The protocols, the capture patterns we design against, and what's already being built.
Layer 3 of the internet — community trust — was never built. This page is the technical companion to the manifesto: what the missing layer looks like, the protocol stack Weave coordinates, the failure modes we engineer against, and an honest read of who else is in the landscape.
The missing layer in the internet's protocol stack
The internet has four layers. Layer 1 (network) moves packets. Layer 2 (transport) delivers them reliably and encrypts them. Layer 4 (application) is the apps you use — browsers, email, the web you see.
Layer 3 — community trust — was never built. Who is a real person? Who vouches for whom? What groups have standing? How do credentials move across community boundaries? These questions have no protocol-level answer on today's internet. Platform companies filled the gap with proprietary systems. Weave fills it with open protocols.
The protocol stack Weave coordinates
FPP (First Person Project) — Personhood credentials
The anchor of the stack. Lets people show up as verified humans in community spaces — without surveillance, without blockchain wallets, without platforms. FPP has its own development momentum, active standards engagement, and growing community interest. It is the most mature element of the trust layer.
Groups as first-class protocol objects
Today, every identity system treats the individual as primary and groups as sets-of-individuals. But the actual unit of community action is the group. Making groups a protocol primitive — with their own identity, membership, governance, and trust signals — is the most novel piece of the stack and the most important. This is Stream C's deliverable.
DTG (Decentralized Trust Graph)
Lets trust earned in one community context be portable to another without merging governance. A credential issued in one community is interpretable and weightable in another. Trust paths span communities without any central authority brokering them.
TSP (Trust Spanning Protocol) — Secure communication
Coordination infrastructure that doesn't depend on platforms that can be surveilled, censored, or shut down. Communities need messaging that is as sovereign as their identity.
Bridging adapters
The connective tissue between existing standards — KERI/ACDC, did:webvh, and other implementations that need to interoperate. The gaps no single project would fill because the work benefits everyone and no one owns it.
The community-formation insight
This is not just a technology gap. It is a community-formation gap.
Every participatory governance project faces the same failure mode: insufficient participation. Citizens' assemblies, participatory budgeting, civic tech platforms — all face the same decay curve. The standard response is incentives, gamification, outreach. None work durably.
The reframe: stop trying to get people to participate in a governance process. Instead, build the connective tissue that turns existing human community into civic power.
People want to do things that matter, with people they care about. When neighbours come together around something meaningful — a shared garden, a tool library, a school-quality campaign — governance is a natural downstream consequence. Provided the connective infrastructure exists.
The trust protocols are not governance tools. They are community-formation infrastructure that generates governance capacity as a downstream consequence:
- Personhood credentials let people show up as verified humans — without surveillance, without wallets.
- Groups as protocol primitives give the neighbourhood, the cooperative, the watershed council inherent standing — not as an afterthought, but as a first-class object.
- Portable trust lets trust travel across community boundaries without merging governance.
- Secure communication enables coordination that survives political stress.
When this infrastructure exists, communities form. When communities form, governance follows. The participation problem is dissolved, not solved.
Capture patterns we design against
The failure mode for stewards of decentralised ecosystems is to become operationally indispensable, then governance-indispensable, then the platform the protocols were meant to replace. Weave's design interrupts this at every level:
Protocols, not platforms. Open standards no one owns, that everyone builds on. Weave is designed to not become a platform in the act of getting there.
Functional plurality. Multiple implementations of the same protocol. No winner-picking. If one is captured or fails, the others survive.
Interoperability is non-negotiable; architecture is not. Centralised, federated, peer-to-peer — we don't care, as long as users can migrate. The test is behavioural: can you leave?
No certification regime. Weave verifies interoperability via a shared test harness — a pass is verification of behaviour, not a permission. Permissions concentrate. Verifiable tests don't.
No custodianship. Weave does not hold anyone's data, identity, or relationships. That is exactly the role the trust layer makes unnecessary.
The landscape — what exists and what's missing
The structural pattern across the entire landscape: identify a real problem, build sophisticated tools, skip the trust layer, bolt trust on later badly.
Ecological credit markets built serious verification infrastructure. But they require blockchain wallets and property documentation — structurally excluding the communities doing the stewardship. A practitioner in wartime Ukraine documented how one major platform's compliance model excludes fifty ecovillage locations because cadastral maps are locked for security reasons.
Public goods funding mechanisms — quadratic funding, retroactive public goods funding, impact certificates — are genuine innovations. But they presuppose a crypto-native population, can't verify personhood, and re-concentrate around new gatekeepers.
Community coordination networks have built remarkable federated structures — tens of thousands of members across dozens of countries, local treasuries, peer-led verification. They've defined the trust problem perfectly. But manual trust doesn't scale across community boundaries.
What Weave builds that none of them do:
- Personhood without wallets — defeats the blockchain-native population barrier.
- Community vouching rooted in relationship — not cryptography.
- Groups as first-class protocol objects — the actual unit of stewardship.
- The convergence requirement — fund AND require interoperability.
The urgency
Communities everywhere — across every continent — are hitting the same wall. They need coordination infrastructure that is not controlled by corporations and cannot be shut down by governments.
This is a global need. Indigenous communities in the Global South need data sovereignty infrastructure on their own terms. Bioregional movements in Europe need coordination tools that cross national boundaries without corporate intermediaries. Community organisers in the United States face a specific near-term stress test in the 2028 elections — but the underlying need is universal.
The convergence of democratic erosion, platform fragility, AI-driven manipulation, and ecological crisis means communities need this infrastructure now — not as a concept, but as deployed, adopted, functional technology that ordinary people use.