Peer-to-peer protocol · Portable trust
Resolv is an ownerless protocol for carrying your good name between strangers, and for settling disputes by a quorum drawn by lot. No company. No token. No one to capture.
Public domain · CC0 · a design and research draft
Why it matters
Every trade between strangers rests on two kinds of trust: that the other will deal fairly, and that someone fair will decide if they do not. For all of history that someone has been a third party. A lord, a guild, a court, a platform. Every one of them can be bribed, subpoenaed, or switched off, and owns your reputation for as long as it lasts.
Resolv removes the third party from both. Your reputation is a thing you carry yourself. A dispute is judged by a crowd that no one can find, drawn fresh for the case and gone when it ends. The court has no judge to bribe, no office to raid, and no switch to flip.
The last function that still runs on a trusted middleman is judgment. This is the alternative.
Three commitments
Karma
A single measure of how you have actually behaved, earned through costly action and carried between strangers. It proves you at a glance, with no name, no document, and no platform. It belongs to you, not to whoever hosts it, and travels when you leave.
Quorum
A dispute is judged by an anonymous quorum drawn at random from trusted strangers, unknown to you and to each other. They read the evidence and vote in secret, and honesty is the paying move. Their verdict is final, because there is no authority above them to capture.
Sovereignty
The protocol rules on the trade, not on the person. It does not judge your morals, your politics, or your law. You are free to act, and you carry the consequences. No authority sits above you, and your record, kept by no one, is the only thing that speaks for you.
How a dispute resolves
Every settled trade, honored under bond, adds to your standing. Reputation is paid for in real time and real risk, never in words, so it cannot be bought or faked cheaply.
The funds sit in an account only the buyer and seller control. No custodian ever holds them. If you both agree, it closes and no one else is involved.
An odd number of high-karma strangers are chosen at random, several steps removed from both of you, so no friend can sit. They are anonymous to you and to each other.
Each side makes its case. The quorum judges on that alone, votes sealed, no deliberation. Those who side with the majority are paid; the reward makes honest attention the profitable choice.
One signature completes the outcome the quorum reached. The loser's deposit pays the honest judges. The protocol charges no fee, because there is no one to charge it.
A verdict that executes itself. The quorum emits one signature; it completes the matching outcome and no other.
What is true about it
Nothing to buy, nothing to sell, no one to pay. Any party that could profit from the court could sell it, so there is none. It is funded like shared infrastructure, by grants and by people who want it to exist.
Trust between strangers is worth little to the first user and much to the millionth. No test in a laboratory produces that. Like the network it lives on, it is proven by use or not at all.
It settles on open money and open identity because those need no permission. But its subject is trust and judgment between people, not coins. The plumbing stays out of sight.
Telling distinct people apart without an identity document is unsolved. A bought key can sell its vote. The design raises the cost of capture above what capture is worth; it does not claim the impossible.
Contribute
The repository holds one thing today: the whitepaper. Everything after it is open, and open to you. A protocol with no company behind it advances the way the early internet did, by the hands of the people who decided it should. To build it now is to be early to something that has never existed.
No token. No sale. No equity. You contribute because it should exist.
Released to the public domain under CC0. No rights reserved. No owner.