Project Weave
= building a trust layer for the AI-driven internet
Description
< " We see the need for this trust layer to be held as a commons — open protocols governed cooperatively, so no future platform can buy it. The commons-holding governance matches the commons-holding architecture. " >
Kaliya Young:
1.
" It is a stack of open standards, most of them already shipping:
- Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) — a W3C standard. An identifier you hold the keys to. No platform issues it, and no platform can revoke it.
- Verifiable Credentials (VCs) — the digital equivalent of a membership card: cryptographically signed, privacy-preserving, presented on your own terms.
- Wallets and agents — software that holds your credentials and acts for you, rather than a platform holding them on its servers.
- Trust Over IP and the Trust Spanning Protocol — a four-layer trust architecture modeled on TCP/IP, so any party can establish trust with any other the way any host can reach any host on the internet.
The First Person Project pulls these together into a coherent architecture based on work by the Trust Over IP Foundation and the Decentralized Identity Foundation, and adds the two pieces AI makes urgent:
- Personhood Credentials (PHCs) answer the question is this a real, unique person? — without a global biometric database and without surveillance. This is the lock on the grandmother’s door.
- Verifiable Relationship Credentials (VRCs) answer the question do these two people actually know each other? Issued peer-to-peer, they assemble into a Decentralized Trust Graph — the social graph held in open protocols instead of sitting in a hyperscaler as an asset on Meta’s or Microsoft’s balance sheet. The scam call from outside your grandmother’s real network has no credential to present, so the architecture could stop it before she ever hears it.
These same credentials extend to AI agents — every agent can carry credentials tied to the person it works for and sign every action it takes, so “who authorized this?” finally has an answer, and a permission you revoke is revoked everywhere at once."
2.
"At Project Weave, we do not build platforms. We work to inspire funding for a protocols-not-platforms approach — backing the values-based technologists already building the alternative to Big Tech. What is needed is funding for interoperability between projects that already exist, so builders get resourced to keep building and to work with one another on complementary problems. A coordination team maps the ecosystem, facilitates protocol development, and runs interoperability testing.
The vision is to fund the ecosystem, not individual projects — multiple implementations, no single point of failure. It is how email works across every provider and how the web works across every browser. We are finishing what should have been built alongside them: the trust layer the internet was missing, arriving exactly when AI makes it impossible to do without."