New to Web4?This page tours real, runnable software, so it assumes the vocabulary (LCT, trust tensors, witness chain). If those terms are new, start with the 2-minute TL;DR, then come back - what's here is real, open-source software you can run yourself, the proof Web4 works in practice and not just on paper. Every term is spelled out in the TL;DR; definitions also live in the glossary (Aa, bottom-left).

Running Now

What is actually real today

Web4 is R&D, not a shipped product. Nothing on this page is a fielded production system, and this page will not pretend otherwise. But much of it is real: published packages, reference implementations, and Rust binaries you can install and run right now. Below is a straight, piece-by-piece ledger of where each part of the onramp actually stands.

Every piece carries a maturity badge, so the claim and the reality stay pinned together:

Specdefined in the Web4 standard. Written down and stable, not yet built here.

Referencebuilt and runnable. Finished code you could install and start today. Runnable is not the same as running in production.

Runningdeployed and operational today. Live instances actually exist and are in day-to-day use.

The core standard

SpecReference

The specification corpus is stable, and the primitives underneath it are published as real packages. This is the shared foundation everything else builds on: identity, trust tensors, witness chains, and hash-chained ledgers, as installable libraries rather than diagrams.

Published primitives: web4-core v0.3.0 on crates.io and PyPI, plus web4-trust-core v0.2.0.
Reference implementation plus a runnable society hub, both public. No production deployment yet.
Tested: 171 tests green in web4-core; the reference Python SDK carries 2,627 tests.
Touch it in about 30 seconds: run identity_bootstrap.py to create an LCT, mint it to a hash-chained ledger, sign and verify, and generate an inclusion proof.

Install the primitives with either toolchain:

pip install web4-core web4-trust
cargo add web4-core web4-trust-core

Read about the standard · the Web4 ontology + reference crates

The hub

Reference

The hub is the program a community runs to stand itself up as a small, self-governing Web4 society: its own members, its own rules, its own tamper-evident record. The MVP is complete (Sprints 0 through 6): buildable, runnable, documented, and pilot-ready. Version 0.1.0-alpha.0, shipping as a single Rust binary of about 6 MB.

A post-MVP hardening cycle has landed, after a three-pass external security review. MCP (Model Context Protocol, the standard way agents call tools) write tools moved to a loopback operator plane, the council gate now runs before anything persists, a production profile refuses to start on unsafe defaults, and law integrity fails closed. There is a hub up turnkey deploy kit for standing one up.

Complete and runnable, not yet deployed in production. It would earn the Running badge once live instances operate day-to-day. Read about the hub · read the code

Hestia

Running

Hestia is the software an entity runs on its own machine to hold a real Web4 identity, with the vault, trust history, and permissions that ride with it. It is in Phase 2 (connected presence): the core (vault, policy engine, witness chain, delegation, and plugin SDK) and the cross-platform app are built and working, and hub integration works end to end. Version 0.0.3.

MCP server with 8 tools, so agents can wire actions into the chain.
Plugin SDK in Rust, TypeScript, and Python.
Claude Code plugin deployed and running on 4 machines.
CLI, TUI, and a Tauri app, plus OID4VCI credential issuance.

Two things are honestly still early. Hardware binding is trait contracts only for now, deferred to the hardbound tier below. The AI-owned autonomous vault is an initial implementation.

Read about hestia · read the code / run it

Hardbound

Reference

Hardbound is the enterprise oversight tier: a usable, actively-hardened layer for hardware-bound accountability. It is real code with a real Rust binary, a single static binary of about 3.8 MB that cross-compiles to arm64 and Jetson, backed by more than 300 Rust integration tests.

To be precise, this is not production-ready. The hardware binding (TPM 2.0) is not yet validated on-device: CI runs against mocks, and on-device Jetson integration is deferred. The threat model still lists about 10 open gaps. It is usable and under active hardening, and that is exactly what the Reference badge claims, no more.

Read about hardbound

The honest bottom line

The core standard is stable and its primitives are published. The hub is a complete, runnable MVP. Hestia is deployed and in day-to-day use. Hardbound is usable and hardening, but not production, and its hardware binding is not yet validated on-device. Federation across societies remains Spec only, specified but not yet built. The value of a witnessed audit trail is that it never lies about which of these is which, and neither will this page.

You do not have to take any of this on faith. The packages are on the registries and the binaries are a build away. Start with the piece that fits what you want to try.

the standard (install the primitives)the hub (a Web4 society)hestia (deployed today)hardbound (oversight tier)the full onramp