Three years of mainnet. The foundation we set out to build is built. The work that follows is different - and the moment for it is now!
On May 23rd, 2023, the LUKSO mainnet went live. The work that led to that day began nearly a decade earlier, around a question:
Can a blockchain serve people the way the internet was meant to - not as a financial instrument, but as the medium for identity, ownership, expression, and the way we actually live online?
The first years of LUKSO's development were the work of answering that question by building a new smart contract infrastructure as an evolution to the experiments on Ethereum.
Today, the answer exists.
Why Adoption Starts Now
The foundation for a cultural web3 is standardised, built, and live. This includes Universal Profiles and the new LUKSO standards (LSPs), which enable identity as a first-class citizen and future-proof token standards with non-transferability to make cultural and reputational tokens possible in the first place.
The network, running on an Ethereum PoS stack with FUSAKA (the next fork) soon, is robust. It is secured by over 179,432 active validators securing more than 5.9 million LYX at a 95% attestation rate. After three years of uptime, LUKSO has processed more than 6.5 million transactions and created nearly 49,000 Universal Profiles, Including over 35,000 with names and pictures. Over 16,000 unique users have utilized the transaction relay service.
The network already hosts a thriving culture, with over 19,000 digital assets and more than 155,000 NFTs and Tokens. These are used for cultural assets, proving that Cultural tokens are not only the future use case on LUKSO. They are already what the network is used for.
But these foundations needed to be built first:
- A real decentralized network started in a decentralized fashion on the primitives of the most sophisticated consensus algorithm: Ethereum PoS
- The LUKSO standards (LSPs) for a future web3 are not just a mere continuation of the ERC standards, but a whole new standards ecosystem built to work in concert and founded on identity as a first-class citizen.
- Access to an on-chain account that is seamless and long lasting and mobile, hence why we needed to build the Universal Profile Mobile App.
- Future-proof token standards with the coming Token Generator v2 that allow for attaching dynamic and verifiable metadata and allow for new features like non-transferability to make cultural and reputational tokens possible in the first place.
- And a way to verify token holdership and distribute tokens (Proof of Presence App) in the real world to bring tokenization where people are meeting and gathering.
The key tools are in place now!
Remember, we cannot bring a non-technical audience to a web3 if it still requires seed phrases, gas tokens, and developer understanding to create tokens.
You cannot bring a community to a network without the standards that let cultural assets behave the way real cultural assets need to behave. You cannot have creators if the tools they need do not yet exist.
How we move on from here
The world has changed. AI agents become part of our everyday workflow, rapidly reducing the need for large teams and complex setups.
The FNCE Foundation treasury sits at around 1.7M LYX. The wise move is to adapt to the current market conditions with intention - and the adaptation lines up with what the project needs now: Education, Experimenting and Usage.
I think over the summer we will not see improvements in the market conditions, but I have a strong feeling that from September on markets will shift, and when that happens we have built what can lead in this new cycle.
As you will see further down, the Universal Relayer will create a massive unlock, not only for everyday users to access web3, but it will also instantly enable everyone to give access to all of web3 to their AI Agents for payments and other on-chain activities.
But to adjust to the circumstances and to be ready for what's to come the following changes will happen:
- The core teams behind LUKSO are decentralizing - they are starting new protocols, joining existing ones or joining independent companies and initiatives, each carrying a piece of the vision forward. A federation of aligned builders, which is what an open ecosystem looks like at its mature stage.
- The LUKSO Office is no longer needed. The agent revolution has changed what a small team can ship - productivity, security, speed and cost have all moved in the builder's favor at the same moment. With distributed teams and AI tooling, a physical office no longer serves the work. A small team is now more powerful than ever before.
- The LYXe migration ended. People had three years to move the $LYXe on Ethereum to the native token in LUKSO. The migration ended, allowing $LYX to be the only asset relevant for running LUKSO blockchain.
- The FNCE Foundation simplifies - The team will downsize and the main focus will be to manage the treasury and making sure that it is ready for the future of a growing LUKSO ecosystem.
- More ecosystem independence - Validators, mini-app builders, cultural partners, brands, the communities forming around the new standards. Three years of work has earned you the right to lead the pieces you have built.
In this new chapter, I am also asking everyone in the ecosystem to step up and take ownership for the parts they want to contribute. As the foundations are built, it is up to all of us to use it, experiment, show and educate about it!
What is coming next will need all of us together working collectively as a community of creators, builders and educators.
What I will build from here
The same shift that lets small teams ship more also gives me the room to be more location-independent. I am planning to spend more time in San Francisco and other places on the west coast - where the next chapter of web3 and technology is being shaped, and where the right partnerships for what I want to build sit.
With a smaller, more agile team and the help of many AI agents (Looking at you Emmet 🐙👀), the focus will be on building the business that LUKSO and the whole web3 ecosystem needs - The Universal Relayer.
This will establish Universal Profiles as the main web3 account and the LUKSO blockchain as the identity layer for all of it. All powered through a unified gateway, which is the Universal Profile Mobile App and future embedded systems that will allow you to create and control your profile from within websites and other mobile applications.
This will be the beginning of a whole new industry, which is a continuation of the Internet Service Providers of the 90s, the Mobile Carriers of the 2000s, and are now the Transactions Relayers for Blockchains in the 2020s.
The ambition is straightforward: To build the Apple of web3 to make accessing web3 as easy as using your phone. An operating system that can access all of web3, designed to reach the rest of humanity who hasn't tapped into this technology. All while preserving its decentralized essence, self-sovereignty and empowerment.
Most people will never run a wallet, manage a seed phrase, or buy gas tokens. They will need one app, one gateway, carrying their profiles and accounts that just work. Universal Profiles and the Universal Relayer is the layer that makes that real. It abstracts gas, signing and chain complexity away from the user. It turns the Universal Profile Mobile App into a frictionless gateway. And it scales the on-chain experience to a mainstream audience.
LUKSO is the biggest beneficiary of this. It is the network that enables seamless and initially free accounts, experience token creation, enabling profiles, reputation, and culture - all on-chain! Something that lets an everyday person experience and play with the tools of web3, while not being required to buy tokens, figure out exchanges, or understand smart contract technology.
Every new user who arrives at web3 through the Universal Profile Mobile App is a new user on LUKSO. Every existing web3 user who upgrades their web3 experience with a Universal Profile is a new user on LUKSO. The moment Universal Profiles go multi-chain, we tap into all of the 70+ EVM ecosystems and their audiences as potential users. And these profiles can also become profiles for your AI Agents, so they can easily access web3.
LUKSO becomes the identity layer for web3 itself - and the home of the cultural layer no other network can host.
So what's next?
In the coming months, I will be focusing on adding a new and improved design of the Mobile App, which will make it much more appealing for non-crypto users centering around collecting and gathering tokens at different venues and places, as well as an improved app home page to discover and easy access frequently used applications.
The big shift will come with the integration of multiple EVM chains into the Universal Profile app, adding the ability to subscribe to gas with a single payment to multiple networks, making it super seamless to interact with all EVM chains.
At the same time a continuing team around the communication for LUKSO will make sure we amplify the work within the ecosystem and educate about the possibilities of these new tools.
What this asks of you
Bringing the mainstream to web3 is not about finances. Most people are not interested in gambling or investing. They are interested in things that have a purpose in their lives - events they attend, music they love, communities they belong to, fandoms they live in, creators they care about.
Culture is everywhere. Tokenization within culture is the only path to mainstream adoption that will actually work long term.
The tools to do this exist now on LUKSO. The work we can all participate in now is bringing people to them. And this is done by everyone using their own circles, their own communities, their own contexts.
While I will continue working on the foundations - but with a new more sustainable pace, you can step forward by:
- Use the tools. Create your profile, mint your tokens, attend the events.
- Build with them. A mini-app, a community, a brand experience, a credential system.
- Educate. Walk one person at a time through what is possible.
- Bring culture on-chain - in whatever shape your community takes. LSP7 NDTs will be the most powerful tool for connecting your community, make use of it in the form of loyalty points that people claim at your events, or reputational tokens that can only be earned - showing your participation.
This will naturally take time, and it will take education. Every one of you who carries the message forward shortens that path.
The new chapter
Three years ago the LUKSO network started. Now it is a foundation and a movement - carried by all of us in many places and forms, around a vision that no longer belongs to a single team.
If you have been waiting for the moment to build on LUKSO, to launch your initiative inside this ecosystem, to take ownership of a piece of what comes next, this is the moment.
To every contributor, every validator, every builder, every Universal Profile user, every team that staked its work on this network: this exists because of you. What comes next will be shaped by all of us!
The new chapter starts now!
🖖 See you in the world of 🆙
— Fabian
