Trust, built into the internet.
AI agents already take real actions: they write code, move money, and make decisions. Today we cannot prove what an agent did, on whose authority, or by what rules.
Web4 closes that gap. Trust is earned through witnessed behavior, not declared by a platform and not assumed because someone holds a key. To witness is to observe an action and attest to it, staking your own reputation on the record.
New to Web4? Read in this order: the 2-minute intro, Why Web4, then First Contact. Those are the first three steps of a five-page path, not a different route: the reading path lays out all five in order with time estimates. The pieces and concepts below are for when you want to go deeper.
The onramp
How the pieces compose →A standard alone is inert. These four pieces are how you actually stand it up. The core standard is the substrate you build on. The hub, hestia, and hardbound are three scales of the same posture: community, personal, and enterprise.
The open ontology every piece speaks: witnessed presence, role-contextual trust, and auditable authority. Install the primitives (web4-core); the repo's bootstrap example mints your first identity in about 30 seconds.
A single ~6MB binary that turns a group into a sovereign Web4 society: seven roles, a signed founding law, an append-only witnessed ledger, and sealed member channels.
Named for the Greek goddess of the hearth: your machine is the home fire, your agents are guests under your rules.
Local-first identity for any human or agent: a cryptographic LCT, an encrypted vault, scoped revocable delegation, and a witnessed trust record, all on your own machine with no cloud.
As in hardware-bound: identity welded to a real security chip, for oversight you can prove to a regulator.
The oversight tier: hardware-bound identity and pre-action policy enforcement (plugins cannot self-approve), producing audit trails built to stand up to regulators.
The vocabulary
A handful of primitives everything else is built from. Start anywhere, or read them in order in the glossary.
Web4 is research and development, not a finished product. The spec corpus is stable and the primitives are installable. The hub is pilot-ready. Hestia runs end to end today. Hardbound is a usable, actively-hardened enterprise tier whose hardware binding is not yet validated on real devices. We say what is real and what is not on every page.
What is runnable today →