The Dawn of Decentralised Trust Networks
At The Open Co-op we’re starting 2026 with a sense of profound optimism. After years of foundational work on PLANET and related projects, the pieces are finally coming together to create decentralised trust networks. Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Relationship Credentials (VRCs) are no longer theoretical curiosities—they are technically viable, increasingly robust, and critically, now legally defensible.
The First Person Project is blazing a trail, developing the protocols we need to build cooperatively owned decentralised trust networks that belong to all of us, not to Big Tech shareholders. Tim Bouma’s recent work on “Things in Control” demonstrates that common law is evolving to recognise a new category of property—digital assets controlled through cryptographic proof rather than legal entitlement or physical possession. This matters enormously: it means the infrastructure we’re building has legal foundations, not just technical ones. The architecture of trust is no longer just an engineering problem; it’s becoming a recognised framework for how we organise our digital lives.
The First Person Network envisions a world where our online interactions feel like those we have with people we know in real life—direct, private, personal, with no intermediaries, no surveillance, no advertising. As Sankarshan writes in “The Citizen Reassembled,” we need technologies that encode freedom by default, creating what he calls a “federalism of trust” where states, citizens, and machines coexist through verifiable, revocable, and rights-oriented architectures. This is the work of our time: combating the rise of data-nationalism and building a collaborative, regenerative economy.
Building on Firm Foundations: Murmurations and Lessons Learned
Our work throughout 2025 on Murmurations and MurmurMaps has provided invaluable groundwork for everything ahead. The year-end release of MurmurMaps demonstrates how DIDs and UCANs (User Controlled Authorisation Networks) can be combined to provide secure, decentralised systems with composable permission structures. We’ve moved from theoretical research to working code—an open-source tool that anyone can use and self-host to support distributed data sharing. Decentralised Identifiers mean you don’t even need a password; public-key cryptography provides security without shared secrets or centralised databases vulnerable to breaches. This is infrastructure that puts users in control of their own identity.
Equally important have been our lessons from collaborative endeavours. Our involvement with the NAO Genesis project reminded us—sometimes painfully—of the difficulties of effective collaboration. It galvanised our intention to ensure that all future work follows the wisdom of hard-won experience: shared purpose must be explicit from the outset and roles must be clearly defined — the elements required for effective teamwork must be consciously established, not assumed. The core lessons are clear: effective collaboration requires careful planning, explicitly defined shared purpose and clear governance, all of which demand deliberate effort, honest communication and accountability.
The Urgency of Now: Why We Must Build Alternatives
It is impossible to look at the state of the world and not feel alarmed. Climate disasters escalate year on year. Nationalism spreads its divisive poison. Profit-driven wars and illegal invasions continue, perpetrated by crooked leaders drunk on power and obsessed with financial wealth. The trajectory is clear, and it is deeply troubling. But alarm can also be galvanising. More and more people are arriving at the same conclusion, that enough is enough and we need another way to manage our collective affairs on planet Earth.
Aspiring changemakers can benefit from this growing backlash by offering an alternative narrative and new technologies based on trust, cooperation, and the human understanding that we are all connected to and rely on nature for our survival. For example, Samantha Sweetwater’s new book True Human explores how separation is at the root of the metacrisis and how nurturing interconnection, relationships, and ecological maturity act as foundational components for systems change.
Our interconnection, and reliance on nature, is so obvious but rarely discussed. Think about it like this: if you imagine Earth as a basketball, the entire biosphere—all the air, water, soil, plants, animals, and ecosystems that sustain every living thing, including us—would be thinner than a sheet of paper wrapped around its surface. That incomprehensibly thin layer is everything. It is our only life support system, and there is no backup. We owe it to ourselves and to future generations to do what we can to protect it. That means building systems that serve life rather than extract from it, that distribute power rather than concentrate it, that enable cooperation rather than competition, and that recognise our fundamental interdependence with each other and the natural world.
The Open Co-op is committed to this work. 2026 is the year we move from possibility to practice.
Join us.