About Arrow
What is Arrow?
Arrow is a community with the mission of building vertical-takeoff aircraft that are affordable and accessible to everyone through an air taxi network. The vision of "private jets for everyone" will be achievable by using volume manufacturing, cheaper fuels, autonomy, and the rideshare network.
How is Arrow different?
Arrow is bringing the engineering ethos of web3 to the hardware space. Instead of closely guarding trade secrets, we'll be building entirely in public with all of our work open source. Using this model, we will build a global community of people working towards our shared vision and have a larger "brain trust" than any company building in secret could have.
Building in public means that contributors don't need to be interviewed and hired before they can begin work. Anyone is free to contribute ideas towards our vision and will be judged solely on the merit of those ideas.
All of the business logic for Arrow will live on the Ethereum blockchain. This will allow us to efficiently allocate tokens to any meaningful contributor instead of figuring out how to send shares of a C-Corp internationally. The Arrow token will not be publicly tradeable for the first few years of the project so we can focus on building a meaningful product.
How is open-source hardware possible?
As software technology advances, we can do more and more of the engineering process without a physical presence. Instead of machined prototypes and wind tunnels, we can use CAD models and CFD analysis. This type of virtual iteration will be expanding to almost the entire engineering stack over the next decade.
Blockchain technology allows us to easily reward contributors for their ideas. Alignment of incentives is much easier now that we are able to establish a culture of rewarding valuable ideas with a token allocation.
The hard work of engineering will occur in the virtual realm, and the physical work will become a commodity. Contract Manufacturers and robotic factories will be able to handle parts of the physical realm that previously required specialized talent available locally.
Arrow will be pioneering some of the techniques for hardware engineering with a global team.
Why is this important?
The decentralization of the financial system is likely just a leading indicator of decentralization in the rest of the world. As the information economy and remote work ramp up, people will have much less reason to live in centralized cities. If they're just as competitive in the economy, many people will prefer to live somewhere cheaper and with more space.
Current transportation infrastructure is radically suboptimal for such a distributed population. Roads and current commercial air travel are far too indirect to be practical. We need a point-to-point way of travel that is easy and affordable for everyone.