The World Wide Web was a different place before search engines. It was a realm of discovery, where you could stumble upon new and fascinating content by simply following links.
Search engines transformed this landscape. They began to obscure the incredible diversity of the web. The Web, once like Earth with endless places to explore, became more controlled.
Today, what you discover is often dictated by corporations and governments. They decide what you see and what remains hidden.
Then, they started monetizing you. You became the product. Through targeted ads, surveillance, and monitoring of your activities, you turned into a commodity.
Ariton changes this. Built on free and open standards, Ariton empowers you with control and ownership over your own identities and data.
Communities
Ariton revolves around communities. You can create and join communities of many kinds, for example "The Knitting Group", which could have instructors, educators, hints and tips, buy and sell and more within the community.
A community has no boundaries, but can be local and regional, or global and universal.
On Ariton you build your social graph and you see content that is relevant to you and your connections. This means you get partial protection against spam and unwanted content. It helps with social discovery and personalized ratings.
Communities can spawn projects, which can potentially result in a product. When a product comes from a project, there will be benefits for the community and the project contributors.
Community owners, and members, can earn from their communities. As a community grows and the quality of content and contributors within it is able to earn on their goods and services. This is a way for community manager to reap some rewards from curating a great community.
Projects
The creation and management of projects is a key feature of Ariton. Projects can be anything from a small task to a large initiative.
Communities gather experts and participants around topics of interest that can lead to projects. Projects can be open for anyone to join, or by invitation only.
If a project results in tangible assets, such as a product or service, the project contributors, and the community, will be rewarded.
New Foundation
Ariton is a re-envisioning of the economy for human societies that builds on a new foundation of modern solutions that help elevate the participants into a better tomorrow.
While Bitcoin gave us sound money, a human society needs so much more. Ariton is a (future) superapp that integrates the latest in decentralized technologies and protocols, allowing anyone to launch their own communities, privately or publicly.
These communities will bring together people, allowing a more free expression and digital lifestyle that is traditionally prohibited on the Internet today.
Ariton is decentralized in such a manner that makes it hard to be stopped, and is easy for the general audience to contribute with strengthening the network as a whole.
Ariton makes the participants in the communities, owner of their own digital data and online presence. Instead of your personal data being used to monetize you, you own and control your own data and how it is shared with others.
Economy
The majority of the world economy today revolves around fiat currencies, which are controlled by governments and central banks.
Access to credit has been a great source for divide in the world, and while it has increased the wealth and quality of life, it also enslaves people in debt. Ariton will have a new economy that is based on something new.
Humans have evolved natural behaviors that are the foundation for our individual moral belives. Morality is not entirely subjective or a mental construct by our minds, but a natural behavior that has evolved over millions of years. Some of them we share with other animals.
One of these are reciprocity, where we feel a sense of obligation to return favors in the future. It's a common social dynamic where acts of kindness or assistance create a bond of mutual support and goodwill.
When you help a friend and they owe you a debt that isn't monetary, it's often referred to as a “favor debt” or “social debt.”. This has traditionally been a manual accounting by each individual, often forgotten or not repaid. Ariton Will have a sytem that allows beings to contribute to the network by using their skills doing what they they love, and allow those contributors to have their needs filled by other beings who are also doing what they love.
Life is about how we spend our energy, not how we spend our time. There is abundance of time, it keeps coming all the time, but energy is limited. We have used money as a means to store our energy, and it will continue to be used in the future. There is a need for something more...
Ariton will have a new economy that is based on energy, it will be separate from the existing monetary system. People can use it as a way to store their energy, and use it to pay for services.
The traditional system of economy, in rudimentary explaination, works as follows:
Either you save up enough money to hire someone for their services, or you take up debt with someone that already have money. This can in many cases, take up a lot of time. In places where debts are easily available, people become indebted for rest of their existence. In practical terms, we even indebt future generations.
Instead of two neighbors waiting to aquire enough money to hire each other for services, or people sitting idle waiting for employment, we can use our energy more productive in an economy of goodwill. It will not replace the existing monetary system, but act as a separate and additional mechanism for societal organization.
You can earn energy points on Ariton, and give those energy points towards other humans, communities, projects or products.
Features
Web & Mobile First
Identity
Marketplace
Registries
Anyone can provide "Registry as a Service" within a community, which are curated lists of data. Examples for this are Land Registry and Business Registry.
If you have any kind of business idea, you can register your company within the communities you are a member of. These can be any kinds of company, from selling your homemade clothing to a software development company or a retail store.
Verification
Anyone can provide "Verification as a Service" within a community, which is a provider that verifies the authenticity of data (verifiable credentials) or identities (DID). These verification services can issue identity cards to users based upon a set of rules the verification provider decides.
Data
Anyone can provide "Data as a Service" within a community, which can be any type of data. One example of data provider would be approved lists of content for children.
A data provider could have different curated lists of approved content, that are tagged with metadata and age-related tagging, allowing parents to subscribe (free or paid service) to data providers and utilize those data lists in apps for children.
Reputation
Reputations are important in the digital world, as a means to filter out noise and problematic actors. Within a community on Ariton, individuals will build up reputations connected to their identifiers.
Ariton replicates reputation in a similar manner as the real world. This means that Ariton attempts to mitigate problems that occur with gaining influence by purchasing votes, likes and followers with monetary payment. Reputations on Ariton are not global, they are connected to the community and your connections.
Artificial Intelligence
AI will play an important role in Ariton, from helping users create content that is aligned with their communities and positive in tone, helping to build and curate great communities.
Ariton builds on the Web Neural Network API (WebNN), which is an open standard that allows models to run safely within the web browser. Ariton will utilize locally run SLMs (Small Language Models) that run on your device, keeping your privacy intact.
Mini Apps
Based on the needs and requests from communities, Mini Apps will be developed by the Ariton team or by third parties to cover those feature needs.
One of the Mini Apps that will be built for Ariton, is a decentralized task app. What decentralized in the context of Ariton means, is that the tasks are stored in each user device and not dependent on a centralized server or entity. There are always a copy of the tasks on the user device, and the tasks are shared with other users in the community. Having a tasks management app is a great way to help build and maintain a community.
Super App
What is a SuperApp? Ariton is a SuperApp, that means it is a customizeable platform that offers a wide range of services through Mini Apps, which are different for each community. A community can tailor which Mini Apps are accessible for its members.
Who will build Ariton?
Without the advances in open standards on decentralized identifiers, Ariton wouldn't be possible. Launching Ariton comes at the exact time when foundations are laid to develop such a superapp.
|
Sondre Bjellås (Founder, CEO and Chief Product Engineer) - With more than three decades of experience
with
software development, he has extensive experience with technology, languages, patterns and practices,
both
in building large scalable systems, web apps and decentralized software. His relentless focus on rapid
release cycles allows Ariton to develop and adapt to its users and market without delays.
LinkedIn | GitHub |
|
Dan Gershony (Chief Technology Officer) - With experience from blockchains and a
former CTO
role in a large British player in the blockchain space, Dan brings insight and capabilities to the
Ariton
team that will ensure success and quality of delivery.
LinkedIn | GitHub |
|
David Gershony (Software Engineer) - David brings 15 years of experience to the team, and is an expert in
Problem Solving & Complex algorithms when it comes to code. With years of experience in software
Development
& Teach Lead in the world of banking, payments and billings domains.
LinkedIn | GitHub |
|
Milad Raeisi (Software Engineer) - He is a seasoned Software Architect and Programmer
with
over 20 years of experience. As a Senior Developer, he specializes in software development, UI/UX
design,
data science, AI, and blockchain. His expertise in building large-scale systems and decentralized
applications drives innovation and quality at Ariton.
LinkedIn | GitHub |
|
Lu Barvinskaya (Software Engineer) - Junior developer that has contributed to open source and
is currently finishing education in software development.
GitHub |
|
Kosta Korenkov (Software Engineer) - Fullstack developer with a product focus.
Interested in self sovereignty, making sense, minimalism, sane ways of living and making peace with oneself.
LinkedIn | GitHub |
How are we building Ariton?
Building Ariton was impossible to build not long ago. Ariton has been made possible by advances in open standards such as DID, VC, and DWNs. It has been made possible with advances in LLM (Large Language Models), SLM (Small Language Models) and AI. New capabilities for software developers are made available each month and Ariton developers are dedicated to fully adopting the tools and technologies available, to ensure rapid development cycle and very short time to market for new features.
Technologies and Protocols
Ariton builds on decentralized identifiers (DID), verifiable credentials (VC), decentralized web nodes (DWN) by TBD, Codex by Institute of Free Technology (under consideration, might be too dependent on blockchain), Fedimint (Bitcoin federation for privacy and community trading), Nostr (communication relay protocol and technology).
For artificial intelligence (AI), we build and run models using the Web Neural Network API (WebNN), ensuring privacy without relying on centralized cloud services. These features are limited to devices that include local Neural Engines and support the WebNN open standard.
Additional readings that are relevant to the development of Ariton: Navigating the social graph.
Privacy and Security
Privacy is fundamental to Ariton. You are the owner of your own data. By leveraging the recent advances in decentralized open standards, we are building Ariton on a foundation that is secure and private by design. For example: On Ariton, your private converstations are only stored on your devices.
The team behind Ariton have experience with Bitcoin, banking, financial industry and critical infrastructure services. We have the security comptency to ensure that Ariton is secure and safe for its users.
Milestones
The Ariton team has a proven track record of delivering software projects. We are currently in the process of planning the first version of the superapp.
Our first milestone is to ensure funding to continue the development of the superapp. We are currently seeking investments and funding to continue the development of the new superapp.
Funding: August 2024 until ~October 2024.
Development (alpha): October 2024 until ~August 2025.
Development (beta): August 2025 until ~December 2025.
Launch: ~January 2026.
ARI token launch: ~July 2026.
AI features (SLM): ~December 2026.
Third Party Mini Apps: ~June 2027.
Software development is an iterative process, and we will try to deliver features as promised in the milestones above and the features mentioned on this web page. We cannot guarantee that all features will be delivered as planned, but we will do our best to deliver a great product that is useful for our users.
FAQ
Q: Will there be integration with traditional financial services?
A: No, Ariton is a decentralized platform and will not have integration with traditional financial services.
Q: How will Ariton earn money?
A: Ariton will earn money from premium features on the app. This includes more storage and premium features
to be decided later. Ariton will also earn money by taking a small fee on transactions, fee on creation of new communities and other
services within the communities.
Q: Will Ariton have a token?
A: Yes, there will be a new token (ARI) launched which will be the native token of the Ariton platform. The
token will be used for transactions within the platform.
Q: Why is Ariton needed?
A: Ariton is needed to provide a platform for building and managing communities that is decentralized and
secure. Ariton will give users the power to own their own data and identities.
Ariton will provide meaningful services that today is provided by centralized and national services, such as
property registry, company registry and more.
Q: How can users earn money on Ariton?
A: Experts, professionals and others that dedicate their time on Ariton, can build up registries and data
services that are provided to users for a fee. For example
this could be a list of approved content for children, or a list of approved/verified/certified companies in a
specific industry. The team behind Ariton
will continue to work on ideas and features that will allow users to earn money on the platform, as we see
this as a fundamental feature for positive and constructive community building.
Thank you for your attention. The Ariton team is looking forward to bringing the future of communities to you.
