Tari is the brainchild of the former lead maintainer of the Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency, Riccardo Spagni (aka: fluffy pony) who is currently just a standard maintainer of the Monero project. Monero is the gold standard in privacy preserving cryptocurrencies and is considered to be highly secure. To this date, Monero has not been hacked or infiltrated by any government agency, including NSA/IRS. Spagni has created a private-by-default blockchain protocol, which is a digital assets management system in order for them to acquire privacy without investing time and research. He's developed this platform specifically for creators to self-custody all of their digital assets without having a centralized corporation custody them. If creators are able to custody their assets fully, then they are able to resist censorship by default. The ease of integration and stability are key aspects which allow creators to integrate privacy by default. The protocol is private and highly secure, just like Monero. In fact, it is a merge-mined sidechain of Monero itself. Though it is written in Rust instead of C++, presumably chosen to not compete for Monero devs, among other reasons.
The aesthetics of Tari are attractive to many non-technologically savvy creators. This lures people into this protocol as a "privacy trojan horse", says Spagni, which benefits creators instead of corporations without much thinking. Instead of trying to convince people that they need privacy online, this platform truly enables them to effortlessly acquire privacy and custody all of their creations without a corporation dictating anything. This privacy enhancing software is ubiquitously available to all because digital privacy should be accessible to all.
The templates and rulesets are quick and easy for almost everyone. Creating visually appealing user experiences for their followers, creators get empowered and are. Creators can quickly create digital scarce assets, monetize it, make it visually appealing and acquire privacy in Tari.
The mobile wallet app, Aurora, developed by the community can be downloaded on your mobile device to access testnet Tari (tXTR). Testnets are vital for people to interact with new apps and protocols because the risk of real value loss is zero. Testnet tokens aren't worth anything. Anyone can dive into this and quickly see what opportunities there are to engage with the platform without risking loss of funds. Or one may run a test node (Ubuntu, Mac, Windows) and help stabilize, secure and mine testnet Tari which will run silently in the background as a process. The Aurora libraries and codebase is free and open source, which allows creators to really engage with this technology.
Tari Labs University (TLU) is another amazing useful resource for education in the blockchain and crypto space. Education is one of the most important aspects of understanding these rapidly evolving technologies. Quickly digesting new concepts is crucial to staying on top of the most modern trends in technology and the blockchain space. TLU offers this freely and is also open source. Some of the cryptography concepts they discuss are elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), bulletproofs, MimbleWimble and much more. The more knowledge users have, the more secure users are.
The concept of creators having total control of their digital assets is something that web 2.0 has not focused on. Instead, web 2.0 platforms, like Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), Reddit etc., have had too much control over the brilliant creators who entirely contribute to their success. Once a platform that can liberate creators from the control of the greedy corporations exists and also offer top notch privacy at the same time, the creator economy will undoubtedly explode.
