MVP Studio - From Idea to MVP... Build, Test, Showcase (IF)

[John]

Hi, all …

Welcome to MVP Studio thread—a bold, open-source, bridge to success , where anyone—yes, even non-coders—can share their app ideas and see them soar into MVPs fit for Impossible Futures (IF) with perhaps even the firepower of an offshore dream team like Maidsafe had a few years back..

Why This Is Our Moment to Shine even more

We’ve been creating something special with this community and Autonomi for years—a decentralized haven free from Mag 7’s grip. But what if the power to shape this world wasn’t just for coders?

What if every community member, could vibe-code (i’m aware of the current limitations but still) an idea and see it come alive? MVP Studio—an uplifting hub where creativity meets craft, and we all rise together!

Your Vibe, the forums Code: Drop your app dreams —into the studio.
No coding skills? No problem! Just bring the vision!

Developer Magic: Seasoned forum and offshore (new friends) coders will swoop in with constructive critiques and sparkling ideas, turning rough gems into polished plans, all in the open-source spirit.

Offshore Firepower: A ready-to-roll offshore team will grab the best ideas and craft MVPs in a few weeks (depending on scope and complexity), ready for submission to IF (Impossible

Helps rural communities (like mine) that may not have access to deep tech talent and are left taking a chance on outsourcing for skills (fish out of water)

How We’ll Make It Happen
This is a just a thread that can develop, lets focus on why, not how.

Step In: Post your idea in MVP Studio thread—sketch it, describe it, use a no code platform.

Polish Up: Developers like you (perhaps creatives, copywriters, legal) chime in with feedback—e.g., “Add a QR scan! Use Rust for security!”—building it together.

MVP Lift-Off: Top ideas get picked by forum for the offshore crew (Abundance of talent due to larger populations = lower costs ), funded by the person with the idea , crowdfunding, the forum, or a mixture of all three sources.

Why This Lifts Us All

Empowerment: Non-coders become creators, stitching their ideas into Autonomi’s fabric, we also gain new friends and spread the word about the network into huge tech savvy markets by hiring offshore developers.

Community Glow: Developers mentor, iterate, core concepts and ideas, offshore pros deliver, and we all enjoy shared success.

Join the Uplift!
This isn’t just a studio—it’s a place to outshine the web’s cluttered mess with our collective talents and fill in the weak spots where they exist .

From an Idea to MVP… Build, Test, Showcase (IF)

[DavidMc0]

I definitely think it’d be a good idea for community members who may not be developers to share ideas for user experiences that would appeal to specific target markets that are potential early adopters of what Autonomi can offer.

So yeah, non-coders sharing ideas and attempting to vibe-code them into reality with the occasional assistance of devs would be great. As you say, promising proof-of-concepts could be developed by pros to take them further.

It would be great to see marketing focused community members getting on board now that we’re close to marketing & user experience holding Autonomi back more than tech.

[John]

Thanks for that @DavidMc0
Might tone the graphics down a bit next week
Looking for input for the offline alias address books next week too if you
or anyone else is up for it and see if we can impress @happybeing @traktion (who might also have ideas), … i got a bit stuck. Cheers for now.

[loziniak]

Polish power!

[DavidMc0]

I have an idea to submit to the polishing shop.

I think it would be great if more people who whinge about lack of marketing could focus their energy on coming up with concepts that can be built with Autonomi and may provide real product-market fit. Without that, marketing will probably be wasted effort that yields very little (except for marketing targeting forward thinking developers - that’s important and working well with Impossible Futures).

My concept for polishing (thoughts / feedback / collaboration to move it forward):

Idea: Autonomi enhanced torrent client (TorrANT / ANTorrent / PermaTorrent / whatever)
A next-generation torrent client with Autonomi support that enhances streaming, keeps torrents alive forever, and allows users to earn rewards as they use it.

Core new features:

• From the UI, users can ‘pin’ a file to Autonomi to make it available to all users forever, even when seeders fall away
• Enhance the streaming experience for pinned files when they have few seeders
• Run Autonomi nodes while seeding to earn rewards that can be used to pin files
• Built-in wallet allows earning and spending ANT rewards for pinning and other uses

Clear pain point for torrent users that this could address:

• No permanent availability. When seeders vanish, so do torrents
• When seeders are sparse, streaming isn’t smooth

Market information

• Existing global user base of about 170 million active torrent users, 2-3% of internet traffic (2023).
• One of the most widely adopted decentralised technologies
• BTT token, which also seeks to incentivise availability and bandwidth has a market cap of over $600m as of 3rd July 2025

Unlike many ‘Web3’ apps, this has:

• An existing global user base
• A concrete problem (dead torrents)
• A frictionless way to earn tokens (run a node, not mine or stake)
• Users don’t need to know what ETH, Arbitrum, or Autonomi is; they just see “Pin this file permanently” or “Earn tokens while you torrent.”

This makes the Autonomi infused torrent client a Trojan horse for Autonomi utility; delivering real value without the learning curve.

Steps needed to get this going
As a base, probably fork or make add-ons for Webtorrent Desktop or another appropriate open source toorrent client. This fork/addon would need to:

1. Add an Arbitrum wallet to client for handling earning ANT and spending ANT on uploads (‘pinning’). Could also add ‘wallet connect’ or some other third party wallet support.
2. Add ability to ‘pin’ torrents to Autonomi (download torrent, upload to Autonomi, update some kind of registry (likely on Autonomi) so it can be found by other torrent / Autonomi users)
3. Enable downloading and streaming from Autonomi for pinned files when peers are slow or unavailable (can have speed threshold based on Autonomi performance so it’ll automatically use the fastest source)
4. Allow users to launch & manage Autonomi nodes from the torrent client interface

Summary
To me this concept seems like it could have great product-market fit by providing real, relevant utility to solve a real pain point for a large community of users. BTT also shows that the community isn’t cryptophobic, and demand seems to be there for incentivisation.

Feedback
What do people think in terms of potential product-market fit, and in terms of viability and scale of the work involved to make it work?

Please feel free to polish away

[Zoki]

How about a version control plugin for the legacy internet. ‘watch’ pages that are important to you and each time you visit you are alerted to changes and given the option to save the latest state.

How else am I going to track the price of lambos.

[safemedia]

damn this was one of my ideas that I was going to make a mvp for after the futures program.

Basically the ability to seed files, and the ability to let people ‘pin’ them to autonomi so that they are still available even if there are no seeders. (still useful to have seeders even if pinned, as the download speed should be higher than directly through autonomi - depending on how many seeders)

[DavidMc0]

@safemedia

still useful to have seeders even if pinned

Absolutely. A reverse of this could be done that lets Autonomi users also share torrents for popular files for improved access speed / to reduce stress on nodes if needed etc.

@safemedia

damn this was one of my ideas that I was going to make a mvp for after the futures program

I hope you go ahead with that! I saw another dev also had a similar concept, or at least focus on the same market with a different spin back in 2021:

@zettawatt

I think someone will develop a bounty system for desired media. All the data exists already, duplicated all over the world. It just needs to be uploaded to the network. Once the system is proven and the torrent folks realize they can 1. upload their stash without fear of it getting taken down 2. Get paid to upload popular content if they are first to the bounty and 3. Use all that idle space they currently have to farm, I think you’ll quickly see a wave of people from this community come on board. These guys are already paying for downloads from Usenet services, hard drives to store stuff, and all those fancy must-have tracker sites. That all goes away and everything becomes so much easier.

TL;DR I don’t think people will pay to upload popular media. I think a market will develop organically to pay for the upload costs.

Seems like a ripe problem for an Autonomi based solution.

After your work on Autonomi development so far, how feasible does a torrent client with the outlined features seem to you @safemedia?

[safemedia]

Super feasible. Just need to fork an existing client and then add the autonomi side.

Then add a new icon to the right side of each torrent, which when clicked will let the user upload the file to autonomi.

When a new user adds that torrent, it will first seed if there are any seeds. If there are some then download like normal. If not, then it should check if the file is stored on the autonomi network.

Now to be able to detect if that file is on the network or not we would need the xorname. So when a user uploads a file, it should also store the xorname that is returned to a place where all clients can query, perhaps some shared scratchpad?

Not sure if it’s possible to do some magic where the hash of the file can be used when creating the xorname so that if you just hash your file locally, you can determine the xorname.

Does anyone know if it is possible to find the xorname of a file without it ever been uploaded? Basically a way to know what xorname will be generated for it?

[zettawatt]

That is a blast from the past! There is a lot of old discussions on the forum regarding this stuff. In Colony I’m building the low level metadata indexing, sharing, and search semantics, basically a global client side torrent tracker index. The GUI should be out in the next few days. What the user will have is a search page, click on the item to view all the metadata, and download the file. The interface will be simpler than the current torrent GUI’s, but at the end of the day its the same: search for stuff, share stuff, and download/upload stuff. The next step was to build something just like I mentioned in that post 4 years ago: an incentivization mechanism to upload data that people want. I’ve been batting that same idea in my head since that post. I am thinking of some kind of smart contract, so you upload your data, pay the costs, and then create a pointer that points to some kind of smart contract object. The smart contract will say ‘once X amount is paid to Y address, the pointer will be updated to point to the file that I uploaded’. Once the amount is reached, the payment is made to the original user who uploaded the file.

Because the uploader has to pay up front, that discourages uploading junk. It also incentivizes uploading popular content. We would need some kind of ‘street cred’ attribute to incentivize good uploaders: if your uploads are what they say they are, you get higher marks, higher on the search list, and you can ask a higher price. If you’re unknown or asking too much, you’ll never get the pay out, so it kind of sets a market for what people will pay for certain data.

On the flip side, there could be a downloader request contract: “I put up a bounty of X for content Y”. The user puts up the bounty in the contract. Then an uploader uploads the data and pays a downpayment in the contract (to prevent spamming). Then the downloader can check the file. If approved or if a set timeout occurs, the bounty is released to the uploader. If denied, the uploader gets nothing. Same as uploader ‘street cred’, download requesters have a higher ranking based on successful past transactions. This one is more difficult because it requires a human element to ‘approve’ that the content is acceptable, I haven’t worked out the details on this one, but that’s my idea.

High level, that’s my thoughts on it. How to do the smart contract, I have no idea. Some of these things may not close out for months. Then there is the aspect of anonymity, how are you going to get that with a blockchain based smart contract? That’s the current hurdle I got stuck on.

So there it is folks, any polishing is greatly appreciated

[safemedia]

Heres a smart contract I created 9 months ago, for solana (obviously need to update for arb):

GitHub - SafeMedia/autonomi-contracts: A smart contract to store file metadata

Obviously if we could do it directly on Autonomi we should

But we do need a central place where every client as see the info, and a way to have everyone be able to add info to there too.

[zettawatt]

Nice, I’ll check this out. Agreed, if this can be done on network somehow, that would be ideal. I mean, in general, making a smart contract system on Autonomi would be HUGE. Maybe we should do that first

The ability to search for a contract ‘object’, see its info, and for every user to have the ability to add information to it is all handled in colonylib. At the end of the day, its just another RDF statement stored on the network, linked to all the others. So while there isn’t a central place to find everything, you have the linkages to build up your own index that you can search, which is much more idiomatic for Autonomi in my opinion.

[safemedia]

Yeah I guess for now we could have centralized metadata store on Autonomi, where owners like Colony could have a place where users could submit their pod autonomi link, and then you merge them all to one pod stored on the network. Then clients could download this every defined interval to have some idea of a map of the network files.

I wonder if things like storing WASM on the network and executing that in the browser might lead to some cool ideas.

[safemedia]

I’d still love to see an implementation of libp2p’s gossipsub, but as others mentioned it might not scale to what we need.

[zettawatt]

For now that’s basically what I did. I found every address that someone posted, created metadata for it, and put it in the ‘genesis’ pod. Once people start making their own pods and sharing the address with each other, I think a central pod won’t be so important: your connections and friends connections will be all that you need. I could see groups/companies maintaining their own pods that list content. A curated list if you will. I also see this as a way to implement DNS. There wouldnd’t be a central DNS like the web today, but many of them, and you get to choose which ones you want to subscribe to. And you can publish your own address, just by adding metadata to your pod that you’re sharing with others, now the network can see your stuff. Anyway, going off on a tangent, lots of opportunity here.

[John]

Will give this a fresh lick of paint, The Polishing Shop is fun but a bit unrelated ,mediocre perhaps? MVP Studio better?

MVP Studio (5/5 Stars)

Best for: Creative collaboration, appeals to both developers and designers, professional yet approachable

MVP Hub (4.5/5 Stars)

Best for: Community building, resource sharing, central gathering place concept

MVP Works (4/5 Stars)

Best for: Results-focused community, implies both functionality and workspace

Quick Comparison

Name	Memorability	Professional Appeal	Community Feel	Clarity of Purpose
MVP Studio
MVP Hub
MVP Works
MVP Collective

[John]

Sounds perfectly logical and a great use case because you’re enhancing something people use already, 170 million of them.

Take a familiar tool, add a powerful upgrade.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!

[John]

just reading through people mentioning polishing maybe should go back i think MVP Studio is a bit better though and have a Polishing Shop as a feature, the final step to going on IF, if people choose to do so. I could see Impossible Futures (IF) becoming the sorta Tomorrow’s World/ Dragons Den of Tech in the medium to long term.

[FrankieJ]

Did someone request the Polish Hammer?

[Traktion]

@safemedia

Not sure if it’s possible to do some magic where the hash of the file can be used when creating the xorname so that if you just hash your file locally, you can determine the xorname.

Does anyone know if it is possible to find the xorname of a file without it ever been uploaded? Basically a way to know what xorname will be generated for it?

Yes, you can easily derive the XOR from raw bytes. There is a client library to do so (see autonomi_chunk::Chunk).

You can also generate the XORs of all the chunks in a file using the self encryption library directly (see self_encryption::encrypt).

Note that the client always generates these for upload. The ant nodes just validate they are correct, then persists them.