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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 :slight_smile:

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