A First Person Project — building the internet's missing trust layer for people, communities, and AI agents.
We are engineers and contributors building the P2P Trust Stack — a four-layer architecture for verifiable, private, tamper-proof identity and relationships. We work as independent contributors alongside the First Person Cooperative ecosystem.
The First Person Cooperative is an open, neutral stewardship organization. It curates, certifies, governs, trains, and consults on the standards and protocols that make decentralized trust infrastructure work — developed openly, governed transparently, and accessible to everyone.
We build to those standards.
The internet was built without a trust layer. Every identity system on the modern internet — from email addresses to social media accounts to OAuth logins — is controlled by a centralized platform that can revoke your identity, sell your data, or simply disappear.
This was always a problem. The rise of agentic AI has made it an urgent one. When AI agents can act on behalf of humans — sending emails, making purchases, signing documents, managing relationships — the question of who authorized this agent, and what are they allowed to do? becomes critical. Without a trust layer, there is no reliable answer.
The P2P Trust Stack is our answer: a four-layer architecture for verifiable, private, tamper-proof identity and relationships, built on open W3C standards and the Trust over IP (ToIP) model. It gives every person, community, and AI agent a cryptographically verifiable identity and a tamper-proof record of their relationships and authorizations.
The P2P Trust Stack implements the credential, node, and relationship standards defined by the Decentralized Trust Graph (DTG) working group, alongside open W3C standards, the Trust over IP model, and DIF specifications.
Every participant in the graph is a Verified Trust Agent (VTA): a DID-bearing node that can be a person, an organization, a community, or an AI agent. Relationships between VTAs are represented as Verified Relationship Credentials (VRCs) — cryptographically signed, bidirectional proofs that cannot be forged or repudiated.
Clusters of VTAs with shared governance rules form Verified Trust Communities (VTCs). The result is a trust graph that is sovereign, private, tamper-proof, and traversable — enabling secure commerce, democratic participation, and accountable AI at internet scale.
The P2P Trust Stack is built entirely on open, royalty-free standards:
No proprietary protocols. No vendor lock-in. No single point of control.
The P2P Trust Stack core components are in active development. A public open-source repository will be announced soon.
Developer Docs — Coming Soon
The Trust Tasks framework defines and standardizes trust task execution using W3C Verifiable Credentials. We are reviewing this work for potential integration.
trusttasks.org →The ToIP Foundation: the four-layer architecture model that the P2P Trust Stack is built on.
trustoverip.org →A licensing model for the P2P Trust Stack has not yet been finalized. We are actively determining how best to make the software available for free use by people and communities while also establishing licensing terms that allow for fair and equitable fees for commercial usage.
The VTA, VTC, and VRC data model primitives are defined by the Decentralized Trust Graph (DTG) working group. Our implementations are built to conform to and advance these protocols as contributing members of the Trust over IP and DTG ecosystem.