From the terrain of dreams, to Speakeasy

The place I was looking for / We know the way.

Many of you know Tonk as a skunkworks that's been prototyping decentralised privacy tooling in new media, & particularly in fully onchain games, or "autonomous worlds". So how did we come across the embryo that morphed into Speakeasy?

In 2022, Baz & Goblin Oats discovered one another. It was a balmy summer in London, and the bull market glow was shimmering (albeit fading fast).

It was a spiritual collision. Over noodles and tea, they recounted their respective life journeys, unearthing mysterious parallels despite hailing from opposite sides of the globe.

Among other chemistries, they shared a deep frustration. Having grown up on the web, they sensed the promise of disintermediation, far beyond speculation. They also noted that the technical progress - particularly in cryptography - was astounding. The FTX debacle & AI hype were just noise.

So like any early skunkworks, they explored the idea maze together - traversing the savannahs and tundras of decentralised identity, DAO tooling and federated social.

Somewhere in that terrain of dreams, Tonk was born.

Soon enough, we were drawn in to the nascent autonomous worlds scene.

At Tonk, we think of autonomous worlds as worlds (broadly construed) that are governed by their citizens (or nobody). Fully onchain games (games that put all state + logic onchain) are a decent early example of an autonomous world.

The strongest reason for our attraction was how fruitful AWs are as a place to boldly try new things. Our friends in the scene were smart and ambitious, and together, we generated wild endgame ideas about the consequences of decentralisation.

Most importantly, fully onchain games are a petri dish, offering prophetic visions into what a disintermediated internet will feel like. One of the consequences of the transition towards a web of proofs is that data will move more freely. It will be self-sovereign, verifiable, open, interoperable, unsiloed and protocolised.

But what will life actually feel like when that happens? If tech history has shown us anything, it's that the future doesn't look like old things done in a new way. The future always looks like new things entirely.

A “personal computer”. “Social” media. “Ridesharing”.

So what are the “new things”, and how do we find them? One of the oft-repeated maxims at Tonk, is that onchain games are a playground for the future. When you run a game onchain, you create a model of a world, where data flows effortlessly, without platform taxes, censorship & siloes.

Importantly, you also model nonfinancial activity. We play games for the same complex reasons we live life. Money is just one part of it.

If you watch carefully, these models give us a glimpse into nonskeuomorphic emergent behaviours and social structures that will dominate the web in 5-10 years' time. Games are prophecy for future tech and future behaviours. They’re also fun, and challenging, and important.

Equipped with that thesis, and going into 2023, the atmosphere inside Tonk was electric. We could see how powerful games were as a place to discover and prototype decentralised privacy tech, for use within, and ultimately beyond, games. Information asymmetry is a cornerstone of game development and a perfect usecase for all this new cryptographic infrastructure (not just ZK).

And it was all playing out in practice. We won hackathons, grants and public goods funding for our work, including privacy tools, game prototypes, cryptographic primitives and more. When invited to IRL dinners and workshops, people couldn’t believe the size of our small team, given the volume of output on our Github and elsewhere.

At the time, it was obvious from game devs, that there was a latent demand for hidden information mechanics, and that it needed cryptographic magic to work in a decentralised context. However, we could also see that game devs had enough to worry about besides fancy cryptography.

That’s when we released the “Privacy Playgrounds Wiki”, an almanac of cryptographic techniques for achieving a variety of in-game hidden information mechanics.

Builders dove into it, refined it, picked it apart - but we wanted to move faster. We wanted to make onchain information asymmetry as simple as calling a function in Rust. So earlier this year, we also open-sourced Gribi, our SDK for componentised hidden information mechanics.

Working alongside studios from across the world, we were delighted to see them integrate Gribi into their designs for livelier, riskier, bolder projects.

Then, something unexpected happened.

A nascent onchain gaming guild needed information asymmetry. Not in a game itself, but rather in the social coordination layer around the game.

This guild needed to grow a decentralised network of people, but they needed a way to keep it private and cosy. To cultivate trust within the guild, without closing it off too much. To create social information asymmetries, but scalable beyond traditional social structures. And thus, the first Speakeasy was born.

This was a perfect usecase for information asymmetry, and as predicted, offered a clue towards future nonskeuomorphic social behaviours.

At this point, a friend entered the fray with an insight that bust our world wide open.

The guild’s problem was actually a microcosmic manifestation of a disease that’s infected the wider web - a problem we’ve gotten so used to, that it’s hard to see. That, deep down, our infrastructure for building trust on the web is outdated. And perhaps, while we’ve been chasing trustlessness, we forgot about building trust itself.

That the web is missing a special kind of place, that’s just the right mix of open and private, so as to optimise for that most foundational affordance: spontaneous sociability. That the web was originally meant to help you find and connect with undiscovered peers, but context-collapse swept us off course.

At that point, the Tonk team went back to our spiritual roots - the artists, critical theorists and architects who originally inspired us. Speaking to leaders from different ecosystems, geographies and scenes, we saw this problem replicated in all sorts of unexpected places across the world.

This crystallised into a set of beliefs. We shared some of those here.

New cryptographic research and experimental implementations from smart teams boldened our conviction that the time was right to build trust infrastructure. Baz was invited to share some of the work that inspired Speakeasy.

Looking back, our bet - that games were the perfect fertile starting point - came true, although we were propelled way faster through the idea maze than anticipated. Our guiding mission has been the same since day 1 - to liberate the internet.

Advanced disintermediating technologies light a path upwards to that shining city on a hill. We wouldn’t be on that journey if not for the remarkable pantheon of cryptographic, artistic and entrepreneurial geniuses at our side.

The web of proofs and the flywheels that accelerate us towards that future are of a different nature to the network effects of the 2010s. The forces at play are subtle - visible only under the right light and audible only to the tuned ear.

Can you hear the music?