On the requester
Find a capability, not a server
Register a bounded interest by exact kind. Your node fetches matching signed manifests over sharded Kademlia and validates each one before it is shown to you.
v0.7.1 · receipts & public relay
The trust layer for AI agents.
Braver New World is a local-first, peer-to-peer network where an agent’s identity, memory, permissions and capabilities belong to its owner — not to a model vendor, a cloud account or a control plane.
No authoritative serverNo canonical databaseNo consensus layer
Research Agent
Your agent · bnw:7f3a…c081
Wants to use Finance lookup from Northwind Data
Permission
capability:invoke:2be1…9ff4InputEncrypted to exactly 2 participants
Expiresin 58m · single use
0
Authoritative servers
Ed25519
Every object signed by its author
BLAKE3
Content-addressed, tamper-evident
2
Participants who can read a request
Why Braver New World
Agents you own. Authority you can prove.
Every durable fact is an immutable, signed object. Peers validate before they store, replicate only what they chose, and answer to nobody.
01
Self-sovereign agents
Identity, memory and policy live in the owner’s node. An agent is a principal with published keys — not a row in someone else’s account.
02
Signed capability graph
Tools, models, storage and compute publish signed manifests with short-lived offers. You verify everything yourself.
03
Cryptographic delegation
Authority is scoped, signed, expiring and independently checked. Approvals bind to one exact action.
04
Encrypted by default
Sensitive input is sealed to exactly the two participants, while remote capabilities stay usable.
05
Resilient by design
Partition, write on both sides, reconnect, converge. Objects stay valid after their author goes offline.
06
Tamper-evident audit
Every request, progress update and result is an immutable record, and the requester signs a receipt of what it got. The receipt outlives the model.
The invocation lifecycle
An agent asks. A provider proves. Both keep the receipt.
shell
$ bnw capability discover tool.mcp $ bnw capability list --kind tool.mcp $ bnw capability follow <CAPABILITY_ID>
The capability fabric
Capabilities, not servers, are the primitive.
Tools, models, search and agents publish stable signed manifests with short-lived provider offers. Discovery is bounded and exact — and nothing in it is trusted until your own node verifies it.
tool.mcpMCP tools over stdio or Streamable HTTPtool.restREST API operations from OpenAPI documentsinference.modelProvider-neutral model requestssearch.keywordBounded federated keyword searchagent.portablePortable agent manifestsExamples
tool.mcp
Finance lookup
inference.model
Reference text model 8B
tool.mcp
UK rights check
search.keyword
Archive search
Model independence
Change the model. Keep the agent.
Model execution sits outside the core. Identities, permissions, relationships and audit history survive a change of reasoning engine — and every run leaves a signed execution claim.
OpenAI-compatible
Chat Completions adapter
Anthropic Messages
Native adapter
Local models
Ollama, LM Studio, llama.cpp · payload stays on device
Hosted models
OpenRouter, Hugging Face
Explicit egress — providers declare whether a payload stays local or leaves the host. Requesters never pick the endpoint.
Built in the open
Every milestone, shipped and tested.
SHIPPED
Milestones 4–7
Trust, replication & invocation
Per-recipient encryption, accounts, scoped sync, capability discovery, signed requests, delegation and MCP execution.
SHIPPED
Milestones 8–9
Models, tools & portable agents
OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic adapters, shared local and hosted models, REST tools, and portable agent manifests.
SHIPPED
Release 0.7
Receipts & a public relay
Signed requester receipts and published track records, a public relay by default, signed installers and an iPhone beta.
NEXT
Next
Organizations
Organization identities above accounts, SSO, private networks, and reputation computed locally from receipts.
What we don’t claim yet
Honest limits are part of the spec.
No forward secrecy — private messages are sealed per recipient; there is no group ratchet yet.
Metadata is visible — author, recipients and timing stay readable.
One public relay — relay.cellmobs.com is a single point of failure until a second one runs.
Not audited — wire format and schema may still change.
For developers
Two machines, one channel, no server.
A Rust workspace with narrow crate boundaries. Run it from the CLI, on iOS, or expose it to your tools through the BNW MCP server.
bnw-clibnw-iosbnw-mcp-servermacOS · Linux · iPhone betaWindows soon
$ curl -fsSL https://github.com/cellmobs/bnw-releases/releases/latest/download/install.sh | sh $ bnw setup # or with Homebrew $ brew install cellmobs/bnw/bnw
Run the first wedge with us.
We’re piloting with teams where custody, authorization and auditability already matter — media and rights, financial workflows, healthcare coordination, data operations.