What happens with Paratii now?
We recently announced Paratii as we know it has came to and end. No token. No funding with VCs. No public raises. No profitability upon virgin, unproven tech. Here we explore why that doesn’t mean it’s all over.
All the code we produced so far is decently documented and there’s an R&D roadmap + immediate issues to be tackled on multiple fronts. We have:
- Launched the Lab: a peer-to-peer web app tailored for crypto content consumers.
- Posted bounties, in ETH, for product issues. Search the “bounty” tag in our Github, if you feel like collaborating, and pick what suits you.
- Released an original video docu-series on this web app: Around the Block, an episodical panorama of the decentralisation movement 👇
As an organised team, we stop existing. By an “unbounded network of contributors”, we mean Paratii becomes an open source research lab. In practice, we are:
- Freezing the payroll. Cutting all (but website hosting, etc) costs. Freeing the team to work on whatever each one wants.
- Maintaining exploratory routine around curation protocols. Keeping to publish research material and gradually implementing distributed signalling. Supporting any implementation or team we may be able to help with, in the space, individually or collectively.
- Researching token-less incentive engineering.
- Exploring the universe of non-profit funding.
Some believe the end goal of any organisational effort is to maximise its own existence. Our end goal here is not mere survival. It’s making public infrastructure for video applications and fairer monetisation models a reality.
18 months ago, the way to maximise impact my co-founders and I could have in accelerating the web3 video ecosystem seemed to be (1) educating local communities; (2) building proto-dApps these could try out; (3) exploring, formalising and hacking together pieces of the emergent web3 stack.
We’ve asked ourselves the same question over and over: where should our energy be, now? Are the resources at hand invested in the most effective way?
As the discomfort of fading away from start-up mode starts to settle in, some small plot twists indicate we may be on a good path. One of our best engineers is already working with a “competing” team. His source material on “task one” are libraries he helped build when at Paratii. Integrating this “competitor’s” service into our streaming pipeline was something we wanted him to do for months, but there was never time or high priority.
That’s what we meant when we said Paratii is not giving up on its purposes — just biting them stronger. What we meant when we restated our commitment to the ecosystem —now more efficiently distributed.
Paratii is an open source R&D lab that builds on public, permissionless infrastructure for online video. Join us on Telegram for the freshest news.
