Specification complete · implementation at Phase 3
A peer-to-peer naming and hosting protocol. Names live in a signed, append-only log that every participant replicates and verifies without trusting anyone. Content is addressed by its hash rather than by where it happens to sit.
Status
There is no binary to download, no network to join and no name to register. Implementation began only after the charter, the specifications and the threat model were written, because a naming system inherits whatever politics it was built with.
Building against the specifications keeps finding consensus-critical defects in them — proof-of-work parameters an attacker could choose for themselves, a founding extension that violated its own grammar, a registration term the charter states two incompatible ways.
Each would have produced a silent fork rather than a visible error. All of them are in the changelog, and the ones still unresolved are recorded as unresolved.
The design
Not visibility — chokepoints. The clearnet works until somebody with leverage decides it should not work for you, and in practice a handful of organisations hold all five levers at once.
VayuWeb is not a place to hide. It is a place with nobody to petition to take it away.
What the design removes is the addressable party — the one a court order or a business decision can be served on. It does not remove a state's ability to seize a device, compel a person, or block the network you reach peers over.
Four commitments
The strongest property here is structural: there is no server. A site is a signed pointer to content-addressed bytes, so whole categories of compromise are deleted rather than mitigated.
What remains is the reader's browser, held under a deny-by-default profile with the privileged control surface on a socket a browser cannot address.
No primitive is hard-coded — only versioned suites, carried in every signed record from record zero. Suites move forward only, verifiers keep every historical suite, and migration runs through a hybrid so it stays safe even if the target scheme is later broken.
The test a design has to pass: a change of substrate, primitive, format or maintainer must be possible without invalidating a single existing name.
A name costs seconds of CPU. Hosting costs your own disk. There is no token, no treasury and no protocol fee — Article 7 forbids all three and Article 9 entrenches the prohibition against amendment.
The honest counterpart: cheap for the publisher is not free in aggregate. Someone's disk and bandwidth carry the content, and if nobody chooses to, it goes away.
A system only experts can operate has already centralised; it just has not admitted it yet. The usability target is Phase 5's acceptance test, and it is deliberately hard to argue with.
Someone who has never opened a terminal completes install, identity, registration, publishing and viewing — unassisted, without reading the specifications.
Architecture
VayuWeb names are addressed vayu://example.vayu/, never https://. Those schemes carry a promise about certificate authorities that VayuWeb does not make; it makes a different one — content verified byte for byte against its hash. A security indicator that lies is worse than none.
Resolution runs against your local replica of the registry, so nobody learns which name you resolved. 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.
Namespace
Creating a top-level domain on the clearnet cost about 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.
Nothing in the Annex matches that. The set is closed — a client decides whether an extension exists offline, from the copy it holds, so two honest nodes can never compute different namespaces.
Every extension is equal. There is no premium tier, no reserved class, no founding rank and no default suggestion — Article 35.1.c says so in terms, and no client may present otherwise. The eleven named in the text of Article 35.1 are named so the founding set survives loss of the file, not because they rank above the other 1,259.
All 1,270, read from docs/spec/NAMESPACE-CATALOGUE.md — the normative Annex, incorporated by Article 35.1. The Annex also records who each extension is for.
Charter
No token. No treasury. No protocol fee. Article 7 forbids all three; Article 9 puts them beyond amendment — so unlike a pricing promise, this one cannot be revised by whoever is running things in ten years.
That is the title of Article 39, and it means it. New extensions and protocol changes move through the VWIP process and are ratified by peers. The network runs whatever its peers choose to run.
The charter is dedicated to the public domain deliberately, so any fork can carry 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.
Both sides of each are Articles, so Article 3.7 cannot rank them and Article 58 reserves the choice to an amendment. A consistency checker prints all six on every run and fails if one is closed by editing a single side.
Article 21.4 lists them, and a checker in the repository reads that list out of the charter rather than restating it — so amending the Article changes the check in the same commit. The test in Article 21.5 is what the words assert to a reader who has read nothing else, not what a longer passage elsewhere qualifies.
That gate now reads this page too. Marketing copy is where a forbidden claim is most likely to be written and was the one surface the checker could not see.
Limits
A charter that overclaims dies the first time reality tests it, so these are stated up front and repeated in the specifications.
It does not hide who you are, where you are, or what you are reading from anyone watching your network connection. 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.
Content lives while at least one peer pins it. If everybody stops pinning, it is gone.
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.
It removes intermediaries, not states. Blocking traffic at the network layer, seizing a device and compelling a person are all still possible.
There is no support desk, because a support desk that can restore your name is a support desk that can take it.
Roadmap
Dates on a volunteer protocol project are a form of dishonesty: set by wishful thinking, missed, then quietly deleted. Each phase carries an acceptance test instead — a condition an outsider can check without asking anyone whether it is done.
Questions
No. There is no software you can run against a network. What exists is the Constitution, the specifications, the threat model and a registry core that runs on one machine. The roadmap explains the order and what “done” means for each phase.
No. There is no global consensus on ordering, no mining, no block reward and no chain. VayuWeb uses a signed append-only log per participant with a deterministic convergence rule for the one case that genuinely conflicts — two people claiming the same free name at the same time. Naming does not need double-spend prevention across the whole system, only per name.
No. Article 7 forbids a token, a treasury and a protocol fee, and Article 9 entrenches that against amendment. A token creates a class of people whose interest is the price rather than the protocol, and it makes governance purchasable.
It isn't. Nobody gets paid. That is a real cost, and it is stated honestly rather than solved with a mechanism that would be worth capturing.
No money — a few seconds of your computer's time. Registration and renewal use a memory-hard proof-of-work that is trivial for one name and grows superlinearly if you try to take ten thousand. It prices squatting without a payment rail, a token, or a treasury that could be captured.
Nobody. Article 39 is titled “There Is No Governing Body” and means it. Protocol changes move through the VWIP process; the network runs whatever its peers choose to run.
Yes, above the protocol layer, and the test is one question: if this business shut down tomorrow, would anybody lose a name? If yes, it is a chokepoint and it is forbidden. If they lose only a convenience, it is a service. Registration-as-a- service must generate the keypair on the customer's device; pinning must be swappable; nothing may ship pre-selected in a client.
At this stage, specification review is worth more than code. Reading the Constitution adversarially and finding the clause a bad actor could drive a truck through is the single most valuable contribution anyone can make right now. Security issues go through SECURITY.md, not the public tracker.
Long-term development moves to Radicle; GitHub is a temporary public mirror. Code is MIT. The charter, the specifications and the artwork are dedicated to the public domain under CC0. There is no CLA, and there will not be one.