Sphere — Concentric Rings View

This index presents the Sphere project from the inside out: starting with the individual person and expanding outward through connections, groups, organizations, and society. Each ring builds on the one inside it.

Ring 1: The Individual

“Who am I in the network?”

Everything starts with a single person. In the Sphere network, an individual is an entity in a trust graph — but unlike existing platforms, you have genuine ownership and control.

Identity — The foundational challenge: how to establish who someone is in a decentralized system. Explores 1-to-1 identity, the n-to-m spectrum, pseudonymity, and identity recovery without central authority. The hardest unsolved problem in the system.

Ego Network — The network as you see it. Your personal perspective on the graph — your connections, your communities, the co-citation patterns that reveal hidden relationships. This is the user’s actual experience of the network.

Web3 Social Media — You own your data. You decide who sees what, under what conditions. No algorithmic curation by a company optimizing for engagement — you control both outgoing and incoming information flow.

Ring 2: The Connection

“How do I relate to others?”

Beyond the individual, the next ring is the direct relationship between two people. These connections are the edges of the trust graph.

Trust-Based Social Network — The P2P trust model. Connections are directional, typed (“knows”, “trusts”, “is member of”), and carry permissions. A connection from A to B is not the same as from B to A until reciprocated. The permission system gives fine-grained control over data sharing — far beyond public/private.

Social Tokens — The reputation layer. Peer-to-peer tokens (trust, mistrust, recommend, like) track the quality of relationships. Verified tokens (checked, judged) add third-party validation. These tokens have time limits and accumulate into a trust profile.

Social Smart Contracts — Voluntary agreements between people, stored and managed on decentralized networks. Unlike state-imposed law, these contracts are entered voluntarily. Disputes are resolved through arbitration protocols backed by social tokens.

Ring 3: The Group

“How do we organize?”

When connections form clusters, groups emerge. The Sphere network provides flexible structures for group formation and management.

Circles and Spheres — The group model. Circles are simple structures (autocratic, representative, pure, virtual). Spheres are composable super-groups — a sphere can contain sub-circles and sub-spheres, each with their own governance. This enables organization at any scale without forcing a single model.

Tribe Unification Protocol — Online communities inevitably duplicate. Tribe protocols provide formal mechanisms for merging and splitting groups, described with set theory operations (full unification, split unification).

Sphere Localization — Groups can be anchored to physical places using cryptographic location protocols. This enables local community organization without GPS surveillance — proving you’re “in the area” without revealing exactly where.

Ring 4: The Organisation

“How do we make decisions together?”

Groups need governance. This ring adds the machinery for structured decision-making.

Governance Engine — The central innovation. An abstracted representation of any governance structure, formalized as an activity graph of four elements: Entities, Objects, Procedures, and Connections. Can represent anything from a simple vote to a complex parliamentary system. Crucially, governance engines can modify their own structure.

Democratic Procedures — The full catalog of decision-making procedures available as building blocks: proposals, votes, elections, referenda, courts, councils, committees, task forces, audits, petitions, town halls, and many more. These can be combined and customized for any organizational need.

QuestBoard — Task coordination and funding. Users post feature requests with bounties; developers accept quests and earn rewards. Smart contracts handle escrow; social tokens track reputation. The economic engine for collaborative work.

Open-Source Development — The broader vision: not just open-source code, but open-development, open-test, open-contribute. Network-native reward mechanisms incentivize continuous development instead of relying on corporate sponsorship.

Ring 5: The Society

“How do we shape the world together?”

At the largest scale, these tools can reshape how society makes decisions, validates knowledge, educates, and aligns its technology with its values.

E-Democracy — Governance engines applied to real-world democratic processes. Enabling citizens to participate in decision-making beyond periodic elections, with peer review of outcomes and scaled direct democracy through delegation.

Value Networks — Moving beyond representative voting to voting on values themselves. Value objects are formally defined with legal descriptions and can carry AI training data. Weighted voting lets people express both preference and confidence. Destructive voting enables expressing strong opposition.

Decentral University — Decomposing the university into its core functions (research, teaching, accreditation, identity verification) and rebuilding each on decentralized protocols. Education and credentialing without institutional gatekeepers.

Decentral Knowledge Verification — Decentralized peer review and knowledge validation. How to verify claims without relying on institutional authority — using network-based review and reputation tracking.

AI Alignment — The most far-reaching application. Using decentralized value determination to guide AI behavior. If we can’t agree on values among ourselves, we certainly can’t align AI. The Sphere infrastructure provides the democratic machinery for building that consensus.

The Foundation Beneath All Rings

Motivation and Principles — The five principles (Decentralization, Transparency, Ownership, Trust, Cooperation) that inform every ring.

Technical Architecture — The three-layer software architecture (Blockchain, Network, Application) that makes the entire system operational. The engineering substrate supporting all five rings.

Decentral Voting Systems — The cryptographic voting mechanisms (“Stille Post” votechains) that underpin democratic procedures across all rings.