Tari Show Space Full Summary Host: Naveen (Co-founder, Tari Labs) Participants: Fox, DCL, Rome, Pax I. Bounty Program (Highlight of the Event) Community member Fox proposed launching a bounty program several weeks ago; Naveen adopted and launched it. The results exceeded expectations: 90% of tasks received PRs within 40 hours. Sergey was the first community contributor whose PRs were merged—two in total. The program is expanding, and future bounties will be designed to require deep collaboration with core developers, avoiding purely AI- or bot-driven task completion, while simultaneously transferring knowledge to the community. II. Upcoming Features The Ootle community template library will launch this week or next, allowing community members to upload their own smart contract templates with ratings and automatic indexing. New wallet features are under development with the goal of creating a universal wallet framework embeddable into any Tari application. Full nodes have exceeded 100GB; prune mode is being developed to lower the barrier to entry. Regarding stablecoins: “A lot of work is happening in the background,” but no further details can be shared. III. The Fluffypony (Riccardo) Incident — Full Account This was the most explosive segment of the Space. Naveen spoke emotionally and at length. Background: Riccardo Spagni (Fluffypony), former core maintainer of Monero and one of Tari’s original co-founders. They have been friends for over eight years; Naveen considers him family. While Riccardo was incarcerated in the U.S., Naveen personally cared for him—including paying for his daily necessities in prison, saying, “I was the only one who paid for his toothpaste.” Riccardo is now an advisor for another project called wagyu. Naveen stated unequivocally: “Anyone who trusts him is foolish,” and has permanently blocked him on X, severing all ties. Regarding tokens: Riccardo received no Tari token allocation because he failed to fulfill his agreement; the tokens were revoked. There is no selling pressure from him (unless he mined tokens himself—an area Naveen has no insight into). Regarding code contributions: When asked if his departure left a technical void, Naveen directed viewers to check his GitHub contributions and noted they were minimal. The people who actually did the work have always been there—and are still working. Regarding legal action: Asked if lawyers had been involved, Naveen replied: “I won’t answer that question. You can read between the lines.” IV. Liquidity and Exchange Issues Community member DCL raised concerns about fragmented liquidity and wash trading. Naveen acknowledged that fragmented liquidity is currently a problem. Tari currently exists in two forms: wrapped Tari (on Ethereum) and native L1 tokens, with L2 tokens expected in the future. Cake Wallet has an open PR requesting Tari support; Naveen hopes it will be merged. He does not intend to dictate which exchanges should be used—this decision should be made by the community. Token issuance will decline sharply over the next 12 months following an exponential decay curve, aligning with community growth and naturally improving liquidity. Current market cap is approximately $2–3 million; fully diluted market cap is around $15 million. V. “Why Has It Taken Eight Years?” Community member Rome questioned why, after eight years and over $10 million spent, smart contracts still aren’t live. Naveen responded: Early on, they explored implementing Lightning Network in Rust but found it unsuitable. They later discovered the Cerberus consensus algorithm, studied it deeply, and developed their own improved version (Ootle). Supporting privacy features is an extremely complex engineering challenge—not something solved by forking someone else’s code. Tari is entirely original, built from scratch in Rust. He cited over 100 iterations of Tari Universe and development across four mining verticals. He admitted decision-making has not always been perfect but emphasized that all code is open-source and verifiable by anyone. VI. Discussion on Mining Algorithm C29 Rome questioned why C29 was chosen over alternatives like ProgPoW. Naveen explained that algorithm selection must balance ASIC resistance with implementation feasibility. C29 targets GPU mining; if the community believes it was a misstep, it can be proposed as a community-led discussion for revision. VII. Community Governance Direction Naveen clearly stated that TariLabs attempting to do everything alone is a failure model; governance must gradually transition to the community. The next phase (Phase 2) will establish community working groups with leaders nominated from within the community and incentivized via XTM. TariLabs’ future role will shift to coordination and advisory—not decision-making. Plans are underway to invite engineers like Stan Bondi and Brian to participate in technical-focused Spaces, but Naveen emphasized that the community should prepare thoughtful questions first. VIII. Discord Issue Community member Pax raised concerns about Discord requiring phone number verification—a barrier in privacy-sensitive countries where identity is tied to phone numbers. Naveen said he was previously unaware of this setting and immediately committed to resolving it. Overall Impression: This Space was highly information-dense. Naveen was notably emotional, particularly when discussing Riccardo, revealing previously undisclosed details. The core takeaways are: the bounty program is working effectively; there is no token selling pressure from Riccardo; and the project has officially begun its transition toward community governance.