Chorus One, a provider of staking services for more than 40 blockchains and protocols including Ethereum, Solana, Cosmos and Polkadot, is joining a growing field of hosting service providers on the Urbit peer-to-peer network.

The new hosting platform, called Red Horizon, marks the first foray onto the Urbit network by a major blockchain or technology player that was not originally building within the close-knit ecosystem, according to Chorus One's Gary Lieberman.

Urbit is a peer-to-peer network that works largely by giving each user a "personal server" to store their own data; when users interact over the network, they each keep local records of those interactions. It was started in 2002 well before Bitcoin's launch in 2009.

The network isn't technically a blockchain but shares many of the same ideals, such as trying to short-circuit middlemen and centralized "Web2" applications that dominate online activity and profit partly by monetizing users' data.

The new hosting service could be "ideal for the general public, DAOs and any other community interested in leaving MegaCorps behind," according to Chorus One's press release on the launch. A DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization – a type of group that's governed by computer code and token holders, in contrast to a company owned by shareholders and managed by executives.

A frequent criticism of Urbit – acknowledged even by top developers within the ecosystem – is that it's complicated to understand and difficult to use. The introduction of hosting providers grew partly out of an effort to attract more users – essentially making it easy for people to easily get an ID on the network in exchange for a fee.

In May, Urbit Foundation Executive Director Josh Lehman (known as ~wolref-podlex on Urbit) gave a presentation at CoinDesk's Consensus 2023 conference noting that the number of IDs or "ships" on the network had surged over the past year, as more hosting services became available.

Urbit's website shows three hosting providers currently up and running, including Tlon, the for-profit company that sponsored the network's development until 2021.

Providing a hosting service for Urbit seemed like a natural extension of Chorus One's staking services for blockchain networks, Lieberman told CoinDesk in an interview.

"We’re anticipating that Urbit itself is going to be a product that a lot of people are going to want to use," said Lieberman, who goes by ~tiller-tolbus on Urbit. "Hosting was somewhat of an obvious place to go."

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Bradley Keoun

Bradley Keoun is CoinDesk's managing editor of tech & protocols, where he oversees a team of reporters covering blockchain technology, and previously ran the global crypto markets team. A two-time Loeb Awards finalist, he previously was chief global finance and economic correspondent for TheStreet and before that worked as an editor and reporter for Bloomberg News in New York and Mexico City, reporting on Wall Street, emerging markets and the energy industry. He started out as a police-beat reporter for the Gainesville Sun in Florida and later worked as a general-assignment reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Originally from Fort Wayne, Indiana, he double-majored in electrical engineering and classical studies as an undergraduate at Duke University and later obtained a master's in journalism from the University of Florida. He is currently based in Austin, Texas, and in his spare time plays guitar, sings in a choir and hikes in the Texas Hill Country. He owns less than $1,000 each of several cryptocurrencies.