The core standard
The core standard is an open ontology (not infrastructure) that makes AI actions verifiable. It anchors every entity to cryptographically witnessed presence, role-contextual trust, and auditable authority, expressed as typed RDF relationships.
It's the base layer of the onramp: the shared vocabulary that the hub, Hestia, and Hardbound all speak.
The problem it solves
Today you have to choose between two bad options for trusting an agent:
Central control
A platform decides who is trusted. That does not scale, and it's a single point of failure.
Cryptographic ownership
You're trusted if you hold the key. But holding a key does not mean you will act well.
Neither answers the real question: how do I know this agent will behave appropriately here, and how do I prove what it did? The core standard is built around that question.
The canonical equation
Web4 = MCP + RDF + LCT + T3/V3*MRH + ATP/ADPThe operators carry meaning, and the terms must not be redefined:
MCP (Model Context Protocol, the standard way agents call tools and exchange context) is the I/O membrane: the cross-society interface. The internal structure is LCT + T3/V3*MRH + ATP/ADP. Each term links to a plain-language explainer.
Honest status: R&D, not production
The spec corpus is stable and reference implementations exist. There is no production deployment yet.
A reference implementation plus a runnable society hub are public.
How a newcomer touches it
Install it:
pip install web4-core web4-trustcargo add web4-core web4-trust-coreThen run the ~30-second identity_bootstrap.py proof-of-presence. It walks the whole loop end to end: create an LCT, mint it to a hash-chained ledger, sign and verify, and generate an inclusion proof.
To go deeper, read docs/START_HERE.md and the normative specs in web4-standard/core-spec/.
The core standard is the vocabulary. See how the four pieces compose into an onramp, or follow a single concept down.