"…a seed, from which a new and greater civilisation can grow."
「…新しく、より偉大な文明が育つ種。」
Infrastructure that protects rather than extracts
搾取するのではなく 保護するインフラストラクチャ
Technical architecture where incompatibility with surveillance systems becomes your advantage
監視システムとの非互換性があなたの優位性となる技術アーキテクチャ
Abstract architectural visualization showing protective layers around personal data, contrasting with transparent extraction-based systems in the background / 個人データの周りの保護層を示す抽象的なアーキテクチャの可視化、背景の透明な抽出ベースのシステムとの対比
Human-centric governance for the age of automation
自動化時代のための人間中心のガバナンス
Traditional institutions like the United Nations operate through consensus mechanisms that require months or years of negotiation among nation-states, creating governance structures too slow for rapidly evolving technological realities. International standards bodies like ISO produce specifications through bureaucratic processes where corporate interests often dominate, embedding assumptions that privilege existing power structures. These legacy approaches assume stable contexts where deliberation speed matters less than political accommodation.
Contrasting visualizations: UN-style consensus process (slow, centralized) versus sovereigns.institute participatory workshops (rapid, distributed, human-in-the-loop) / 対照的な可視化：国連スタイルのコンセンサスプロセス（遅い、中央集権的）対sovereigns.institute参加型ワークショップ（迅速、分散型、ヒューマン・イン・ザ・ループ）
Sovereigns.institute: participatory legitimacy at speed
Sovereigns.institute：スピードでの参加型正統性
Sovereigns.institute inverts this model through participatory workshops that gather diverse stakeholders—healthcare workers, cultural anthropologists, legal scholars, technologists, indigenous representatives, disaster responders—in intensive collaborative sessions. Rather than nation-states negotiating abstractions, actual practitioners with lived experience co-create governance frameworks that reflect ground truth. This human-in-the-loop centrality means technical specifications emerge from genuine needs rather than being imposed top-down.
Sustainable governance through continuous dialogue / 継続的な対話による持続可能なガバナンス
Where the UN produces treaties that become outdated before ratification completes, sovereigns.institute maintains living governance frameworks that evolve through ongoing community engagement. Workshops in London, Tokyo, and other locations create networks of practitioners who validate whether technical implementations actually serve stated goals. This continuous feedback loop prevents the divergence between written policy and operational reality that plagues traditional institutions.
The fifty-plus countries represented in sovereigns.institute deliberations provide cultural diversity without requiring unanimous agreement on all details. Instead, the architecture accommodates legitimate differences—what constitutes "family" or "consent" or "ownership" can vary by cultural context while still enabling interoperation through polymorphic schemas that reference internationalization frameworks.
Traditional standards bodies like ISO operate on multi-year cycles where committees meet periodically to debate specifications that are often obsolete by publication. The process privileges organizations with resources to sustain long-term participation, systematically excluding perspectives from smaller entities, developing regions, or rapidly evolving domains. Standards emerge as compromise documents negotiated among entrenched interests rather than optimal solutions for actual problems.
Timeline comparison: ISO standardization process (years) versus standards.agency iterative development (weeks to months) / タイムライン比較：ISO標準化プロセス（年単位）対standards.agency反復開発（週から月）
Standards.agency provides infrastructure for developing and validating technical standards at the velocity that automation demands. Rather than centralized committees, distributed working groups create specifications collaboratively, with implementations validated in real-world deployments through continuous integration. This approach treats standards as living documents that evolve based on operational feedback rather than static texts negotiated in isolation from practical constraints.
The key innovation is maintaining accountability while distributing authority. Every schema published through standards.agency carries provenance—who developed it, through what process, validated against which use cases. This transparency enables users to make informed trust decisions rather than blindly accepting standards because they bear an official seal. When a healthcare schema proves inadequate for a specific cultural context, the community can fork it, adapt it, and demonstrate superiority through actual deployments rather than lobbying for committee approval.
This decentralized approach paradoxically creates more robust standards because they must actually work in practice to gain adoption. ISO standards can remain theoretical because compliance is mandated; standards.agency specifications survive only if they prove useful to practitioners. The selective pressure of real-world deployment eliminates brittle abstractions that look elegant on paper but collapse under operational stress.
Automated systems require standards that can be validated programmatically, not just interpreted by human experts. Standards.agency schemas are machine-readable by design, with formal validation rules that allow systems to verify compliance without human intermediation. This matters critically for autonomous coordination where decisions must happen faster than human oversight permits.
Consider disaster response: when autonomous drones, robotic logistics systems, and AI triage systems must coordinate, they cannot wait for human interpretation of ambiguous standards documents. Standards.agency schemas provide unambiguous definitions that enable machine-to-machine coordination while remaining auditable by humans. The polymorphic architecture means the same resource can satisfy different automated systems' requirements simultaneously—a medical supply can be tracked for logistics, validated for clinical appropriateness, and allocated under ethical prioritization, all through programmatic checks against formal schemas.
Current architectures replicate surveillance capitalism through parallel frontend and backend vulnerabilities. Wallets expose complete public histories enabling targeted attacks. Transaction systems reveal operational environments where sophisticated actors extract value before ordinary users can act. Build.foundation creates explicit alternatives—infrastructure so fundamentally different that its incompatibility with extractive systems becomes a protective feature.
Diverging paths - one showing traditional extraction architecture, the other showing build.foundation's protective counter-architecture / 分岐する道—一方は伝統的な搾取アーキテクチャを示し、他方はbuild.foundationの保護的対抗アーキテクチャを示す
The extraction pattern / 搾取パターン
Frontend interfaces expose complete public histories to anyone who knows an address, allowing wallet tracking, highly targeted phishing, and social graph construction that analytics firms monetize just like data brokers commoditize browsing behavior. Backend infrastructure exposes transparent operational environments where sophisticated actors continually monitor pending activities, extracting value through positional advantage. This dynamic arises because naive openness triggers a tragedy-of-the-commons effect, where advanced actors over-exploit until ordinary users retain no surplus value.
Genuine protection requires architectural incompatibility with surveillance systems, not carefully maintained interoperability that inevitably compromises security. This is a deliberate choice, treating incompatibility itself as a protective feature. We attract people who recognize that bridging the world of bits to the world of atoms requires technical substrate that intentionally breaks compatibility with extraction-enabling architectures, even when that incompatibility makes conventional growth metrics impossible to achieve.
Switching from CBOR to EXI (Efficient XML Interchange) as primary data encoding provides concrete advantages. EXI achieves binary compactness—roughly ten-to-one compression over textual XML—while preserving hierarchical expressiveness and schema-governed validation. This combination enables polymorphic resource definitions where single identifiers simultaneously represent resources under multiple overlapping interpretations.
主要なデータエンコーディングとしてCBORからEXI（Efficient XML Interchange）への切り替えは、具体的な利点を提供します。EXIは、テキストXMLに対して約10対1の圧縮でバイナリコンパクト性を達成しながら、階層的表現力とスキーマ管理された検証を保持します。この組み合わせにより、単一の識別子が複数の重複する解釈の下で同時にリソースを表す多形態リソース定義が可能になります。
Visual comparison showing CBOR's flat structure vs EXI's hierarchical richness, both at byte level / CBORのフラット構造とEXIの階層的豊かさの視覚的比較、バイトレベルで
Lighter yet richer
より軽量でありながらより豊か
At the kilobyte and byte level, EXI proves lighter than CBOR yet supports dramatically richer semantics. The polymorphic approach enables healthier data persistence patterns where schema and data need not centralize on-chain, reducing bloat while enabling far greater expressiveness.
Physical object (land) shown simultaneously as property, habitat, sacred site, economic asset - each with different permission layers / 物理的オブジェクト（土地）が財産、生息地、神聖な場所、経済資産として同時に示される—それぞれ異なる許可レイヤーを持つ
Bridging bits to atoms
ビットから原子への橋渡し
Physical objects can be logistical assets, legal entities, cultural artifacts, and environmental resources at the same time, each with distinct, schema-validated permissions. This bridge between bits and atoms reflects physical reality's inherently polymorphic nature—objects exist in multiple valid interpretive frameworks, each with its own rules and permissions.
Current systems enforce binary ownership models when modern realities require nuanced permissions reflecting complex stakeholder relationships. For example, land must be classified as property, habitat, sacred site, or economic asset rather than simultaneously embodying multiple identities with different permissions for different stakeholders. Emergency supplies in disasters must be categorized as logistics, medical utility, or cultural resource rather than evaluated across all dimensions at once. Our polymorphic architecture resolves this limitation architecturally.
Consider autonomous systems with multimodal sensing: camera vision captures visual understanding, terahertz sensors analyze material composition, and spectrograms interpret acoustic signatures. Token architectures cannot adequately represent such dimensionally rich inputs in ways that remain reliably referenceable for other systems. This forces either storing everything on-chain—untenable over time—or moving trust off-chain, defeating the purpose of decentralization. Polymorphic resources solve this challenge.
At the byte level, EXI is lighter than CBOR while supporting dramatically richer semantic expression. This means the polymorphic approach actually reduces on-chain storage requirements while increasing what can be expressed. This architectural efficiency matters for long-term ecosystem sustainability because chain bloat constrains participation by increasing node operation resource requirements.
When different schemas and associated data can persist off-chain through schema-governed validation while maintaining on-chain verification, the ecosystem gains healthier data persistence patterns that enable richer applications without unsustainable storage growth.
Recovery phrase models fundamentally cannot scale beyond early adopters. Expecting billions of people to securely manage twelve or twenty-four word mnemonics imposes barriers that are insurmountable regardless of educational efforts. The cognitive burden of understanding permanent, irreversible loss renders current wallet architecture essentially unusable at population scale.
Traditional seed phrase card dissolving into network of trusted social connections with threshold cryptography visualization / 伝統的なシードフレーズカードが閾値暗号を用いた信頼できる社会的つながりのネットワークに溶解する
Programmatic creation and social recovery
プログラマティックな作成とソーシャルリカバリー
The alternative wallet architecture introduces programmatic wallet creation with social recovery mechanisms through threshold cryptography. Rather than burdening users with mnemonic management, the system automatically generates multiple wallets to establish security boundaries. Trusted contacts each hold credential shares, with restoration requiring a threshold—for example, three-of-five. No single contact can restore access alone, mitigating social engineering risk, while thresholds tolerate some contact loss.
Security through distributed trust / 分散信頼によるセキュリティ
This intentional incompatibility with legacy recovery phrase models is treated as a protective feature, not a limitation. When users can designate trusted contacts who collaboratively restore access without any single contact having sufficient information to compromise security independently, wallet loss becomes a recoverable problem rather than catastrophic permanent failure. This architectural shift enables serving populations that current models systematically exclude.
This approach removes the scaling barrier that prevents mainstream adoption. Current wallet systems demand technical sophistication and operational security discipline beyond what smartphones already require. Social recovery with threshold cryptography and biometric integration provides a genuine alternative that maintains security without imposing impossible requirements. The potential user base expands by orders of magnitude when wallet loss becomes a recoverable problem rather than catastrophic permanent failure.
A conversational interface allows users to issue natural language instructions without technical vocabulary. For example, "allocate ten percent to disaster relief while keeping half available for emergencies" prompts on-device AI to produce polymorphic resource definitions with precise constraints and validation logic.
User speaking naturally to device, with on-device processing visualization showing local inference generating schema structures / ユーザーがデバイスに自然に話しかけ、デバイス上の処理の可視化がローカル推論によるスキーマ構造の生成を示す
Privacy through local inference
ローカル推論によるプライバシー
Using WebAssembly and GPU acceleration, inference runs entirely locally, avoiding remote queries that would otherwise expose user data to surveillance. Local models leveraging retrieval-augmented generation exploit personal context efficiently, reducing the need for trillion-parameter centralized models and their associated environmental costs.
Cultural preservation through economics / 経済を通じた文化保護
Centralized large language models incur disproportionate costs when handling high-context languages with complex grammatical structures. Subject-object-verb languages such as Japanese place crucial meaning-determining verbs at sentence endings, forcing models to sustain higher state ambiguity across long token sequences. Keeping high-value context on-device makes cultural diversity preservation economically feasible, inverting the value flow: rather than corporations extracting data, users retain sovereignty, and models improve through local interactions.
When someone can state their intent naturally and have conversational AI running entirely on their device generate appropriate technical specifications automatically, blockchain interaction becomes accessible to people who would never learn technical vocabulary or command-line interfaces. The on-device processing means sophisticated capability happens locally without sending queries to remote servers that would enable behavioral surveillance. This reverses the extraction pattern where convenience requires sacrificing privacy.
The ecosystem develops through d-app.store integration, providing modular composability without the interoperability vulnerabilities of legacy architectures. Applications operate in secure abstraction layers with controlled interfaces to private context. All interactions follow schemas that explicitly define access conditions, with polymorphic permissions guaranteeing enforcement.
Layered architecture showing applications operating in secure abstraction layers, with schema-governed permission boundaries / アプリケーションが安全な抽象化レイヤーで動作する階層化アーキテクチャ、スキーマで管理された許可境界を持つ
Internationalization at the foundation / 基盤における国際化
Internationalization schemas establish universal reference structures that domain-specific schemas invoke, rather than embedding cultural assumptions directly. For example, healthcare schemas reference internationalization schemas for family relationships, acknowledging cultures define "family" differently, and for consent frameworks reflecting varied legal norms. Designing for internationalization at the architectural level avoids embedding dominant cultural defaults that later require patchwork fixes.
Prototype deployments accessible through standards.agency showcase utility in real-world contexts. Working implementations demonstrate technical capabilities operating under real-world constraints including network degradation, resource limitation, and adversarial conditions rather than only functioning in laboratory environments. Security validation coordinated with sovereigns.institute ensures technical security models align with legal compliance frameworks from inception.
Prototype deployments with Japanese public data showcase utility in disaster management and rural revitalization. When earthquakes, tsunamis, typhoons, landslides, volcanic eruptions, or electromagnetic pulses occur, schema-governed coordination supports both human and autonomous responders under fragmented infrastructure.
Split scene showing emergency coordination with offline mesh capability and rural community resource coordination / オフラインメッシュ機能を備えた緊急協調と地方コミュニティリソース協調を示す分割シーン
Disaster response coordination / 災害対応協調
Polymorphic resource definitions allow emergency supplies to be simultaneously tracked for logistics, assessed for medical use, evaluated for cultural appropriateness, and allocated under prioritization frameworks. Offline transaction capability is vital, enabling local mesh coordination with mainchain settlement when connectivity returns. This validates that technical infrastructure operates under genuine pressure rather than only in optimal conditions.
Rural revitalization applications address depopulation, aging demographics, agricultural sustainability, cultural heritage, and infrastructure strain. Schemas coordinate heterogeneous resources—volunteer time, specialized skills, equipment, funding, and cultural expertise—without forcing conversion to monetary equivalents that distort true value. An elder's agricultural knowledge, a remote worker's technical skill, municipal equipment, and external finance all interoperate through polymorphic definitions.
The design follows Foundation's vision of enabling coordination across increasing complexity and time scales. Like psychohistory's equations functioning at civilizational scale while individual events remain unpredictable, these substrates enable reliable large-scale coordination while allowing local emergence and variation. A polymorphic approach is natively suited to this challenge because it accommodates multiple simultaneous interpretations that adaptive systems can navigate contextually.
Abstract representation of Foundation's psychohistory - patterns emerging at scale from local variations, suggesting coordination across complexity / ファウンデーションのサイコヒストリーの抽象的表現—ローカルな変動から規模で出現するパターン、複雑性を横断する協調を示唆
This is infrastructure that operates at the nuanced granularity and rapid velocity that complex systems demand, creating foundations that automated systems and human coordination will build upon as complexity grows beyond what traditional institutional forms accommodate. Developed in continuous dialogue with sovereigns.institute governance frameworks, demonstrating concrete co-evolution between human governance and technical infrastructure.
