Crossing the Chasm (12/2020 and beyond)

The Audius community will roll out new mechanisms for content ownership and revenue never before possible, backed by the crypto-native primitives driving the protocol under the hood. As a platform well poised to bridge the gap between crypto and a mainstream audience, Audius will always prioritize simplicity to offer an intuitive user experience grounded in web3. 

With Audius token, active participants will dictate protocol changes through an ongoing distribution to new stakeholders. To maintain governance weight, participants of the protocol must continually contribute in value-added ways, or have their governance power diluted and replaced by others doing the same. 

In doing so, Audius will live forever as a protocol owned and operated entirely by its users, stewarded by community governance.

Mainnet Launch (10/2020)

The mainnet launch of Audius is the genesis of the Audius platform token, allowing fans, artists and curators to earn a piece of the platform as a value-added user. Alongside the suite of client use-cases detailed previously, Audius will introduce a protocol dashboard to showcase analytics and governance for all stakeholders.

Testnet (08/2019—09/2020)

The Audius protocol began welcoming its first 3rd-party node operators into the network, with artist content and metadata being hosted by end users for the first time. Through this period, as more node operators were onboarded, the project team wound down most of their internally-operated nodes, maintaining a few as a canary mechanism to understand how the network is performing. 

One month into this testnet period, at the end of September 2019, the Audius first-party client implementation launched publicly for the first time. This included basic functionality for uploading content, playing content, searching for / following artists, and more. 

Over the following months, many more client features were shipped, including: notifications, mobile apps / desktop apps, remix competitions, and a welldocumented API for interfacing with user-operated nodes directly. 

By the end of the testnet period, the protocol was being used by over 500,000 fans every month (see Section 1.3 for more details).

Private Alpha (01/2019—07/2019)

6 months after founding the project, the project team began inviting early users to engage with the protocol and an early client implementation to provide feedback. In this phase, access to the product was granted on an invite-only basis and major issues were ironed out in a controlled environment before introducing 3rd-party node operators into the network. 

At this time, all content uploaded to Audius was hosted on IPFS, and the client was interacting directly with the initial implementations of the content node and discovery node. The Audius client also featured a unique web3 login mechanism called Hedgehog, allowing users to sign up with an email and password in a trustless manner, rather than having to connect with Metamask. This was open-sourced as a standalone project to help other consumer-facing products achieve a higher degree of usability.

Genesis (05/2018—12/2018)

Shortly after the project was founded, the project team released an initial version of the Audius whitepaper detailing the plans for the architecture, and shipped the first functional implementations of the Audius smart contracts, content node, and discovery node.