Tari and the Future of Accessible Crypto Mining: A Conversation with Naveen Jain

As the crypto space continues to evolve, platforms like Tari are returning to its roots—making blockchain accessible, private, and easy to use for everyday users. In this exclusive interview, we speak with Naveen Jain, a contributor to Tari, about how the project is reviving permissionless participation, lowering the technical barriers to mining, and challenging the dominance of complex, KYC-gated chains. With over 700,000 users already engaged during its testnet, Tari is shaping up to be a major force in the next wave of crypto adoption.

Q1. In your opinion, how does Tari’s launch mark a turning point for the wider crypto market?

The launch of Tari marks a return to the fundamentals that originally made our industry viral and wildly successful: permissionlessness, accessibility, and pro-freedom. 

The industry has changed tremendously since the launch of Bitcoin and Ethereum. In the beginning, anyone could download free software from the internet, and mine. In doing so, they helped secure the network and earned rewards with minimal friction. Today, things are completely different:

• For new users, onboarding to most blockchains is a torturous, multi-step ordeal that feels more like applying for a mortgage than downloading an app. All proof-of-stake chains, such as Ethereum and Solana, are KYC-gated. We created a video showing how bad it is to onboard to Ethereum now:

• The most successful chains are 1984-level surveillance systems that make users less safe, and don’t serve the interests of the businesses they hope will use them. No user wants to be robbed or stalked because everyone knows how much money they have. No business wants their competitors to know who their top customers are or their customers to know how much other customers paid for a product or service.
• Existing chains fail as developer platforms because they lack the one thing developers need most to succeed: distribution. There’s a reason developers gladly pay Apple, Google, and Steam for distribution – it’s because distribution is the difference between building something that dies in obscurity and something that reaches millions. Today, in crypto, developers have no chance of reaching this outcome. They are lucky to get a tweet from a foundation or a random KOL posting about their app.

Tari solves these problems head-on:

1. Tari Universe is the easiest onboarding experience we’ve found in the industry. It’s three steps to become an on-chain user:
   1. Download Tari Universe
   2. Install it on your Mac or PC
   3. Run it. That’s it!
2. Tari is confidential by default
3. In the future, an app launcher interface into Tari Universe will enable every Tari miner to discover new apps natively within Tari Universe, and app developers will get meaningful, sustainable distribution.

Our hope is that the launch of Tari shows the industry that you can build beautiful, easy-to-use platforms that honor our industry’s original values. Hopefully, because Tari Universe is so easy to use, Tari is able to onboard a huge number of new users and help drive adoption to new heights. It will also be a huge win if other teams start using elements of Tari as a template for their projects.

Q2. What hindrances does Tari eliminate when it comes to adopting crypto mining?

The goal for Tari Universe is to make crypto mining easy for anyone to do. Tari achieves this goal by:

1. Leveraging an ASIC-resistant hashing algorithm (RandomX) for 50% of Tari blocks. This means that you can mine Tari on nearly any modern Mac or PC
2. Removing as many steps as possible between someone downloading the app, and getting started with mining. The software does everything for you behind the scenes, including creating your wallet, connecting to the network, syncing state, joining a pool, and getting you mining with no additional clicks
3. Making the app beautiful and fun to use

Tari makes it so easy that existing crypto users often ask us, “That’s it?”

Q3. Can you explain the comprehensive accessibility and simplicity that Tari provides in comparison with conventional crypto mining ecosystems?

Tari Universe is all about removing friction. When you first launch the application, it automatically creates wallet, connects to the network, syncs state, joins a pool, and starts mining with no additional user interaction. It is by far the easiest mining application that we’re aware of.

Q4. According to you, how could Tari impact the worldwide adoption of crypto among non-technical consumers?

Anyone with a Mac or PC can start mining Tari in 3 steps (download, install and run!). As a result, Tari Universe has the potential to become something that new users with minimal technical experience feel comfortable using. In our view, if you want to reach and onboard millions of non-technical users, you have to build applications that meet them where they are. This is a key goal for Tari Universe.

Q5. As Tari enjoys over 700,000 consumers in its testnet phase, what is the significance of this in indicating the market’s growing interest in consumer-friendly solutions for crypto mining?

The best products are products that sell themselves. That is the best way to reach new users in the crypto industry and beyond. In our view, the interest we’ve seen in Tari and Tari Universe indicates that Tari is making progress towards achieving this goal.

Q6. Keeping in view Tari’s key focus on confidentiality, can you describe the reason why the platform chose this as the centrally important thing in its design?

Tari’s focus is on user and developer experience. It just so happens that default confidentiality is a key ingredient to achieving Tari’s goals. By keeping transactions and balances confidential, users are kept safe. No third party can monitor, profile, or track their financial behaviour. Keeping users safe is a key part of creating a world-class user experience. 

For developers, building on a default confidential system means they can have more ownership of their user base. Their competitors can’t easily vampire attack them. This means they can conduct their business transactions on a default confidential basis, just like all businesses do in the traditional finance world. In our view, this means that more developers may be interested in building on Tari in the future because more value will accrue to their apps, and their existing mental models on how to compete in the marketplace of ideas still apply.

Q7. Dissimilar to other blockchains that require staking or hardware, what is Tari’s approach to democratizing access to crypto mining?

Tari’s approach to making mining accessible for everyone is to make Tari Universe so incredibly easy to use that anyone can use it. In our view, that is the best way to onboard significant numbers of new people on chain.

Q8. What are the 3 simple steps with which users can begin their journey of rapid crypto mining with Tari Universe?

Easy!

1. Visit www.tari.com
2. Click “Download Tari Universe”
3. Install and run Tari Universe on your Mac or PC

That’s it!

Q9. What are Tari’s endeavors to prevent fraudulent activity or bots amid the wider easy access, as well as zero requirements for experience?

Proof of work is naturally anti-sybil because there is a cost to mine. This is one of the key benefits of leveraging proof of work as a security model. No approach is perfect, but in our view, proof-of-work is the best anti-sybil system out there that is also privacy preserving (no scanning retinas or KYC!) 

Q10. While focusing on future developments, what integrations are planned by Tari to boost its ecosystem and capabilities?

As the Tari miner base grows, and the native Tari L2 + app store launches, we believe developers will prefer to build novel apps on Tari vs. other chains. This is the key from our perspective: how does Tari create an environment where entrepreneurs and developers want to take more risk and try new things vs. copypasta of existing apps? In our view, there is a clear answer: create a world where more value can accrue to the app layer by allowing apps to own their users, and provide significant, native distribution.