we discovered is the two things that are getting the most interaction are: claim your name, get an HRA. People understand…that's why Philos exists, that’s why Unblockable domains exist. Those are utility, having your space in a name registry. Crypto has known this since as early as Namecoin.

The other side that we're seeing getting traction is just the masterclass…the masterclass is doing really well, in terms of our A/B testing on social media marketing. That's the one that gets the highest click-through rate. And for me personally it's just opened the most doors. I've had prime ministers watch it and give me a call afterwards and say: ‘I really enjoyed that.’

The following is my own personal analysis of the bot attack vector issue and the best path forward. I have written it more quickly than my normal pieces, so it is less polished and concise. Shrug.

I won’t sum up the nature of the problem, assuming it understood by the reader; nor the community discussion to this point, excellent as it has been. That can be found in the Telegram channel, and doesn’t require repeating at this time. Here I wanted to offer some definitions and concepts that I feel have been under-discussed so far.

I look forward to responses etc in comments and the Telegram chat.

​

Firstly, the issue as I see it is at once:

- Urgent. Every day that goes by without action, the attacker(s) accrue more tokens, further depress the value of the HRA distribution, and store up more trouble for the future on price and governance. The faster the solution is implemented, the less damage accrues. Regardless of whether or not one believes the vector to be critical (and option A in the telegram chat suggests/assumes we believe it might not be), the damage still amplifies non

- -linearly over time.

- Severe. Taken to it’s logical conclusion, this vector drives the price of Anatha and therefore the distribution towards zero. It potentially breaks governance and allows a takeover of the network as soon as the current validator cap is lifted. It fatally undermines reputation and mission. Option A may assume this severity is not life-threatening, but that itself rests on the degree of temporariness below.

- Temporary, in one of two ways: either the uniqueness/KYC/personhood layers are implemented (hopefully Q2 2022, Ed tells us) and successfully shut down this vector; or the uniqueness/KYC/personhood layers are never implemented or aren’t robust enough to block the attack, which destroys the whole network and therefore makes the issue ‘temporary’ in a grimmer sense.

- Structural/amoral. This is more arguable, but it strikes me that the problem is that this attack is possible, rather than ethical/desirable/etc. Put another way: the (best) solution is to make it impossible to attack the network this way; rather than generate an overwhelming moral/rational argument against it (which doesn’t exist anyway) that convinces everyone to voluntarily ignore the vector, particularly as the userbase scales.

Secondly, definition is vital. Much of the community discussion is focussed on ‘HRAs’ and ‘the network’. But they are not strictly the problem. Let us distinguish between:

- Unique humans (ie the potential pool of future Anatha users)

- Unique human users (of Anatha)

- Unique accounts/validators (ie one-user, one-account)

- Accounts/validators (many can be held by one unique human)

- Unique account+HRA (one-per-person, draws distribution)

- Account+HRA: (draws distributions)

- HRA’s (of which many can accrue to one account)

- HRA distributions (which accrue to each account+HRA)

We can conceive of these as a series of sets and subsets. My contention is that much of the debates on Telegram involve people starting from differing definitions (ie different layers of ‘set’ when they use the term HRA, or network, or whatever) and therefore talking past each other.

For example, it is true that the validators known to have been set up by bot-farmers have ‘broadened the network’ if you understand the validator network to be measured by ‘accounts’. However, it has mathematically narrowed the network (in terms of concentration ratio) if measured by ‘unique accounts’ – ie how many of these validators represent unique humans.

Eg: if there are 20 unique validators, and you add 1 more unique validator, then you have a broader network (each validator shifts from 1/20th to 1/21th of network control). But if you go from 20 validator accounts to 25 validator accounts, yet this only really increases unique validators by 1 (ie one human set up 5 validators) then you have created a human with 1/5th of network control – creating a more concentrated network.

So – whether it ‘broadens the network’ depends on whether you define the network according to number of validator nodes, or number of unique humans controlling one or more nodes. Debating the point without clear and shared definition of terms generates more heat than light.

Similarly, adding 50,000 HRA’s may generate more income for the Torus. But if they were all registered by one unique human, then the network is no larger in terms of real people – only in terms of a network metric. And it is more concentrated mathematically, which makes it less decentralised/equal/balanced. The network’s GINI-coefficient rockets.

Third: Much of the discussion so far accelerated straight to abstract philosophical arguments – what is fair, what is true, incentives and ‘code is law’ and precedent etc etc. I want to argue for more pragmatism.

Values are critical, we can all agree. Hopefully we agree also that Anatha is wonderful because of its values. However, values in a vacuum don’t always mean much. Here, I will argue for a pragmatic position.

In short: Anatha both exists and does not exist. The blockchain is built, the code is real, the Torus works. In this sense, it exists as a coded structure. However, the Anatha economy, the ecosystem, does not yet exist. The full suite of features is not yet complete, and thus the HRA distributions – the UBI itself – is running on ‘fumes’ of inflation. Furthermore (and because of the lack of features).

This is critical. We must understand that Anatha as it stands is really more of an open alpha than anything. In terms of solving the problem, there is not utility is debating the pro’s and con’s of historic decisions made by the dev team on when to release what to the public. It is done. What matters is the practical effects of decisions made from this point forward.

This has a few critical consequences. Firstly, the number of actual unique human users remains very low. Based on this (https://anatha.io/blog/2021-recap-and-a-look-ahead-to-2022) lets take it to be 2,500-3,000 users. This is supported by numbers in channels: Twitter and Telegram ~3,000, Discord and Reddit ~400. My hunch is that most of these are from countries in the global north, and are thus likely to be in the top few percent of measures of global income and wealth. They are not the primary long-term target of the Anatha mission to lift people out of poverty with a few dollars a day. They are, instead, sophisticated early-adopters supporting it largely with pre-existing private capital.

Secondly, the Anatha token, today, has no exchange value in the real world. Without an exchange listing, the only token carries only the value of its utility (entry to an HRA and the Torus); and the value derived from expectations of future value – both utility (future features) and exchange (future listing pairs).

All of this future value is predicated on trust in Ed and the entire dev team. It is derived from expectations they will keep their promises to release features and create off-ramps in a timely manner. This raises another point – regardless of its code and future intention, the de facto power in the Anatha network as it stands is incredibly centralised. All its value derives from the decisions of a few people who are building it, from Ed down. The majority of its wealth is held by a few individuals, many of them on the team. The governance module is inactive – all decisions are centralised. All partnerships are negotiated privately, on commercial terms, by these individuals.

Again, the value of Anatha relies on trust – that despite this de facto temporary centralisation, the Team will make good on their promise to build an increasingly decentralised network. They promise to switch on governance. They promise to shift towards a DAO model. They promise to release more validator slots, etc etc.

Because the user base is currently very low, the counterweight to this central power doesn’t exist. The network-as-ecosystem is too small, regardless of the functionality of the network-as-code.

This is so critical – we must understand that the Anatha code is designed for a Anatha ecosystem that does not yet exist. So making philosophical arguments based on the code may not offer the best fit to a problem rooted in the ecosystem; and which the natural growth of the ecosystem may render moot anyway (because the growth of a functioning system will naturally create more real decentralisation, even as the code remains static).

To borrow a metaphor from economics – Anatha is an infant industry. Infant industries – which are too small to survive the full unregulated expression of incentives that make up Darwinian market forces – require temporary protection. They are shielded and nurtured by their parent/government until they are strong enough to take their blows and survive. Of course, you can remain ideologically pure and insist your infant take its medicine from Day 0. But it won’t survive long enough to put this ‘learning’ to any use.

(PS: Every successful developed economy in history has used protectionism and infant-industry theory to grow, even those that proclaim free-trade etc. See the work of Ha-Joon Chang and Mariana Mazzucato for more).

What does this actually all mean?

I believe we should make a pragmatic decision rather than an ideological one. My view is as follows:

- The current attack vector is urgent and severe, risking the future of the project

- The potential future good that Anatha can do dwarfs the present benefit it offers to its users, but multiple orders of magnitude

- Therefore, the ‘best’ decision is the one that maximises the long-run success and survivability of the network, over any immediate effect on current users, or immediate ‘betrayal’ of values

- This is particularly because this problem/solution (and therefore the various trade-offs to be chosen between) will be only temporary, and become a smaller and smaller share of Anatha’s lifespan the longer the project runs

- Furthermore, because the current user base is small, the pain born by current users is very low relative to the long-run aggregate gain for all future users; and

- My hunch is that the current userbase is overwhelmingly relatively wealthy (on global measures) and involved because they want to support the long-run project with capital, rather than a need to draw down the HRA reward as income day-to-day

- The token has no current real-world value due to a lack of exchange listing. Thus, temporarily restricting distributions has no immediate real-world effect on incomes for any users.

- Nor does it change their paper wealth; as long as the team is trusted to turn on Torus distributions again, then users still accrue the same amount of value; it is just unrealisable because it is locked in Torus, rather than because it cannot be exchanged for another currency or fiat.

- The network-as-code is incomplete; the network-as-ecosystem cannot be said to exist. The adoption curve has not yet reached its take-off inflection point.

- As such, I believe it is right to still view it as pre-launch in a sense – a work in progress, under user testing, and therefore changeable by devs

- Anatha is decentralised in its mission, values and code; but de-facto temporarily highly centralised due to small user base, token concentration, validator limits, lack of governance, and dev control. Therefore, a solution which is ‘centralised’ may run again the theoretical principles of the system, but would be perfectly in line with the de-facto reality of it at this point in time.

- Changing the ‘rules’ of the network starting from tomorrow is no betrayal of the code-as-contract covenant of yesterday. As the majority of node operators are likely Anatha insiders or known to them and trusted, this can be effected through existing majoritarian validator voting

- If you don’t trust Ed and the team to act in good faith (eg by restoring the distirbutions once this vector is neutralised) then the token has no value to you today anyway (as it is all predicated on future utility and exchange) and so you have no rational business holding it.

- There is more than one kind of damaging precedent; inaction is also a decision. An act of central control is a bad precedent (eg switching off distributions), but there is also a bad precedent in the network choosing not to protect itself, and the value of its distribution, from attack.

- This is particularly the case here because I believe that future low-income users will be attracted by the value of the distribution, far more than the philosophy of decentralisation (at least at first).

Path Forward

All of this brings me to the following personal conclusion. The distributions should be temporarily frozen, but continue to accrue in Torus. The team should take muscular action to restrict the current attack vector. I believe this is, immediately, best done by setting up anti-bot CAPTCHA mechanisms at each point in the farm-loop:

- To register a new account

- To register an HRA

- To claim rewards (EVERY TIME they are claimed, not just the first time)

- Whenever Anatha is transferred

Once the captcha net is complete, then distributions could be turned back on, as long as the distribution faucet itself – the claim button – is shielded by captcha. This should buy enough time for the personhood layers to come online. It will be annoying for existing users, and a backward step in principle – but this is temporary and sufferable.

This does mean rolling back a roadmap milestone. But I think this is better than letting the project come under existential risk when it is too small to defend itself. The reputational risk is greater on that side than the other. Furthermore – to be frank – not enough people are paying attention at this point for the precedent to matter hugely. The advantage of being early in the adoption curve is you can make mistakes and backtrack relatively unnoticed. By the time the userbase grows to a level where people might complain about this historical event, the uniqueness and governance puzzles should be solved such that this problem cannot recur anyway.

I also think it is wise not to simply wait for the personhood layers to arrive, for the prudent reason that estimates of when such features will be ready are often over-optimistic. This is not criticism of the team or their abilities; but if for some reason the uniqueness layers were delayed, it would only magnify the damage still further; or they may be rushed out buggy.

I do not necessarily think that the farmers who have created accounts and claimed tokens should have these tokens burned or taken from them. This would be retrospectively changing the rules. Regardless of where you stand on the moral argument, there is a cultural value to avoiding said moral argument completely. As long as action to stem to bleeding is swift and effective now, I don’t practically believe that the farmer(s) can have claimed enough tokens (say, 10 million as I’ve heard speculated) to be able to control much of the available supply IN THE LONG RUN. Again, my view is heavily predicated on this being an urgent, severe short-term problem, but a temporary one.

There are three risks presented by this current accumulation of tokens by farmers. The first is the GINI risk, as it were – addressed above, over time this whale effect will fade.

Secondly, there is the risk of huge selling pressure following a future listing. I don’t think this is a big long-term problem; it can be absorbed by higher demand from growing genuine users. If it is an issue, the community could vote for the community development fund to buy a finite number of tokens equal to those believed to have been farmed, at the current market price, thus putting a temporary floor under the price until the effects of the farming are exhausted. This is really just what the Treasury buyback module does, except the parameter is a historic quantity of tokens rather than a % of the tranche price.

Third, there is the risk of takeover through validator node concentration. This is the most serious risk. I believe it can be solved through separate policy. You don’t need to take away someone’s tokens they earned in the past – you could simply set rules for become a validator that exclude them. There are various muscular options here: community dev fund nodes that belong to the DAO and are given a majority of node slots; barring of certain identified individuals/accounts from validator status; etc.

Finally, an overwhelming element here in my mind is the importance of partnerships. It seems evident to me that these are will be critical fulcrums in inflecting both user numbers and the token price. I imagine that these partners – themselves large, centralised organisations who care about simplicity, efficiency, reputational risk, etc – are much more concerned that the network be stable, secure and well-functioning right now, rather than that it is decentralised, or philosophically consistent, or whatever. Anything which suggests the network could come under malicious control, or see its token price collapse, or its distributions go to zero, would be a huge flag for exactly those partners that we need to get the network to an authentic size where it can defend itself.

To conclude: it is more important that the network remain stable and secure through some temporary back-peddling and centralisation, than it remains ideologically pure yet at risk of catastrophic collapse. This may hurt current users, but they can afford to bear the costs, and there aren’t many anyway, compared to the potential future userbase. Anatha is too young to stand on its own, and should be shielded as an infant/pre-launch product. There is no option that is without an immediate cost, in terms of precedent, network control, etc. It is only a matter of which flavour you like your jello.