What is Status?

When you ask what people think about Status as an application, typically you hear things like:

  • It’s a private chat app
  • We’re focusing on the wallet, but we have chat still
  • It’s a super app
  • It’s an interface to web3
  • It’s trying to be a Discord replacement but with blockchain

Which are all kinda true but none of these things really get to the core of what we’re bringing to the table that differentiates us. We can’t (and shouldn’t) directly compete with either chat apps like telegram and signal or wallets like metamask. This is not a winning strategy and doesn’t get to the core of what our competency and influence should be.

Status brings coordination to transactions

The key idea that has yet to be exposed to the user in a clean way is a native place to coordinate around building transactions and sending them off. Generally, any transaction is the result of coordination and thought. That coordination may be with a human or a machine (dapp) or both! Currently, you typically use 2-3 apps to get it done. Let’s take the most obvious and canonical of examples to see what I’m talking about:

the multisig experience.

When using a multisig (let’s assume for now it’s already setup, which should also be a native experience), you submit a signature of for a transaction, which other parties (or your other devices) much check and contribute signatures to if they approve. This coordination happens outside the application you’re using to sign transactions (typically Gnosis safe these days). You submit that signature, it travels through the centralized indexer and waits for someone else on the multisig to sign-on. You then go to discord or telegram or whatever else and ping that person that you’ve done so and that they should sign on and complete the txn. The chain continues. This is even a simplified description of what actually happens in many cases.

This is absolutely absurd, especially for us. I guarantee if anyone has managed an on-chain treasury or used a multi-sig with themselves or friends, they are nodding their heads and would absolutely use an “all-in-one” multisig application. That’s just a single example of bringing coordination to the blockchain.

All conversations within Status should lead to a transaction.

This should be in EVERY Status developer’s mind when building and contributing. If we can’t nail this experience, then we shouldn’t be working on anything else. We can’t compete with applications that focus only on a slice of what we do (chat apps or wallets), and we shouldn’t because we aren’t them.

This concept shifts the mindset of what the application is: a series of conversations with groups that coordinate around sending transactions. We’re bringing the dapps into the chat context, and not the other way around. Why does this work for us? Because the chat protocols and technology we use are native to the blockchain ecosystem. We’re already 95% of the way there just by forming a chat with someone. By coordinating the transcation within the chat, you’re leveraging everything you’ve already brought to the table:

  • security: I know who I’m sharing this info with and understand no one else sees this unless invited in
  • identity: everyone here has an address and signing process
  • context: this group is for doing X,Y,Z, which means we can bring in exactly that outside context (network, contract address, tokens, business logic, whatever).

This then introduces the idea of plugins as the main development ecosystem within Status, which is an abstraction layer that is open to anyone to contribute to (assuming we provide the details of that abstraction). Franck has been writing about this for a while and the old Logos Innovation Lab did something like this with Waku Objects a while back. Franck has even thought about pushing this further into a privacy-first focus with the idea of self-hosted bots. You don’t need to rely on anything external if you run a bot that fetches relevant information yourself and share it to the chat context. The party involved then has the understanding that they’re trusting you to provide information vs an external entity and if the app-to-chat API is appropriate, they’d be able to verify it themselves if desired (go blockchains).

Other benefits include (but not limited to):

  • pushes the use of the wallet, leading to opps for incentives, leading to revenue, leading to project sustainability.
  • gives us a (worthwhile) narrative to rally behind that differentiates us from the rest of the ecosystem, while staying in line with our values and principles.
  • set ecosystem standards that need to be made, as this experience is brutal across everything. How we do this should be the example of how it’s done moving forward, everywhere.
  • enables community contribution and an ecosystem of permissionless development. We define the in-chat application API, people go wild and build what they want without waiting for us to do it for them. Currently, no one external can build within the Status ecosystem, and that’s a huge red flag for me.
  • provides a clean interface for introducing new functionality and backends (e.g. Logos, Nimbus, anything new and cool)

I could go on and on, but I want to ensure people understand this concept and why I think we’re missing the point of what Status is supposed to be. We aren’t a wallet or chat app. We are facilitators of coordination, which requires a wallet and a chat.

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a bit of riffing off this concept to further strengthen it:

  • I know we have put a lot of emphasis on the wallet lately w.r.t. development priorities. This doesn’t preclude that at all. The wallet will always need to understand how to make transactions appropriately and be reasonably fully featured when compared to others in the ecosystem. What this does is put the experience of navigating to the wallet secondary to the actions at hand. In fact, a fun feature you could add eventually is recommending actions based on the assets in their wallet, feeding an automated recommendation engine that’s tailored to the end user without any gross manipulation.
  • We’ve previously emphasized that chat is a “retention mechanism” for the user. It’s purpose is to keep the user coming back to the app for some reason. Framing things in this context gives you a solid understanding as to why that’s the case. Chats, in this context, are about doing something. You are coordinating around an activity, and those activities are either done multiple times over (sending someone some SNT) or are prolonged (managing a treasury with a multisig). The emphasis is on the action, and can be extended and expanded as needed.
  • This also fits very naturally to the name of the application, Status. What is the STATUS of the things you’re doing? STATUS is where we “do stuff?” You can play with this concept ad-nausium, even redesign the entire aesthetic around this concept “what would you like to do?” and only then ask who you’d like to do it with, Chat can just be one of those functions.
  • Continuing, this user experience is more in line with other superapps, like WeChat.

Thank you for your contribution. I notice a lot of “we” but it is hard to understand who exactly this is referring to.

We seems to refer to Status CCs and Status as a project here.

We clearly refers to IFT leadership, as this direction didn’t arise internally.

Maybe leadership of some kind again? A former product manager perhaps? Hard to tell.

This indiscriminate “we” glosses over the details of what has happened in Status over the years. The problems that you’re pointing at here aren’t technical ones. The problems are cultural, resulting from poorly communicated and poorly managed objectives, an absence of leadership and a cavalier approach to our principles. And most egregiously a failure to listen to (and in some cases outright censorship of) Status CCs when they reach out repeatedly pleading for help.

Essentially, borderline abandonment, for years.

We in Status have suffered significant cultural impacts that have not been owned, nor does there appear to be any particular desire to own them, let alone speak them aloud. And this topic strikes me as a continuation of this narrative, “Status CCs you’re doing it all wrong. Why aren’t you doing right? You silly simple Status CCs.”.

Consider that our organisation metastasised into a burgeoning hierarchy as ossified as it is stagnant, a fog of departments and leads and reporting structures and chains of communication and priorities. Some thrive in that molasses, and can carve out their niche, but what tends to suffocate among all this noise is ownership and mission. Perhaps right now we are on the cusp of a renaissance, that would be lovely witness.

What we in Status need is the empowerment to reclaim our culture, clear commitment from leadership that our principles are immutable and the recognition that Status is not a set of shifting priorities dictated from above. We are a collective effort, and if we are to function as intended, as a facilitator of coordination, then the first coordination problem to solve is our own.

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ive gotten the same read after following status intensely for the past few years. the founder/ceo seems focused exclusively on writing philosophical essays for logos that no one cares about. since the departure of oskar to vac and then out of the org entirely there seems to be no one cohesively managing status as the complex technology startup that it is who also has the authority and competence to tackle any difficulties from dev issues to market (pivot) issues and who can communicate about all these things openly and timely with the community as second nature. i dont think ive seen jarrad even mention status for years on his twitter and carl seems completely MIA. its painful that 8 years in were still having to write discuss posts about maybe starting to think about talking about ‘plugins’ while we basically had them ready to go 5 years ago with a much more complete and useful app than now. the level of disfunction in management to go backwards in app ux with 100s of millions of dollars and 8 years of effort would probably go in the history books if anyone would even care enough about status to write on it after most of its users have slowly died off.

look not to pile on jarrad, but i think hes more suitable to be like a chairman, cfo or chief spiritualist than ceo. afaict he never contributed anything technical to status beyond a few commits in 2016 adjusting some pictures. and he doesnt seem to have any resume as any kind of engineer before status, not sure if he has any relevant experience to be able to run status. i like his vision and philosophy but the fact is this is an extremely deep tech startup and its pretty inconceivable that it doesnt have a strong technical leader at its helm. if hes the 1 in 1000 steve jobs like tech ceo that can make it work without engineering skills hed at least need to compensate by being on top of things as an extroardinary communicator internally and externally but hes also not even that from what ive seen.

we need a strong communicator at ceo position who has made deep technical contributions to the actual status project and allocate some snt reserve (vested) as reward package to them so they have skin in the game. oskar would be great, franck from waku too. i mean even you samuel or jonathan from desktop would imo be a huge improvement over the status quo because you guys spontaneously communicate with the community while also understanding the apps at a code level. im sure an snt vote on this would easily pass if any of these candidates would step forward. every other successful blockchain startup has founder ceos that actually engineered the core parts of their app themselves and as a result cant stop yapping about that on their feeds which is good and precisely how things should go (think hayden, koppelmann, romero etc etc). its the difference between building the mvp yourself and then staying obsessed with it even when managing others vs getting reports on it by the people that actually build the thing and slowly becoming apathetic about it all bc you frankly dont really understand whats going on.

im not sure what the point of ift is but if there is some complex financing going on here (jarrad vaguely said something about status and hence now ift/logos projects being partially funded by some undisclosed loan he made from before the ico) that makes it so that status can only survive under this larger funding umbrella, then i still think this subproject needs its own dedicated ceo as described above with snt allocation. for years now status has had literally no leadership (if everyone is the leader no one is) resulting in all the dev and communication mismanagement. only the founders have skin in the game through their original snt allocations but dont have the right skills to manage the project and seemingly are stretched thin with their attention over other ift projects. they can keep their allocations as far as im concerned but status needs its own koppelmann dangit

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oooo lot’s of history and nuance here. Let me see how I decide to respond to it (with depth). I’ve been here a long time, and typically in a position to “see” most of what’s going on, and why.

This is going to get spicy, because there’s lots more to be said than what has been laid out so far, and there’s some truth within what the two of you have replied with, and I’m personally happy to own a portion of that. My post is about the narrative we simply don’t have with the public, and have never done correctly (in my opinion). It’s actually taken quite a while for me to be able to put words to it satisfactorily.

I will say, regardless of the history and why we happen to be where we are, I intend to influence the future such that we don’t continue with how it’s going right now, or repeat the same mistakes we’ve made that lead us here.

I wouldn’t be writing a post like this in the first place if I felt like we were on the right path.

As for the “we” in the OP. You’re right, it skips around. I’m a community member of SNT, I’ve been reasonably involved with Status, Logos, Vac, Nimbus, and I’m “leadership” at this point. I’ve gone to bat for Status a tremendous amount, and in some cases, sharing promises to the community that weren’t kept.

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my criticism is really only for the ceo its the most important and decisive position in the org by far because its the only one that has the potential to turn things around beyond analysis. and its the only position that can truly shape how well the org actually executes on its vision, and execution is everything. fwiw ive always liked your engagement with the community and like the op so if status core devs would like to see you as ceo id gladly support you as well. id support any strong communicator that has enthusiastic support by the devs tbh. but the key problem is executive management and no analysis is going to change things until there is a strong chief executive that can actually execute on any of these ideas. hence my emphasis on such a person needing to be in the weeds technically as well and yapping about it constantly so internal and external community can actually follow him as a shelling point.

I have much to say about this as well. Most of it being around the concept of a “CEO” being wrong and anathema to the point of all of it. I’m a realist and understand your meaning though, so I’m going to sit on it and think about how to respond to it all.

im not an expert on this but the successful examples of ‘flat orgs’ i know where there supposedly is no ceo still have extremely competent founders or ‘leaders’ with nebulous titles (EF, valve). im not even saying the org structure needs to change. im saying the person needs to change. name him chief wizard idc

one more thing orthogonal to my point of replacing current figure head with more energetic highly skilled figurehead that actually knows how to execute.

i dont really get why status the org insists on being so leaderless. youve already positioned yourself as a pure software writing org that runs 0 infra or at least has the ambition to. the org also dumped 95% of its ico snt allo many years ago. so:

  • no progressive decentralization to make it easy to cater to a community and build market share and
  • no exposure to the token isolating the org even more from any market forces that would keep it hungry enough to focus on what users want (cf our accomplished 2017 class mate gnosis with their large token exposure since ico that theyre still holding)

ok thats already bad enough. but now on top you also operate without strong leadership. so even if without token exposure somehow due to some intensely altruistic desire (which is a pipedream bc ppl need to clock out and attend their families at end of day but lets roll with it) all ccs somehow simultaneously crack the right formula on how to prioritize features and bug fixes without user input since the community died off (lets assume we have discovered telepathy to do this)… this perfectly motivated team with perfect roadmap will still execute badly. the status app in its entirety is all one experience for the user. and thus one person needs to coordinate the dev process, the communication/marketing for it, the evaluation of its impact on the market and adjustments based on impact of all the before-mentioned, CONSTANTLY, to ship this one cohesive satisfying experience. this isnt something you can encode in a constitution for 200 years, this is constant intense highly skilled daily management and is the reason why we dont have world changing startups popping up every day bc this shit is hard.

lets at least limit these bad organisational design faults to 2 out of 3 to not completely let this project die off. the ship for progressive decentralization has sailed years ago, the app is already known as an extremely painful but at least principled project. so we need either organisational token exposure or strong leadership. cant expect the ball to just move into the goal by itself.

edit: and i didnt even start on this weird obsession with nim lol. its like were doing everything not to succeed (but this is probably just another symptom of non-hungry mediocre skilled leadership worsened by no exposure to token/market)

Hey everyone, long time reader first time contributor. Spend some money on being a very good chat app and let the users choose the private part on their own. There is always going to be a new chat app because that’s just human nature. I’ve used: msn messenger, aol messenger, google chat, whatsapp, signal, groups.im, discord, slack, facebook messenger, skype, google chat, rocket chat…you get the point. Make the chat fast, reliable, fun and engaging with a unique UI…and people from all over will flock in to use the new hot chat app.

I mean, make it the flyest chat app on the planet. And, inevitably, when it’s Status’ time to shine because there is always a new chat app – let me say that part again, there is always a new chat app…a user base flows in and we have room to tinker. Have staking locked and loaded so that when people come in to chat we hit them with a message that says, "Would you like to stake your SNT to do some cool stuff? Obviously people love doing cool stuff. Maybe you and a friend can open a private dm and do some private joint staking? I don’t even know if that is a thing but I want to stake with my friends…why not?

We’re all thinking way too much on Status App as a thing, and not thinking hardly enough on how Status App makes people feel. I feel like I can say ‘we’ because I’ve been on this journey with Status since that hackathon in Prague and felt the electricity that filled the room. I was over the moon with joy when I became a CC a couple years back just to see that stagnation had seeped in a little bit. Let’s get to simple and get back to fun.

One of the funnest things I do in life is play this shitty word game in iMessage with my Mom that has an >80% chance of getting Alzheimers…I play this game with her to keep her here with me. I’m not using iMessage because fuck the man and muh privacy.

  1. Make a really good chat app
  2. While we wait for people to flock in…and yes they will flock in, focus on having experiences for them to have together
  3. When all those people love Status because they love Status…start to do more crypto dogfooding.

good points but at the end of the day in any company vision is secondary to execution. a top talented hungry leadership team in terms of execution can start off with the completely wrong idea but rapidly iterate towards the homerun product faster than the team with mediocre execution even if they immediately start with the perfect vision. the latter is exactly status’ 8 year story.

Points of Order

Inadvertently I’m sure, this seems to imply that most of what I’ve said is untrue. Perhaps, if there’s a specific point you believe is incorrect, state it clearly so we can address it. Otherwise, this kind of vague minimisation could unintentionally reinforce the very problems I’m pointing out: a dismissive attitude to critical concerns and an unwillingness to own up to the reality of what has happened.

Just as a reminder for those not in a position to see most of what is going on, I have been around for a while also. I have had the luxury to be a direct and involved witness to everything I’ve described. My account isn’t speculative, it’s a firsthand reflection of what has happened.

One of the core problems I’ve raised is the lack of accountability for the past. If we can’t even acknowledge what has happened with clarity and seriousness, how can we expect to fix it?

Likewise, and because I’m so invested in Status and its success, I’ve deliberately chosen to be measured rather than exhaustive in detailing the full extent of the issues.

If this is a starting point for a broader set of two-way conversations I’m happy to engage. I welcome the chance to see the IFT poised to listen. To be clear, a two-way conversation means real engagement. It means active listening, responding to real concerns, and acknowledging where things have gone wrong. Status CCs have been expected to absorb top-down decisions while being told we are a ‘flat’ organisation. That contradiction has never been meaningfully addressed.

I almost mistook this narrative for a revisionist contextless lecture about how confused, unaligned, misguided and/or unproductive Status CCs are. I’m pleased it is not, there are enough lectures going on with other leadership figures trying to wedge Nim into everyone’s stack. As a side note, I do find myself forgetting how our obscure pet language make us more efficient, agile and easy to hire for.

To quote myself.

One can forgive some of my fellow CCs for wondering if they are being patronised.

IFT’s Relationship With Leadership

We need to talk about this, and we keep pretending it isn’t an issue.

As it happens I published a substack article on Thursday on the concept of leadership rotation, and the problems with leadership and hierarchy. There are more articles scheduled dealing with case study analysis of successful leadership rotation implementations, paths to implementation, etc.

@86.eth makes a number of very valid points. And reminds me of a question I’ve asked myself a number of times, “How does the role of non-executive Chief Executive Officer work?”.

Let’s Pretend

Allow me lay out a scenario:

Meet Sam :office_worker:, he’s a CEO, he gets things done. He makes decisions and tells people to do things different if they do them wrong. Sam is a busy CEO.

One day Sam needs to take care of another important project and he’s away from his CEO job for the day. Sam is proud that his organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy, and his workers like that too. The workers make some choices on their own in that day and finish some jobs. Good job workers.

The next day Sam is back at the organisation and he see that the silly workers have made all the wrong choices. That was really silly of them. So Sam needs to tell the workers to do all the things different and not do them wrong again.

Another day Sam has another important project to take care of and he’s away from his CEO job for a whole week. The workers know they need to make some choices to make progress, but they also know that Sam will shout at them for doing it all wrong. Probably best not to make any decision then, the workers don’t want to be silly again.

Next week Sam is back from his important project. Not all the work is done. Why did the workers not do the work? The workers tell Sam that they need him to make some decisions. Silly workers! We are a totally flat organisation with no hierarchy, you need to make your own decisions. Sam is unhappy with his silly lazy workers.

One day Sam has another important project to take care of but it will take about 10 years. So Sam tells the workers that he has hired a special worker :singer: Buzz to make decisions about things. It is ok though, because the organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy. Sam says bye and is busy for 10 years. Good luck Sam!

In the 10 years the Buzz :singer: has lots of ideas and makes lots of decisions. Some of the workers don’t think the decisions are very good, they think Buzz is doing it all wrong. The workers tell Buzz that they think the decisions are all wrong and that Buzz should decide again. Buzz doesn’t want to listen, Buzz’s decisions are the best decisions. Buzz tells the workers that Sam thinks that all the decisions are the right decisions.

The workers feel funny, because they want to do what they know is the right decision, but Sam the CEO said that Buzz is a special worker. The workers know that they have been silly in the past and made the wrong decisions and don’t want Sam to feel mad. Also Buzz said that Sam thinks all the decisions are the right decisions. Buzz says that they talk all the time about the decisions, Sam always likes Buzz’s decisions.

The workers still feel funny, but Buzz reminds them that it is all ok because the organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy. Buzz is busy though, so Buzz needs only a few people to talk to. That makes it easier for Buzz and all the workers. Buzz says theses workers are new special workers. That’s ok, Sam always likes Buzz’s decisions.

Some workers still feel funny and talk to each other about how the work is all wrong. Other workers say it is ok because the organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy. Sam always likes Buzz’s decisions. Some workers that still feel funny talk to Sam. Sam says he doesn’t like Buzz’s decisions. The workers feel very funny. Buzz doesn’t like the workers talking to Sam, it makes Buzz feel very grumpy.

Sam says Buzz is a special worker and other workers should listen to Buzz. Sam says he doesn’t like Buzz’s decisions. Sam says the workers are doing the work all wrong, silly workers you are doing the work all wrong. Sam says the workers have forgot the organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy. The workers ask Sam to stop Buzz make the wrong decisions. Sam says the organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy. Buzz tells some of the workers to go home and not come back.

It’s ok the organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy.

Analysis

Ok, let me put my nerd hat on for a minute. At its core, I wrote this scenario to highlight the “illusion of decentralisation” within organisations that claim to be non-hierarchical while still being governed by implicit power structures. Sam, the leader of a “totally flat” organisation, acts as the central authority figure who intermittently asserts control while simultaneously disavowing responsibility for organisational dysfunction. This paradox, where leadership exists but refuses to acknowledge itself as such, mirrors the failures of many so-called flat organisations that resist formal hierarchy yet remain dominated by opaque and unaccountable decision-making.

Buzz represents the phenomenon of “proxy leadership”, where a figure is installed with de facto authority, operating under the guise of neutrality. The workers recognise the flaws in Buzz’s decisions but are trapped by a double bind: Buzz’s authority is both absolute (because Sam says so) and non-existent (because the organisation is “flat”). The introduction of special workers reinforces power consolidation within informal hierarchies, a classic feature of organisations that reject explicit leadership but still centralise authority through selective gatekeeping.

The repeated reassurance that the organisation is “totally flat with no hierarchy” functions as a kind of “mantra of denial”, exposing the way language is weaponised to suppress dissent and uphold a system that contradicts its own stated principles. The workers’ feelings of unease, their dissonance between the claimed structure and the experienced reality, mirror the real frustrations of individuals in organisations where decision-making is both rigidly controlled and irresponsibly diffuse.

By the end, the workers have been gaslit into paralysis. They are told they have autonomy, yet any attempt to exercise it results in correction, contradiction, or exclusion. The final line, “It’s ok the organisation is totally flat with no hierarchy.”, is designed to land with grim irony and capture the way such organisations maintain legitimacy through repetition rather than reality.

A coherent public narrative isn’t something you can fabricate through branding, it emerges naturally from a team that is aligned, confident, and empowered. If the internal culture is unstable, if the decision-making process is opaque, and if CCs feel disconnected from the direction of the project, then of course the external message will be muddled. Fix the internal alignment, and the external narrative will take care of itself.

Ultimately, the above scene is a critique of power masquerading as its own absence. It exposes how “flatness” can serve as a rhetorical shield for unaccountable leadership, creating environments where decision-making is concentrated yet disavowed, dissent is delegitimised, and workers are left in a perpetual state of uncertainty, disempowerment, and erasure.

So Where Do We Go From Here?

We can keep repeating the same cycle, where decisions are made in an opaque, unaccountable way, where concerns are met with vague reassurances, and where CCs are expected to function without clarity or empowerment. Or, we can actually address the structural and cultural failures that have led us here.

If we are serious about Status being a truly flat organisation, where autonomy is real and decision-making is shared, then let’s start acting like it. That means:

  1. Explicitly defining how decision-making works.
  • Who is responsible for setting priorities?
  • How do CCs participate in shaping direction?
  • What mechanisms exist to challenge and refine leadership decisions?
  1. Ensuring leadership is accountable to the people building Status.
  • Leadership can’t function as an invisible force that steps in and out at will.
  • Let’s start defining a real path for rotational leadership.
  1. Aligning our internal reality with the external narrative.
  • If Status is about coordination, let’s coordinate ourselves first.
  • If Status is about sovereignty, let’s give CCs real autonomy, not just in words but in practice.

We have the opportunity to stop pretending and start building an organisation that actually reflects the principles we claim to uphold. That starts with a commitment to real structural change.

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Just acknowledging that I’ve read this. I initially wrote as myself, expressing my own opinions about “What Status is”.

Since it’s been taken out to expand that dramatically, I’ll need to choose my words even more carefully than before, as they represent a much much larger situation, which takes more time. You’ll need to be patient.

In the meantime, I encourage anyone reading to comment on the original post, and add any merit, false assumptions, alternatives, or additions to it that seems interesting.

This whole leadership conversation, while obviously overlapping and important to our ability to run with any narrative efficiently, is not what my intentions of the post were.

They were to have a conversation about a unifying narrative we all can run with that makes sense within the IFT, the broader ecosystem, etc, which helps individuals intuit the right direction when developing and what the “North Star” is that is being pushed towards.

System and cultural challenges to one side, for the minute I’ll park my urgency over the why we are here and why a narrative alone is pointless. And I’ll engage directly with only the topic of narrative without the necessary context.

This topic of “what is our mission?” is something that I’ve been really concerned about and I’ve felt really disheartened, pretty impotent and extremely frustrated about it. And I am not alone, I have many conversations with CCs and they share similar concerns. I write a lot, and I’ve written quite a bit on this topic, but most the time I keep it to myself because challenging the status quo here is/has been very risky. I tend to content myself with addressing and fixing milktoast low hanging principle violations. In fact the reason this category exists in this forum is because I made it, I want to energise the conversation around why we exist. I am happy to see it be used for its intended purpose, so thank you.

In my opinion, freedom of speech should be an ironclad guaranteed in the IFT, if we agree to that, you’d get a lot more engagement and critical analysis from intelligent, thoughtful, experienced CCs. Not just me having an aneurysm when I can’t bare a particular situation.


My thoughts…
This is something that I wrote about at the end of November 2024, see the original link Preserving-Our-Mission-Status-Needs-to-Remain-Movre-Than-a-Wallet.

Introduction

As we strive to create a successful wallet product, I can’t shake the thought: “would that success be worth celebrating if it came at the cost of our broader vision?” What if we became just another crypto app, chasing trends and compromising on the ideals that made Status unique in the first place?

Our Mission: More Than Just Another Wallet

Status was never meant to be a mere crypto wallet. It was envisioned as a tool for privacy, censorship resistance, and empowerment, something to help people break free from oppressive systems, not bind them more tightly to commercial or governmental control.

If our wallet achieves financial success but sacrifices our core principles, we will have failed. Revenue cannot replace the sense of purpose that comes from building something that genuinely changes lives. Success isn’t just about balance sheets or user numbers; it’s about standing firm in the ideals that inspired this project.

For further considerations exploring the anti-privacy nature of our current approach please see my expanded article.

Wallet - Sacrificing Our Mission at the Altar of Convenience

What is Status’s True Goal?

Our goal must be bigger than riding the crypto wave. It’s not about monetising trends in the so-called “crypto-bro-sphere.” Frankly, the idea of pivoting our vision to chase fleeting hype makes me cringe. Status was born out of a noble purpose, to serve as a platform for secure communication and meaningful change. Reducing that mission to “just another wallet” embarrasses me.

So, what sets Status apart? Our unique proposition is clearly stated on our website:

  • Privacy: A sanctuary from surveillance, whether by corporations or governments.
  • Censorship Resistance: A voice for the voiceless, in the face of authoritarian silencing.
  • Facilitating Movements: A tool for collective action—whether for freedom fighters, unions, or housing rights advocates.

These principles are not just features; they are the foundation of everything we do.

Manifesto Before Bros

How Do We Sustain Ourselves?

EDIT: Hi, me again from the future. This section is very small and poorly developed, I think that we need to expand these ideas further and consider potential mixed income streams. Again these points were written as a framework, with ideas to be developed.

The obvious question then becomes: how do we monetise this vision? The answer is simple—we don’t, at least not in the traditional sense.

Instead of profit-driven strategies, we focus on building goodwill and trust. Our sustainability model could resemble a decentralised Patreon, where our community supports the platform out of shared belief in its purpose. By being transparent and accountable, we can inspire users to invest in our mission, not just our product.

What’s Next?

The world doesn’t need another crypto wallet. It needs tools that protect privacy, empower movements, and resist censorship. It needs platforms built not for profit but for purpose.

At Status, we must choose our legacy carefully. Will we be remembered as just another app chasing fleeting trends, or as a principled project that stood firm in its mission to make the world freer and fairer? For me, the answer is clear. Let’s build a future we can truly be proud of.

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Status is a Superapp.

For those who forget the model and why it’s designed to do so in a privacy preserving and p2p manner. Please re-watch this New York Times video on WeChat, this video explains the concept, why its powerful and the problem with the implementations (as any centralised Big Tech company becomes extensions of the dominant authority), moreover you don’t have to take it from me.

If you want to see a better example of a Superapp, I recommend going to Tokyo or Thailand and using LINE, infact most contributors at Status should make this trip and immerse themselves in how LINE functions in Tokyo - I have also provided maps of the app flows that describe the functionality (as well as many others).

WeChat was instrumental in developing Small to Medium enterprise economy in China it allowed small business to sustain themselves by connecting directly with their customers. I view Crypto as an analogous developing economy - I believe the model will be instrumental in developing a circular crypto economy (a goal that has yet to be achieved by the entire Crypto industry, a reminder for those who are impatient).

Most Westerners struggle with the concept of a Superapp. Another way to think about a Superapp is to imagine a digital convenience store, like 7-Eleven.

Here is a quick breakdown, again, nothing I will say here is new.

The pillars are three core verticals or “businesses”.

  • Chat / Social
  • Financial Services
  • Lifestyle Services

They all provide different functions, and each of them build on the previous, and is more capital intensive than the last. Moreover all 3 pillars have synergies which amplifies each other.

Chat / Socials is primarily about retention. Messaging applications have the highest retention rates, approximately 35% Day 30 Retention Rates. Contrast this with Payments which is closer to 5-10% D30, and Browsers which are 25% D30.

This is primarily through user-generated content and most importantly, notifications that re-engage the user. The content and notifications are highly relevant to the user as they from friends, family, and topics of interest, and the content is ever evolving.

Financial Services are about revenue, I find it pretty self explanatory, revenue is important for continuation of development, to subsidize the costs of Chat / Socials, and build a treasury capable of catalysing user growth and moving into Lifestyle Services. Paths to revenue in Crypto Wallets is now well understood, and we can leverage p2p payments similar to Cash.App or Venmo ( the original point of projects like Hashcash and Bitcoin)

ANT Group nearly did the world’s largest IPO based on the following:

  • Payments (Status Wallet, Status Network, Status Pay & Keycard)
  • Lending
  • Wealth Management (Status Wallet / Portfolio)
  • Insurance

So we need to design and implement p2p versions of these.

Specific to Crypto is the Trader market, this is not a fad, its a fact of life. We know that centralised exchanges dwarve users of any other DApp or Crypto project but orders of magnitude (Binance and Coinbase receive 20-35m unique visits, monthly), Ethereum.org gets about 500k visitors, and your favourite dapps are lucky to get 10k-100k visits per month. Outliers to this pattern that are crypto-native are Brave(20m/month unique visits) and Metamask(2m/month unique visits). For sake of simplicity I am not including the stats for how those visits translate into installs, but this data is also available. Not catering to the core of the crypto economy is dumb, having that said I will readily admit that I have, in the past, held a “holier than thou” attitude, but again I have not held this position for years. I viewed Defi as reckless, and whether I like it or not, this is human nature and I recognise where the Crypto economy is at in its maturation, you should too.

Lifestyle Services this is where the circular economy really starts to come to fruition. The users, capital and tooling from previous pillars enable you to bootstrap IRL economy and cross the digital divide, the “low hanging fruit” here are gig economy services, like courier services, food delivery, ride sharing, etc. As well as expanding the p2p payments to have storefronts for small to medium enterprises. That way retail shops (online or offline) can have communities, an online storefront and accept crypto payments easily through the app (and keycard).

The lifestyle services is by far the most capital intensive and difficult to pull off, today there are places that accept crypto but they are sparse, they leverage a diaspora of crypto users rather than cultivate the social and upsignal places to buy. Most of you have forgotten or unaware, that Coinhero (Bitcoin SPV Wallet) & Syng (Ethereum’s “Mist for Mobile”) - both predecessors to Status I built on my own, without a team, had maps of physical places to support crypto economy.

Again, the Crypto industry as a whole has largely not yet managed to cross the digital divide, with the exception of Latin America, and that has been driven due to institutional instability of state run fiat currencies. Even then El Salvador is having issues with its adoption. Argentina was forced to adopt it due to its Bitcoin “Black Market” and I’m sure people are aware of the recent news around Libra and how thats going.

Superapp Lifecycle

The primary pillars of a Superapp also resemble the lifecycle of a Superapp.
You get users, you get the revenue, this allows you to scale up user growth, and
then and these allow you to cross the digital divide, building Lifestyle Services.

That’s exactly what we’re doing, have done, and will continue to do.
This is exactly the path other Superapps have taken.

While there is always more work and ongoing maintenance, the Chat side of Status is largely “done” so we are now building out the Financial Services phase, this is not a pivot, this is the progression.

I can appreciate if you are working on one of these pillars, you may not recognise the need or importance of others, nor the phases in which they should be built.


On Flat Organisation

It is true when I started Status I naively believed in the ideas put forward by The Pirate Party & and I was influenced by the idea in Rick Falkvinge’s book, Swarmwise, as well as the book The Starfish and the Spider, which outlines a hybrid model, one we still resemble. These models work up to an organisational size of around 70-100 contributors, after which this model breaks down, the model can also work when people are voluntarily contributing or the costs are externalised, in other words the model is more suitable for movement building that are populist in nature. Note that the Pirate Party lost all their traction and failed to put forward any real policy platform due to internal discord from trying these ideas. Occupy was also easily dismantled for similar reasons. Github started flat and also transitioned at similar organisational sizes. In reality teams can be approximately 8 people in size before they are partitioned and management put in place to facilitate coordination and cross-communication.

The idea of a completely flat organisation has not existed in Status and nor in IFT for years now, and is only professed by those who have yet to meet the harsh realities themselves. Hierarchies are natural to any complex system (read Principles of Systems Science) and IFT is structured this way.

IFT is structured like a venture studio with portfolio management to manage the timelines and execution of multiple projects over heterogeneous teams. The edges between projects are real and require interfaces. You need accountability otherwise you suffer from the diffusion of responsibility.

On Leadership

Having that said, I am still believer in majority of decisions being made by the people being closest to the problem, and as a good leader, I delegate to the leadership of the project leads. I interface with the leadership and advise them, offer suggestions but ultimately trust in their judgement, sometimes that goes well, sometimes it leads to less than ideal outcomes. I provide information for informed decision making and sometimes I have to make interventions, which I do in several phases of “heavy handedness”, with the expectation that the leadership responds sooner rather than later. I believe this allows for more ownership in the projects, I won’t apologise for placing trust in the teams and their leadership, and like everything, I readily admit that no system is perfect.

My function in this regard has also been in the process of being delegated to the IFT board, and more specifically Corey for Portfolio Management and Leonard for Engineering Management, this is because the practice is becoming more formalised and we have the organisational capacity to do so. This also allows the IFT Board to have more say in the direction and management of steering the organisation. It also takes time for them to learn how to do this - transitional phases are necessary.

This does naturally put my role into more of an Executive Chairman, and this is what I am working towards for myself although this will probably take at least another year to come to fruition, we’ve already hired a Chief of Staff, and with the aforementioned roles - allows me to be less involved in the engineering and spend more time on other issues of the organisation.

Having said that, I do miss programming, the last real attempt I had was a sabbatical where I implemented a R1CS and beginning Groth16 in Nim - I spent the time understanding how Zero Knowledge actually works, and now I have worked on the Logos requirements and am building out the microkernel architecture for Logos. I am looking forward to coding on that for abit, but yes it is true, I will work with engineers to build these systems out, that shouldn’t be a surprise. I also look forward to spending more time getting up to speed in the recent advances of FHE and MPC.

On Philosophy

Being involved in any IFT project, you should care about Financial Freedom, Privacy, Sovereignty (of Distributed Systems), Sound Money, CBDCs, KYC, Surveillance & PsyOp Capitalism - the machinery of Tyranny. You should care about the intentional erosion of Western Society and Global Communications and Financial integration and capture. If you don’t then you likely need education or are a Glowie intentionally trying to undermine the project.

I find people do care about these topics, but often do not have the time to articulate it or fully understand them themselves. People are also at different phases of their understanding. This is why education is a service I provide and I view is necessary to shortcut the time for knowledge acquisition and create alignment in world view.

A great example of this is called “the privacy paradox” representing the disconnect between individuals’ concerns about privacy and their actual decisions regarding personal information. People care about privacy but over-discount privacy until blackswan events impact them. By then it is too late, and it is only then that those who advance these technologies are appreciated.

The software is a material manifestation of ideas and heavily impact design decisions which have huge downstream consequences. “The Medium is the Message”.

This kind of education is certainly important to new entrants into Crypto, starting with Defi, each bull cycle results in an influx of people who are even less acquainted with why Crypto matters. In turn those who become builders make design decisions that detract rather than strengthen the utility of Crypto.

I will continue to educate, if anything, expect more of it.

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Hey Jarrad. Thank you for your engagement it is honestly lovely to see.

Status is a Super App. Great
IFT is a hierarchy. Great

With that clear, I’d like to follow up on a few things if you’re happy with that.

Information and Decisions

Who receives the information? This point is important. Direction should be be transparent to all, but the object experience for many in Status is that it is mediated and filtered through a single person. If leadership trusts teams, then transparency should be the default, not something that only happens when an intervention is required.

The idea of "phases of heavy handedness” has the ostensible quality of strategy, but what it actually communicates is disengagement. Intervening only when things reach a crisis point rather than ensuring clarity from the outset. If course corrections are happening behind the scenes, if leadership decisions are only surfaced after problems have already escalated, then the issue isn’t execution, it is the lack of clear and open alignment from the beginning.

Ownership and Accountability

The structure you’re describing absolves everyone but the team for the failures of their project. If a project goes off track, it’s implicitly because the team didn’t align, didn’t take ownership, or didn’t execute correctly. Great. And in that case, what mechanisms currently exist for team CCs to hold their project leads to account?

In fact this issue is at the core of my concerns here, and raises many more questions. What is the process for addressing misalignment within leadership? How do CCs challenge a direction they believe is flawed? How do they hold their own leads accountable for decisions that are misaligned, unclear, or outright harmful to the project?

If the answer is that they can’t, and historically that has certainly been the onerous burden the teams have had to bare, then we aren’t talking about real ownership. We’re talking about selective responsibility without reciprocal accountability. A structure where leadership directs, but only teams are responsible for failure, is not a system that empowers ownership, it’s a system that isolates blame.

Education

I look forward to it, though I’d note one thing here, disagreement isn’t a knowledge gap. Many of the CCs questioning the current and past direction are deeply invested in Status’s success and have been working within it for years. Many are motivated with a deep passion for and an informed understanding of the imperatives.

The issue isn’t though, that they don’t understand, it’s that they haven’t been given a meaningful seat at the table when it comes to shaping the vision they are expected to build. If the only response to criticisms is “You haven’t read the right books.”, then we’re not having a two-way conversation.

Some Actual Actionables

I’d like to take this moment of attention to ask for three things:

  1. Decision-Making Transparency
  • If direction is being set, then the rationale and expected outcomes should be documented and accessible to all CCs, not selectively communicated through intermediaries.
  • Strategic shifts should not be implied or discovered retroactively but explicitly stated with room for input before execution.
  1. Mechanisms for Holding Leadership Accountable
  • If project teams are expected to own their work, then there must be:
    • a clear process for challenging misalignment within leadership.
    • an explicit and public declaration that projects have autonomy for better or worse, and “heavy handedness” is only reserved for truly exceptional circumstances.
    • a defined and agreed upon path to escalate concerns when decisions made at the leadership level are unclear, counterproductive, or harmful to execution.
  1. Formalising a Two-Way Conversation
  • If Status is to retain any of its foundational principles, leadership must commit to structured, participatory decision-making. Meaning we create an environment where dissent is possible without being dismissed as ignorance, obstructionism, or even state-sponsored subversion.

Are these commitments something we can formally agree to?


p.s.
You wouldn’t believe the amount of commendation I receive from my GCHQ handlers, they are thrilled with my performance I’m doing astonishingly well. :laughing:

While i find this topic of discussion full of fascinating views, we have to be careful about the actionables and the actual objective we’re looking for as a result of this discussion, because we can end up following several well-documented tactics from the CIA’s “Simple Sabotage Field Manual” to a near-perfect degree. Let’s take a closer look:

  1. Encourage prolonged discussions and decision paralysis

“Insist on doing everything through ‘channels.’ Never permit short-cuts which might expedite decisions.”

By demanding that every direction be debated, documented, and approved by consensus before execution, we’re not actually advocating for transparency—we’re advocating for stagnation. Transparency should enable action, not paralyze it.

  1. Create ambiguity around leadership and authority

“Advocate caution. Be ‘reasonable’ and urge your fellow conferees to be ‘reasonable’ and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.”

The suggestion that leadership decisions should always be reopened for debate creates a situation where no one can move forward without endless rounds of alignment. That doesn’t foster ownership; it undermines it.

  1. Overburden processes with unnecessary formalities

“Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products.”

The demand for a rigid, formalized structure for dissent turns constructive criticism into an institutionalized roadblock. Instead of surfacing concerns efficiently, it ensures that any decision-making process gets bogged down in bureaucracy. We can make it sound like “accountability,” but really, it’s just a way to slow things down.

  1. Foster division by framing disagreement as disenfranchisement

“When possible, refer all matters to committees for further study and consideration. Attempt to make the committees as large as possible—never less than five.”

The argument that disagreement means exclusion is a subtle but effective way to create a core contributor-vs-leadership dynamics. It replaces collaboration with adversarial framing, ensuring that leadership is always seen as imposing decisions rather than enabling teams.

  1. Disrupt trust by questioning leadership legitimacy

“Apply all regulations to the last letter.”

Also known as the “well, actually…” gambit, where every decision must be litigated, re-litigated, and framed as a power struggle between core contributors and leadership rather than a strategic move.

So the real question is: Are these concerns meant to improve execution, or are they tactics that will grind progress to a halt?

If the goal is to build, we need to recognize the difference between healthy accountability and weaponized bureaucracy. Otherwise, we’re just running sabotage playbooks and calling it governance. If the goal here is to actually improve things, maybe instead of calling for more process, more debate, and more procedural sludge, we focus on… I don’t know… doing things that actually help execution? Just a thought. Unless, of course, that would get us a bad performance review from our state sponsored intelligence agencies :laughing:

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I raise systemic issues, propose simple, lightweight solutions, and invite collaboration. Immediately, unknown defenders of the status quo appear, quoting PsyOps manuals and alleging sabotage, while leadership likes it.

I appreciate the engagement. Allow me to re-emphasise my points.

  • Demanding clarity and accountability is not “weaponized bureaucracy
  • Opacity and arbitrary decision-making are not “efficiency.”

Decision paralysis is a real problem, as is burdening teams with unnecessary process. But that’s not what’s happening here. The concerns I’ve raised are not about creating a system where “every decision must be debated endlessly”, they’re about ensuring that when decisions are made, they are:

  • Transparent (so teams understand the rationale)
  • Accountable (so leadership is responsible for its outcomes)
  • Consistent (so teams aren’t blindsided by shifting priorities)

That’s not bureaucracy. That’s basic functional governance.

You also imply that reopening leadership decisions for debate would lead to stagnation. But the problem isn’t that CCs are constantly relitigating decisions, the problem is that many decisions are never made transparently in the first place, leaving teams scrambling to align after the fact. If execution is slow, it’s not because people are demanding too much process, it’s because direction has been unclear or inconsistent.

If anything, a clearer, more accountable decision-making structure would accelerate progress, not slow it down. Because when teams understand the rules they can act decisively within them.

For all our viewers out there, there’s a massive difference between healthy debate and “questioning leadership legitimacy”. No one is arguing that leadership shouldn’t exist or make decisions. You’ll notice I immediately accepted Jarrad’s statements that Status is a super app, and the IFT is structured hierarchically. The argument is, that leadership should be accountable for the decisions they make, and that teams should have a functional mechanism to challenge, refine, or escalate concerns when necessary.

The goal is always execution, so let’s fix the underlying issues and not dismiss accountability as obstruction.

In its simplest terms, I want to know what can the average CC do when they see things going in the wrong direction? How can we prevent the highly disruptive mistakes of the past?

Hardly an act of subversion.