People don't have control over their digital lives. Your photos are stored on someone else's servers. Your messages go through someone else's infrastructure. Your devices have backdoors you can't control. Your money is sitting in someone else's database.
Even things you don't think about often—like IP addresses and domain names—are centrally controlled. You are fucked.
We are focused on building tools for digital self-sovereignty. Our ultimate goal is to empower millions, if not billions, of individuals and businesses to be sovereign.
/01 A Cypherpunk's Manifesto
"Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age."
These words opened A Cypherpunk's Manifesto in 1993, declaring that cryptography would defend our privacy where laws won't. Bitcoin finally gave us what cypherpunks dreamed of for decades: "private money" that can't be controlled or censored. It's now enabling other sovereign solutions like Nostr to flourish. We are continuing down this same path.
/02 Protocols Over Platforms
Here are some fundamental principles we believe in:
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Free speech platforms can not exist. Only free speech protocols can exist.
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You can build centralized services on top of decentralized protocols, but you can't do the opposite.
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Protocols enable interoperability among different applications. While this is a challenging problem at the application level, Nostr is one of the first to truly tackle it.
/03 Cryptography
"Cryptography is a tool for turning a whole swath of problems into key management problems." It serves two essential functions:
Sign
Sign public data so everyone knows it's authentic.
Encrypt
Encrypt private data so only the right people can access it.
/04 FOSS (Free and Open Source Software)
Most privacy-focused or self-hostable software (or FOSS alternatives to popular proprietary software) is subpar. It's often ugly, hard to use, and feels like it was built in the '90s. Why? Because it's typically created by developers in their spare time.
The solution isn't complicated: build a proper organization (business) around your open-source software. Companies and organizations like Signal, Proton, Automattic (WordPress), Red Hat, and Comma AI (OpenPilot) have all done something similar. Good software needs real teams and real funding.
/05 Hardware
Current computers—and especially phones—are essentially surveillance devices with digital crack built-in. Intel and AMD CPUs have backdoors. Every smartphone is a tracking beacon. The entire telecom infrastructure is insecure as well. Those home assistants and doorbells? They're government tapewires that you voluntarily put in your house.
We need hardware that's actually trustworthy. Not because someone told us to trust it, but because we can verify it ourselves. Open hardware specifications, transparent supply chains, and user-controlled security features are crucial.
/06 Software Design Principles
This vision of digital sovereignty isn't just about privacy or security—it's about fundamentally reshaping the relationship between individuals and their digital existence. One of the first products we are building is a file-hosting and synchronization service that is end-to-end encrypted, and every aspect of it will be free and open-source.
Local-first
Your data lives on your devices first, cloud second.
Unhosted
The app runs without depending on any servers.
Credible Exit
You can always take your data and identity and move to another place.
Plain Text, Please
Data is stored in plain text (.txt or .md), not some proprietary binary format.
/07 Future Explorations
We're continuing to expand our vision into these areas:
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Web of Trust vs The Algorithm
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Issues with decentralization when it comes to Search and AI
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How FOSS can be made better by taking help from UI/UX designers, and different FOSS apps speaking the same protocol (network effect)
Privacy and censorship resistance for the sovereign individual