Le-Space

Sixteen years of Le Space

From Leipzig’s first coworking space to a stack that runs without servers.

The early years were not photographed, only remembered. The pictures are illustrations.

  1. Illustration: an open workspace with long shared desks and people working side by side.

    Coworking had barely arrived in Germany — a handful of spaces in the whole country.

    A room in Leipzig

    Le Space opened Leipzig’s first coworking space, in the Tapetenwerk: a shared breakfast on Friday mornings before work started, and room for freelancers, founders, employees and students alike.

    The beta project ran from May 2009 to June 2011. The community and its spirit are still there, kept alive by people who were part of it from the beginning.

    One lesson from those years has outlasted the room: being able to have lunch together — a canteen, somewhere to sit down — is a foundation a living community is built on, not a perk.

    Software followed almost immediately, an application to run the space.

  2. Illustration: working on a laptop in the wide mountain landscape of the Karakoram.
    Illustration: a desk with two screens at Loft 38 in Portixol, the sea outside the window.

    Desktop clients were moving into the browser across the enterprise world.

    Work in finance

    Work for Fondskonzept / Maklerservicecenter in Munich: porting a Java Swing client application for brokers to a Google Web Toolkit version — a regulated industry and a large existing application.

    In between, a journey through the Karakoram in Pakistan in October and November 2011. The work itself carried on from Loft 38 in Portixol, Palma de Mallorca, in 2012.

    The WebRTC work started after that.

  3. Illustration: people working on laptops and practising yoga on a beach at sunset.

    Video in the browser was new, and every provider wanted you on their platform to use it.

    Remote.Yoga

    A startup for yoga studios and their students, from 2012 — and the first attempt at something that turns up again much later: making WebRTC video and audio usable for a yoga class, one teacher to many students.

    Parts of it were built in Goa, India, in 2013 and 2014 — as one of the first true digital nomads in the country.

  4. 2016

    WebRTC had reached the major browsers, but was years away from being a standard.

    Working together without a room

    If a coworking space is about people working alongside each other, does it need the room? Le Space built virtual coworking over WebRTC, and video calling as native apps for iOS and Android.

    The technology was already peer-to-peer. But it needed signalling and media servers to get two browsers connected at all. The dependency stayed.

  5. Illustration: a workstation showing blockchain node software.

    The ICO boom: an idea, a whitepaper, and a coin to go with it.

    Proof without a middleman

    Doichain, a fork of Namecoin: unforgeable records of email double opt-in, written to a blockchain instead of held by a service provider. Prototype in 2018, a non-profit to carry it, workshops with the eco association.

    Early in 2025 the project was no longer carried on. The link goes to the archived site — the domain is no longer ours.

  6. Illustration: working on a laptop at a remote desk, distributed database code on screen.

    FTX and Terra-Luna collapse. Trust goes with them — among developers, founders and investors alike.

    The break

    Le Space asked the question again, with two conditions attached: peer-to-peer without a blockchain, and without selling tokens to pay for it.

    The answer turned up the same year — OrbitDB, libp2p and IPFS. Since then there has been a continuous run of local-first peer-to-peer web apps: task lists, a blog, an address book, class booking for yoga studios.

  7. Illustration: developers around laptops at a conference week.
    Illustration: a workplace in Vienna, a web application on screen.

    IPFS and libp2p had grown past the crypto crowd into a research community of their own.

    Two rooms

    LabWeek brought the first direct contact with developers from Protocol Labs — the people behind IPFS and libp2p. That contact is why Le Space is embedded in this community today rather than merely using its software.

    In parallel, a SvelteKit project for a pharmaceutical company in Vienna: another regulated industry, and the framework that carries the local-first prototypes.

  8. Passkeys begin replacing passwords for everyone, not just early adopters.

    First place, from libp2p itself

    Le Space won the Universal Connectivity Hackathon run by the libp2p project, in December 2025.

    The entry has two halves. One made a peer-to-peer spreadsheet speak Universal Connectivity, so it could talk to the UC chat. The other taught the chat itself to discover and install what another peer offers.

    Between them sits the Universal Connectivity Extension Protocol: applications announce their capabilities as extensions and find each other’s over libp2p, with no central registry. An app stops being a silo and becomes something other apps can use.

    Both halves run: the spreadsheet and the chat, rebuilt from the hackathon commits and pinned on IPFS.

  9. 2026

    Local-first turns from a niche term into a movement.

    The stack

    Identity from passkeys instead of passwords. Relays anyone can start in minutes. Two devices connecting over a QR code with no relay at all. A talk at FOSDEM. And Yogasūcī, in use.

    That last piece closes a circle. The problem the WebRTC work ran into — you cannot reach each other without someone else’s servers — is the one that is now solved. And the yoga of 2012 runs as an application that replicates between devices, without a server and without an account.

    Sixteen years, the same question three times over: who owns the thing we work with — the room, the record, the data? Only the answers got better.