Anniversary

Mi lion you fi build a likkle roof over yu head
You fi put a likkle roof over yu head

– Sister Nancy, Roof over mi head, 1982

Concurrent to my building Blacksky has been a deep dive to the bottom of the crates for roots and dub reggae. According to Spotify it was one of my top genres this year. Although it’s en vogue right now to hate “algorithms” as mechanisms for discovery, when they work well and perhaps in contexts where it would be hard to cause harm, they’re really good for things like finding a reggae song you hadn’t heard before or finding out someone saved a PNG file using a bird as data storage.

The song itself is about autonomy and improvisation. If you can’t find a brick, use a bag of stones. A little after that, you’ll have a house of your own. The landlord can’t come kick down your door. You built a little roof over your head.

The song struck me as a message to me, and my own message to others: you should take whatever steps you need to gain autonomy and safety. It also felt like a message I had heard and continued to hear this year in my conversations with folks like Timnit Gebru and Omar Wasow. It also felt like the first DM I got from Blacksky’s first investor, Mekka Okereke, ~1 year ago to this day as I write this. He asked what I would do if I had the funding and freedom to build anything I wanted.

And so I banded together a little party to go on this adventure which wasn’t hard since they had all found me in one way or another or were already there. That’s the thing about real community, if you have it you don’t go wanting for help or support. And so I’m grateful to the 1100+ individuals who’ve contributed their funds to our mission. I’m grateful to our 2 investors Dietrich Ayala and Mekka. Grateful to every engineer who’s opened a PR to any of our open source repositories (and the eagle eyed security folks who give us the heads up on things). And I’m especially grateful to Dr. Kay, JD, Rishi, Marisa, and Clinton for trusting me and contributing their visions and expertise to what we’re building.

This anniversary feels like the right moment to share what we’ve been building.

cash by blacksky algorithms

“How long do you want these messages to remain secret?” Randy asked, in his last message before leaving San Francisco. “Five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years?”
After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read Avi’s answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the afterimage of a strobe:
I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil

– Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (a sci-fi novel about a group of hackers who build an underground data haven to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money), pg. 55, 2000

One of the stops on the Blacksky World Tour 2025 was Berlin, where I spent a fair bit of time with my fellow Cypherpunk Fellows and some soon-to-be collaborators at Landgut Stober. Decentralized identity, cryptography, and infrastructure nerds shooting arrows and conspiring to make the world a better place. That same world that every day feels more and more like the America depicted in “One Battle After Another” with the little too on-the-nose depiction of a militarized, fascist police state.

I live in a world where one of my best friends has been a target of the NYPD. And I need to live in a world where I can privately send that friend money for anything from groceries to car repairs without it being woven into some criminal conspiracy narrative and without having to explain blockchains and wallet addresses.

I live in a world where running certain kinds of servers or programs can give you power or independence. So I need to live in a world where it’s easy to spin those up. You shouldn’t need Linux sysadmin skills to form communities or have freedoms online.

I live in a world connected by the internet, and from the beginning the internet was anti-Black. And so I needed to live in a world where I can be globally connected without being exposed to anti-Blackness.

I need these things the way you need food, clothing and shelter. You have to have shelter to be safe from the elements. And I have to live in a world where these things exist. So, we build and we keep building.

One of the next things we’re excited to build—something missing from the atproto ecosystem—is decentralized payment rails.

We’ve put together a team of product folks, engineers, trust & safety professionals, UX designers & researchers, lawyers, experts from other protocols and a regulated banking partner to introduce the first fintech product to AT Protocol. With financial backing from the Cypherpunk Fellowship and the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) we’ll also be publishing this payments model as a spec with example implementation code in Rust for backend services and in Typescript for UX design examples.

The product will be:

• Open Source – With code examples provided so you’ll know exactly how it works
• AT Protocol Based – You’ll login using the same account you use for services like Flashes, Blacksky.Community, and Bluesky
• Privacy Preserving – Neither us nor our banking partner will know about your transactions
• United States Dollars – The kind you can withdraw and use at the grocery store
• Interoperable – Developers will be able to build their own payment products (e.g. Skyshop for Skylight Social) while using our payment rails. Users will have the option to use Cash with alternative payment providers as well (3rd party as 1st party).

We expect to launch blacksky.cash in Q2 of 2026. We’ve already conducted user research for the peer-to-peer payment flows and are seeking out groups who would be interested in the collective economics side of the product. For groups this could be a loose-knit mutual aid group, susu or giving circle to anything like governance structures as formal as cooperatives and anything in between. If that sounds like you or your group/org please reach out to hello@blacksky.app.

But payment rails aren’t our only new product line for 2026. We’re also working on infrastructure.

blacksky.tech

People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will… Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point… The companies that emerged offering to do that for you instead were successful…

– Moxie Marlinspike, https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html

As Mozilla has been saying, we need to decentralize the internet. Decentralization necessarily requires running your own servers and as mentioned above by Moxie, founder of the beloved Signal protocol, no one wants to run their own servers, and never will. If you take seriously that both are true, how do you square the two?

I frequently reference when asked about Papertree, the project that 4 years later has evolved into Blacksky Cash, how we went about building non-crypto “multi-signature wallets” for users that didn’t know what a browser was. In a conversation I recently had with Erica Stanley, I realized and then explained that I take a lot of joy in building complex things in a way that are accessible to everyday people.

When we got thousands of people to “leave Bluesky” and migrate to or create new accounts on our PDS, it wasn’t from capitalizing on anger. People have been angry at Bluesky before and simply left the ATmosphere altogether. We took their needs seriously, built things in a way that worked for them (simple language, works on mobile web, etc.), did a lot of hands-on troubleshooting rapidly learning and iterating on what was broken, and leveraged community support to explain things. Sharpie and Clinton made video explainers. Dr. Kay and myself wrote out documentation and FAQs.

But we pretty explicitly don’t want to be the only server in town.

At the first ATmosphere Conference I said Blacksky would build a way to launch a PDS with the click of a button:

I’m excited to say: promises made, promises kept. Clinton has built a mobile-friendly web app that will allow users to create a new PDS that is truly one-click and will be hosted on Blacksky’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it as easy to run a server as it is to create an account on Blacksky. It’ll have an easy to use interface, handle DNS and SMTP configuration (for things like send two-factor authentication codes), and provide an admin console for creating invite codes and managing repos + environment variables.

Our ambitious goal with this is to offer hosting not just for PDSs but Ozone/Moderation Service instances and Tangled Knot servers as well. Maybe relays and Slices app-views down the line too.

We expect blacksky.tech to go into an alpha phase soon and are looking for testers. If interested, please email hello@blacksky.app.

A year ago, Mekka asked what I’d build if I had the freedom. This is the answer. And we’re just getting started.