The Status Network was launched with the goal to build open social and financial technology for sovereign communities. Our technology is available for anyone who wishes to rely on tested, secure social and financial tech in the fight to assert their sovereignty.

The primary beneficiaries of The Status Network are communities that lack tech infrastructure, developer tools, or secure social and financial products. Our open technology allows communities to use technology at any level required - ready made social and financial products, developer tools to build on the Status and Ethereum blockchain base, or our core infrastructure contributions for messaging and blockchain scalability.

But who are these communities?

Self-Organizing Communities

Refugee camps, sprawling slums, towns springing up in the wake of disasters - People are forced by war and economic and natural disasters to join together and create meaningful lives for themselves with little, if any, legacy government support. Self-organizing communities emerge where people have organized out of necessity to function as a cohesive society.

In 2014 Brazil Favela's were estimated to house up to 22% of Brazil’s entire population. The outskirts of urban areas with rapid population growth find people organizing to give themselves basic services. As these communities grow without the support of Brazil’s City governments, we see people developing their own thriving mini economies. As favelas grow, they need infrastructure, tools, and their own community money to flourish.

Community currency is a powerful tool for informal settlements. In Mombasa and Nairobi County, Kenya, settlements have been found to generate local production services, which grows local employment, generates a demand for greater retail goods and services, and feeds back to further increase local production services. Genuine mini-economies thrive when the means are introduced to emerging communities.

We also see an opportunity for secure social and financial technology to impact places like Venezuela. In a volatile economy with the highest inflation rate in the world we see people opting out by bartering with goods to battle inflation. Venezuelans can use Status Network products to opt in to a decentralized global economy and regain some semblance of financial stability.

In all of these cases and more, an open social financial technology platform allows people to organize at the scale needed for their lives to function.

Authoritarian Resistance

People are organizing to resist against power. These are groups that are fighting for their own sovereign rights from governments or central banking. Organizers face police and military forces that censor speech, finance, and organizers’ ability to communicate and coordinate.  

There are countless  examples of past and present communities fighting for their own freedom. These groups need open, secure technology to continue asserting their human rights of expression and independence.

What do sovereign communities need? + Opportunities that exist

Investment in infrastructure development can be a critical kickstarter to communities aiming to reduce poverty and self-organize for better social support. Emerging communities with infrastructure and technology deficits have shown that they can and will rise up with technology support that suits their needs and brings communities out from under poverty or authoritarian censorship.

The Status Network creates tangible infrastructure to support these communities.

  1. Secure communications - Digital tools for private, secure communication, social coordination, and free expression. For example, the Status App enables secure, private, peer-to-peer communication to anyone who can download the app. The integration of Dap.ps opens the App as more than just peer-to-peer comms and introduces a vast ecosystem of decentralized communication, finance, and organization tools.
  2. Secure finance - Digital money expands access to financial services including lending, merchant services, and peer-to-peer payments. Keycard is the hardwallet that can integrate with crypto wallet services, and in the future will run on an open source payment rails network for merchant acceptance. Teller is a global exchange for moving crypto-to-fiat and back anywhere.
  3. Secure web3 infrastructure - Communities will build their own customized needs as digital solutions, knowing our rigorous security and privacy-first standards are creating secure infrastructure. The base layer work on secure blockchain scaling with Nimbus, private p2p messaging with Vac, and work to improve permissionless networks with libp2p--all of these contribute to the secure web3 internet that sovereign communities can rely on for security and safety.

The Status Network is about building for real community needs. Decentralized products, tools, and infrastructure take the open source world of technology to another level, creating greater opportunity for any community to stand up and realize their own rights.

Learn more, and get involved at statusnetwork.com.

If you have questions about The Status Network reach out in the Status Discussion Forum