You're pledging to donate if the project hits its minimum goal and gets approved. If not, your funds will be returned.
Existential is software that enables individuals to privately organize and analyze their notes on their own computers. It allows groups to share insights without relinquishing ownership or revealing individual contributors. Each user operates a local Oracle, a coordinated set of AI agents that assess the significance of each passage using a deterministic, reproducible measure of its importance within the corpus. Teams collaborate through a secure, consent-based sharing layer and can publish public documents derived from private material, ensuring claims are traceable while identities remain protected. The platform is built on an open protocol using Ethereum Attestation Service and Semaphore, which ensures value is routed back to contributors without any single party controlling the full record. Seventy percent of all payments are distributed to contributors by attribution, enforced by contract design. Settlement contracts are specified but not yet deployed; until then, this commitment is upheld by conduct and transparently disclosed.
Two key issues exist in current knowledge systems. First, provenance is lost as ideas move from personal notes to team discussions to published work, severing their connection to original sources. Second, current incentives favor volume, speed, and visibility, which undercompensates rigorous, slow, and contested work, while machine authorship amplifies these trends.
Currently, the epistemic benefit is claimed but not measured. This funding will support measurement. In September, we will onboard five to ten organizations with diverse trust profiles and domains. We will pre-register three metrics across their knowledge bases: alignment between conviction ranking and blinded human significance judgment, stability of rankings as the corpus grows, and increase in reuse. Thresholds will be set in advance, and results will be reported regardless of outcome. If independent reviewers cannot agree on significance, the construct is considered too unstable, and the claim will focus on determinism, reproducibility, and resistance to manipulation. In parallel, we will test whether public documents can be created from private material without leaking authorship, and determine the minimum cohort size needed to prevent timing correlation.
$150,000 is the minimum required to support full-time work for twelve months, cohort inference during the research period, and the conviction validation study across at least five team knowledge bases. If funding is below this amount, only the conviction study will proceed. Additional funding will support a multi-party deliberation venue, independent cryptographic review of the anonymity scheme, contracted UX research with non-technical users, legal counsel for the stewardship entity, and, ultimately, an independent security and smart contract audit required for mainnet deployment. Individual users will never pay for their own Oracle or for participating in a team managed by others.
Travis Wyche, co-founder and CTO, is the sole architect and engineer and the original author of the ratified Existential Protocol v0. He brings twenty years of experience across philosophy, art, and software, including six years of applied coordination-infrastructure work as an independent contractor. He has authored a forty-page working paper on knowledge as a distinct asset class and has been working full-time on this project since January 2026.
Rena O'Brien, co-founder and CEO, leads operations, funding, cohort management, and go-to-market strategy. She also serves as COO at an AI governance company focused on building cryptographic verification infrastructure for AI systems.
Currently, two people have built a working system using personal funds. The system is in private alpha and used daily, featuring a local Oracle, a team layer with a fail-closed consent stack, a public authoring layer with a leakage judge on a separate model family, and peer-to-peer Oracle deliberation. An attestation substrate is live on a test network, supporting the full attest-verify-revoke cycle. The v0 protocol specification has been ratified in seven parts. Since late 2023, the design has iterated through six prior proofs of concept. The Open Machine, an independent cultural research studio, is the first external adopter. Additional information is available at existential.ing/essays.
There are several potential risks. First, if claims cannot be published without authorship leaking, and all countermeasures fail, the core architecture would be invalidated. In that case, we would publish these findings. Second, if the minimum cohort size required to prevent timing correlation is larger than what a five-person research collective can provide, the privacy claim would not align with actual user needs, which is also a valuable design insight. Third, conviction may not be a reliable predictor; reviewer agreement will be measured and reported regardless of the outcome. We are confident in reaching clear answers, moderately confident in passing the membrane test, and have deliberately low confidence in the predictive claim, as this represents the primary research risk.
None. We have not received external funding to date. The system was built by two people using personal savings, with no payroll. A Lightcone Commons application was submitted on August 23, 2026, with decisions expected in late October. Additional applications are in progress.