Fluffypony steps down as Monero lead to “further decentralise” it, work on Tari
Monero's lead maintainer is moving to greener pastures.
After five years, Monero lead maintainer Riccardo "Fluffypony" Spagni is stepping down. His role will be filled by a longtime contributor who goes by Snipa. The above image shows Spagni passing his knowledge onto Snipa.
Spagni will be staying on as the back-up lead maintainer, to jump in and act as Snipa's understudy where needed.
According to Decrypt, Spagni has been thinking about this move for a couple of years, but pulled the trigger now for two reasons.
The first is to "further decentralise" Monero, he said. The theory is that true decentralisation communities avoid consolidating around a single identifiable figure. The catch, as many cryptocurrency projects have found, is that this type of consolidation is often inevitable, and required for faster development.
With Monero's RandomX update up and running, and hopefully keeping ASICs at bay for a good few years at least, this may be as good a time as any for Spagni to step further away, and help drive Monero towards more complete decentralisation.
The other reason, Fluffypony said, was to work on the Tari project.
Tari
According to its website, the Tari project is a merge-mined sidechain of Monero. This basically means that when miners mine Monero, they tap Tari too. This lets you imbue one blockchain with the mining security guarantees of another. In this case, the Tari chain inherits Monero's hashrate and security.
Tari is focused on creating a system for the transfer and management of digital assets, with an emphasis on non-fungible tokens.
This basically means creators can digitise finite, unique assets on the Tari chain – anything from frequent flyer points to a digital simulacrum of a rare diamond to a shameless ripoff of CryptoKitties.
Creators of these valuable digital assets can program them to act in various ways, with the assurance that they can only be used as programmed.
For example, a creator could set a condition that an asset be created and transferred to a recipient when that person sends funds, equal to the market value of that according to some oracle, to a certain address.
Or they could have assets shed a certain fraction as fees on each transfer, or impose a requirement that an asset be held for a set amount of time upon receipt before it can be transferred again.
"Our goal is to architect Tari in a manner that gives asset issuers meaningful flexibility with the rulesets they create for their digital assets," the site says.
Many platforms are focused on similar types of asset digitisation, but Tari may be one of the only projects that's working as a merge mined sidechain of Monero, which could make it an interesting one to watch.
Unfortunately, it may be hard for Tari to stoke much hype, given that it's not shilling any platform tokens, and it seems to be actually trying to build something, rather than just sell a get-rich-quick dream.
Fortunately, its users might end up taking care of the token-driven hype further down the line, CryptoKitties style.
Stay tuned for the MyLittleFluffyPonyâ„¢ series of non-fungible tokens, coming to a digital asset platform near you.
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Disclosure: The author holds BNB, BTC at the time of writing.
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