I have seen one person mock this plan as being just Venmo on urbit. And he already has Venmo! So he doesn't want it. Seems pointless.

Well, fine, but by this analysis #everything on urbit# is pointless because you already have it. We already have AOL Instant Messenger. So, rebuilding that would be pointless, right?

Building it again, except on urbit this time, does add value.

A big virtue of this plan is that I'm pretty sure it could be done for $4 million dollars. Probably significantly less! It is small and focused in scope, especially in my version (lightning-only to start), but also in Curtis' original concept sketch ("full crypto wallet" that can store and hold everything under the sun).

I would further propose that it be written in "toy app" fashion, in Sail. This way you "own" the app. It can be user-modified. Ask yourself: do you feel as if you "own" your tlon app? Can you change the background? Can you even change the color? Aha, you say, yes I can: they just added that feature! And to that I say: exactly. "They" had to do that. Can you make it teal? No, you have a tlon corporation-selected menu to choose from. You cannot do anything arbitrary, anything fun or playful. Or useful. Because it's an enormous app built atop an enormous stack and none of it is accessible and exposed to you, the user. Not very urbitty, that, now is it? Sad.

Anyway, having the ability to pay people adds a new power to urbit. Now you can chat with people, and you can pay people. Nice.

It's doable. It's understandable. And it's valuable.

If done in the way I suggest, focused on simplicity and accessible extensibility, it is also an infrastructure-type construction, a public good, of the type that the Foundation really is supposed to be doing (and not doing much else). That's another reason why the Foundation should just build the wallet primitive and make it work -- well! -- for lightning. And maybe also a USD-based currency. Then the community can add in plug-ins for additional cryptocurrencies people are interested in having. Next, the Foundation could add a plug-in for urbit IDs, because being an NFT that would require work more involved and infrastructure-like than just adding another fungible currency. Then the community can add plug-ins for more NFTs. Are you getting the vision?