An open, neutral stewardship organization building the internet's missing trust layer — for people, communities, and AI agents.
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.
The internet was built without a trust layer. Every identity system on the modern internet — from email addresses to social media accounts to OAuth logins — is controlled by a centralized platform that can revoke your identity, sell your data, or simply disappear.
This was always a problem. The rise of agentic AI has made it an urgent one. When AI agents can act on behalf of humans — sending emails, making purchases, signing documents, managing relationships — the question of who authorized this agent, and what are they allowed to do? becomes critical. Without a trust layer, there is no reliable answer.
The First Person Trust Stack is our answer: a four-layer architecture for verifiable, private, tamper-proof identity and relationships, built on open W3C standards and the Trust over IP (ToIP) model. It gives every person, community, and AI agent a cryptographically verifiable identity and a tamper-proof record of their relationships and authorizations.
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. Relationships between VTAs are represented as Verified Relationship Credentials (VRCs) — cryptographically signed, bidirectional proofs that cannot be forged or repudiated.
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.
The First Person Trust Stack is built entirely on open, royalty-free standards:
No proprietary protocols. No vendor lock-in. No single point of control.
The First Person Trust Stack core components are in active development. A public open-source repository will be announced soon.
Developer Docs — Coming Soon
The Trust Tasks framework defines and standardizes trust task execution using W3C Verifiable Credentials. We are reviewing this work for potential integration.
trusttasks.org →The ToIP Foundation: the four-layer architecture model that the First Person Trust Stack is built on.
trustoverip.org →The First Person Trust Stack is released under the MIT License. You are free to use, modify, and distribute it for any purpose, including commercial use, as long as the license notice is retained.
The VTA, VTC, and VRC data model primitives are defined by the Trust over IP Foundation architecture and are implemented in our own way within this stack.