✩ News Archive ✩

Thanks to Florian Pelz, A Scheme Primer, our tutorial text on foundational Scheme concepts and mindsets, is now available in German! Check it out in various formats below:

RadicalxChange(s) latest episode is an in-depth interview with our CTO, Christine Lemmer-Webber. There is a lot of conceptual territory covered in this discussion, with a focus on our work at Spritely Institute starting at 47:15, including a survey of various decentralized attempts at recreating big tech solutions, and how Spritely combines computer science research, object capability programming, and an explicit consent model to develop a new paradigm for decentralized and secure distributed social networks.

We are pleased to announce that we have published a new Scheme Primer! (PDF) (source) We primarily wrote this for the benefit of people approaching Spritely's technology who were unfamiliar with Scheme, but since the lack of a good Scheme introductory document is a common complaint, we hope this is a useful contribution in general and a gift to the wider programming language community.

We now have a rough draft of our whitepaper, The Heart of Spritely: Distributed Objects and Capability Security! (PDF) (ODT) (ORG)

Spritely Institute CTO Christine Lemmer-Webber just released part one of a podcast interview with Mark S. Miller! In it they chart the history of secure capability programming by discussing the development of the E programming language, the variations in attitudes toward technology over time, actor behavior, and asynchronous communication.

Spritely Networked Communities Institute received its 501(c)(3) approval letter today. What does this mean? We are now a tax-exempt nonprofit in the United States!

This blogpost is based on Jessica's work being fudned by NLNet / NGI Zero. We are grateful for the support of this work!

Spritely Networked Communities Institute is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit public benefit corporation attempting to re-decentralize community on the internet.

Foreward by Christine Lemmer-Webber: Jessica wrote this blogpost within the second week of her working full time as part of Spritely but it took me a while to review it and get it up here. While object-capability based banks are not new (Spritely Goblins ships with a simple example mint based on the Capability-based Financial Instruments paper), these systems have traditionally been shown as examples where we need support for local synchronous operations to keep things simple and understandable. With no prior background in the object capability security community or in previous cryptographic banking systems, Jessica quickly refuted this claim and came up with this example alternative purely-asynchronous object-capability-based bank design. Suffice to say, this is an astounding feat and yet another demonstration of how fortunate we feel to have Jessica join the Spritely team!