The internet was built without a trust layer. Identities are unverifiable, relationships are unaccountable, and the rise of agentic AI has made the stakes higher than ever. The First Person Cooperative is building the infrastructure to fix that — giving every person, community, and AI agent a verifiable, private, and tamper-proof identity, and a cryptographic record of the relationships between them.
The Decentralized Trust Graph (DTG) is the internet's missing trust layer — a network of verifiable, interoperable identities and relationships built on open W3C standards.
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. VTAs carry cryptographically verifiable identities that cannot be forged or impersonated.
Learn about VTAs →Relationships between VTAs are represented as Verified Relationship Credentials (VRCs) — cryptographically signed, bidirectional proofs that cannot be forged or repudiated. VRCs are the edges of the trust graph.
Learn about VRCs →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.
Learn about VTCs →The First Person Trust Stack is organized around the four-layer Trust over IP (ToIP) model. Here's where each layer stands today.
| Layer | Name | Technology | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 |
Trust Applications
PNM / CNM / Developer Apps
|
End-user UI/UX for creating, joining, and managing trust applications, communities, and networks. Developer testbed interfaces (TUI + web dashboard) operational. | Planned |
| 3 |
Trust Tasks
VTCs & VRCs
|
W3C Verifiable Credentials · VRC personhood ceremony operational in testbed · trusttasks.org | In Progress |
| 2 |
Trust Spanning
VTAs & TSP
|
Trust Spanning Protocol (TSP) · did:scid:vh + did:peer:4 · libp2p transport · HPKE-Auth confidential messaging · Personhood ceremony · Name registration | Active — Demo Flows Complete |
| 1 |
Trust Support
DID Infrastructure
|
did:scid:vh (self-certifying, hash-chained, operational) · native key rotation with witness attestation | Active |
This portal is the entry point to the Decentralized Trust Graph (DTG) testbed — an end-to-end environment for issuing, mediating, and managing Verified Trust Agents (VTAs) and Verified Trust Communities (VTCs). Core flows are operational in the testbed. The protocol stack is being prepared for open source release under Apache 2.0. Developer-facing interfaces are coming soon.
Establish a new VTA — a DID-bearing identity node — for a person, organization, or AI agent. Generate your self-certifying identity with Ed25519 signing keys and X25519 encryption keys, backed by hash-chained verifiable history.
Connect your VTA to a VTC — a governance-bounded cluster with shared trust rules. Complete a two-way mutual acknowledgment ceremony to establish a cryptographically signed Verified Relationship Credential (VRC) between participants.
High-level overview of the trust stack architecture, key concepts, and terminology. Full developer documentation and API references are in progress.
View Docs →the First Person Cooperative is an open, neutral stewardship organization — a cooperative working layer for decentralized trust infrastructure on the internet, analogous in spirit to ICANN but purpose-built for verifiable identity and relationships.
The Cooperative curates, certifies, governs, trains, and consults, ensuring the standards-conformant tools and protocols that make trust infrastructure work are developed openly, governed transparently, and accessible to everyone.
At the heart of the Cooperative's mission is a simple conviction: people deserve to own their digital identities, to control who they trust and how, and to have cryptographic proof of their relationships — whether transacting, organizing, or delegating authority to AI agents on their behalf.
Learn More About the Cooperative →