Decentralised. Parallel. Web.
A peer-to-peer naming and hosting protocol —
a parallel web with no registrar, no certificate authority, and no landlord.
VayuWeb does not work yet, and this repository does not pretend otherwise.
There is no binary to download, no network to join, and no name to register. Implementation began only after the Constitution, the specifications and the threat model were written — and what exists so far is a registry core that runs on one machine, with no network.
That order is deliberate. A naming system inherits whatever politics it was built with, and retrofitting governance onto shipped infrastructure has never once worked. So the rules came first, in public, where they could be attacked while changing them was still cheap.
It is already earning its keep. Building against the specifications keeps finding consensus-critical defects in them: a wrong domain-separation prefix length, a founding TLD that violated its own grammar, a duplicated namespace entry that originated in the charter itself, proof-of-work parameters an attacker could choose for themselves, a resolver required to emit the fingerprint the same document forbids, and a registration term the Constitution states two incompatible ways. Each would have produced a silent fork or a silent weakness rather than a visible error, and each was found by implementing or by attacking rather than by re-reading.
Every one is recorded in CHANGELOG.md; the ones still unresolved, including the term, are recorded there as unresolved rather than quietly decided.
| Status | Specifications drafted and governing the work, with open gaps recorded rather than closed — Phase 0's done-when is not satisfied today (ROADMAP), and the record schema still carries no log anchor (REGISTRY.md). Implementation started at Phase 1 |
| Code | registry/ holds the record format, verification, proof-of-work, lifecycle, merkle tree, convergence and the resolution algorithm, with a command-line tool. client/ holds a Rust crate (lib.rs, secrets.rs, control.rs) with tests and its own required CI leg. proxy/ holds only a README; the proxy lives in registry/src |
| Charter | The VayuWeb Constitution — drafted and governing this work, but not yet in force: Article 60.3 makes commencement conditional on publishing the canonical digest of Article 1.7, and that anchor does not exist yet |
| Licence | CC0 for the charter, specifications and artwork · MIT for code · no CLA |
| Home | Long-term development moves to Radicle; GitHub is a temporary public mirror |
If you are here to read one thing, read the Constitution. If you are here to break something, read the Threat Model and tell us what we missed.
Two chokepoints decide whether anything on the web stays reachable: who resolves your name and who serves your bytes. Both have consolidated into a handful of companies operating under a handful of jurisdictions. A registrar can suspend a domain. A resolver can refuse to answer. A certificate authority can revoke. A host can deplatform. A content network can decide your traffic is not worth the trouble. Any one of them ends a site; in practice the same few organisations hold all five levers at once.
VayuWeb answers by removing the levers rather than negotiating with whoever holds them. Names live in a signed, append-only log that every participant replicates and can verify independently. Content lives on IPFS, pinned by the people who care whether it survives. Resolution happens on your own machine. There is no root zone, no privileged writer, no treasury, and no token.
VayuWeb is not a replacement for the existing web and does not try to be. It is a parallel one — running alongside, reachable from the same browser, owned by nobody.
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1,270 extensions at launch, and no ceiling. Creating a top-level domain on the clearnet cost USD 185,000 in the 2012 application round, plus roughly USD 25,000 a year, in a window that opens about once a decade — a price that selects for capital rather than for use. Here it costs a ratified proposal and some CPU, so the namespace is as broad as the people using it want. See the Namespace Annex — from
.folioand.zineto.dissent,.allodial,.ghazaland.chai. Every extension is equal; there is no premium tier, no reserved class and nothing is sold. The set is closed and enumerated, which is what makes it safe to be large: a client decides whether an extension exists offline, from the copy it holds, so two honest nodes can never compute different namespaces. -
Peer-to-peer registry. A Hypercore append-only log with a Hyperbee index over it. Every record is signed; every peer holds the whole history and verifies it without trusting anyone.
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IPFS hosting. Sites are content-addressed and published through IPNS, pinned by their owner and by anyone who volunteers. No mandatory pinning service.
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Its own scheme. VayuWeb names are addressed
vayu://example.vayu/, neverhttp://orhttps://. Those schemes carry a promise about certificate authorities that VayuWeb does not make; VayuWeb makes a different and stronger one — content verified byte for byte against its hash. A security indicator that lies is worse than none. -
Local resolution. A small proxy on loopback makes VayuWeb names work in any browser. The optional extension is a convenience, never a requirement. A VayuWeb lookup never falls through to clearnet DNS, and queries are never logged.
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Secure by subtraction, not by guarding. There is no server, so the categories that account for most website compromises simply do not exist: no SQL injection, no remote code execution at the origin, no dependency treadmill, no stolen hosting credentials, no certificate mis-issuance. What remains — the reader's browser — is held under a deny-by-default profile (
default-src 'none', no inline anything, no reporting endpoint), with the privileged control API on a Unix socket a browser cannot address. -
No money, anywhere. A name costs seconds of CPU. Hosting costs your own disk. There is no token, no treasury and no protocol fee, and the Constitution entrenches all three prohibitions against amendment — so unlike a pricing promise, this one cannot be revised by whoever is running things in ten years.
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A name lookup does not leave your machine. Resolution happens against your local replica of the registry, so nobody learns which name you resolved. A clearnet DNS query tells a resolver operator every name you visit; a VayuWeb lookup tells them nothing. It is the cheapest privacy in the design, because it comes from not sending the query at all — and it is only about the lookup: fetching the content afterwards contacts peers, and that traffic reveals which site you are reading.
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Cryptographic ownership. Ed25519 keypairs. Registration, update, transfer and release are signed operations. The registry answers exactly two questions — is this signature valid and is this name free — and refuses to be a trademark court.
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Memory-hard proof-of-work. Registration and renewal cost seconds of CPU for one name and grow superlinearly for ten thousand. It prices squatting without a payment rail, a token, or a treasury that could be captured.
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Community governance. New TLDs and protocol changes move through the VWIP process and are ratified by peers under the Constitution.
| Layer | Technology | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Ed25519 | Ownership and signatures |
| Registry | Hypercore + Hyperbee | Signed, append-only, replicated name records |
| Discovery | Hyperswarm / HyperDHT | Finding other peers |
| Content | IPFS (Helia) + IPNS | Immutable storage and mutable pointers |
| Resolution | Local proxy (loopback) | Makes VayuWeb names work in an ordinary browser |
| Client | Tauri 2.x | Desktop application for people who do not use terminals |
| Governance | Constitution + VWIP | How the rules change, and what can never change |
Full detail in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.
VayuWeb/
├── constitution/ # The VayuWeb Constitution — the founding charter
├── docs/ # Specifications, threat model, governance, roadmap
│ └── spec/ # Normative protocol specifications and VWIP-0000
├── registry/ # Registry, replication, resolution, proxy (built, no network)
├── conformance/ # vectors.json — the interoperability contract
├── proxy/ # Reserved; the proxy lives in registry/src (not started)
├── client/ # Tauri desktop client — Rust crate (secrets, control)
├── scripts/ # Build, release and corpus-consistency gates
└── assets/ # Brand artwork
| Document | What it covers |
|---|---|
| Position | What VayuWeb is and is not — the parallel-web frame, and the four commitments: secure, future-proof, cheap, easy |
| Constitution | The founding charter: rights, governance, entrenchment, the right to fork |
| Whitepaper | The problem, the design, and what VayuWeb deliberately is not |
| Architecture | Components, data flow, trust boundaries |
| Threat Model | Adversaries, attacks, mitigations, residual risk |
| Governance | How decisions are actually made |
| Longevity review | What breaks before 2126, and what was done about it |
| Roadmap | Phases, acceptance tests, and what would make us rethink |
| FAQ | Short answers, including the unwelcome ones |
| Glossary | Every term used across the specifications |
Specifications:
Registry ·
Names & TLDs ·
vayu:// scheme ·
Resolution ·
Hosting ·
Proof-of-Work ·
Publishing ·
Cost model ·
Namespace ·
Attestation ·
Catalogue ·
Services & the Vayu suite
Security and privacy: Content security · Privacy & zero-trail · Local attack surface · Crypto agility & post-quantum
Process: VWIP-0000 · VWIP-0001 · VWIP-0002
A charter that overclaims dies the first time reality tests it, so these are stated up front and repeated in the specifications:
- VayuWeb is a parallel web, not a hidden one. It does not make you anonymous, and that is a design decision rather than a shortfall — see POSITION.md. VayuWeb removes the chokepoints that let someone switch your site off; it does not hide your traffic from your network provider. An optional anonymity layer is deferred until there is a population large enough for an anonymity set to mean anything. Use Tor when hiding is what you need.
- VayuWeb does not guarantee availability. Content lives while at least one peer pins it. If everybody stops pinning, it is gone.
- VayuWeb cannot forget. The registry is an append-only log. You can withdraw a pointer and unpin your copy; you cannot compel other peers to discard bytes they already hold.
- VayuWeb does not stop a state from blocking traffic at the network layer, seizing a device, or compelling a person.
- A lost key is a lost name. There is no support desk, because a support desk that can restore your name is a support desk that can take it.
- No single point of failure.
- No central authority can censor names or content.
- Ordinary people must be able to use it without technical knowledge.
- Code and governance stay open and independently verifiable.
- Prefer lightweight, battle-tested peer-to-peer technology over novelty.
- Say what the system cannot do, as loudly as what it can.
At this stage, specification review is worth more than code. Reading the Constitution adversarially and finding the clause that a bad actor could drive a truck through is the single most valuable contribution anyone can make right now.
Start with CONTRIBUTING.md, then the Constitution and VWIP-0000. Security issues go through SECURITY.md, not the public issue tracker.
Code is MIT. The charter, the specifications and the brand artwork are dedicated to the public domain under CC0.
The Constitution text is dedicated to the public domain, deliberately: any fork must be able to carry the charter with it. A licence on a constitution is a leash on a fork, and the right to fork is the last check that survives when every other one has failed.
VayuWeb is the peer-owned root of the free internet.