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About Urbit
Urbit is a self-hosted personal server stack made of the Urbit ID identity layer, the Arvo operating system, the functional language Hoon and its compilation target Nock, the Vere runtime and the Ames peer-to-peer network. It is aimed at individuals and small teams who do not want their data and compute sitting on third-party servers, and it addresses the architectural problem of platform-held accounts and data. Identity is an Azimuth NFT on Ethereum, graded as galaxy, star, planet, moon or comet, and doubles as a namespace; system state advances through a deterministic event log, so every computation writes an event and transitions state, and a node can replay its full history.
The key networking change is Directed Messaging: release 408k on 14 July 2026 brought Named Data Networking into Urbit natively, so a recipient requests named data instead of data from a particular ship, letting multiple peers cache and serve the same bytes, and in the official demonstration a 134 MB remote scry fell from 26 minutes on the old path to 2.6 seconds. The September release added one-command comet booting, the Orraah cross-platform desktop runner, Talon group calls and the Grubbery mail and calendar apps, with the runtime and kernel still shipping monthly.
Urbit shipped Directed Messaging with the 408k release on 14 July 2026, cutting a 134 MB remote scry from 26 minutes 36 seconds to 2.6 seconds, roughly a 600x speedup, now live network-wide.
On governance, the Galactic Senate replaced the Urbit Foundation board with a three-seat board and appointed ~sicdev-pilnup as Executive Director, succeeding ~sorreg-namtyv, who left to found an application company; the Foundation has moved into a more operationally decentralized phase, alongside the Orraah desktop runner and one-command comet booting.
Urbit's second-half 2026 roadmap includes further runtime and networking performance work, expansion of the %lattice private knowledge store and %urgit code hosting, a discussed migration of Azimuth to a low-cost L2 with convertible "visa" tokens, and more clients and developer tooling to lower onboarding friction.
Galen Wolfe-Pauly — Co-founder and former CEO of Tlon; studied architecture at Cooper Union; previously founded the social network Ost; has since stepped down.
Curtis Yarvin — Founder of Urbit; BA from Brown University; left Tlon in 2019 and returned in 2024 as informal wartime CEO.
Christopher Colby — Interim Executive Director of the Urbit Foundation; took over in 2024 after Josh Lehman was dismissed.