What is Bonafide?

Bonafide is an open protocol where people own and control their data and connections, which work across interoperable apps. It's built for a more personal, private, and competitive internet.

Bonafide is a generic two-layer protocol that enables many apps in many domains. It's person-centric, because we need to solve the "trust me" problem that has plagued the internet for a long time. Each person owns and controls their own data and relationships. That's the basic unit of the network.

In Bonafide, we've also tried to make it easy to build decentralized systems. Those are hard to get right, so we've hidden much of the complexity inside the protocol and the libraries.

Two layers

Layer 1 handles connections and access control. It covers how two people establish a private, encrypted connection, and how each connection controls what it's allowed to receive. This layer has no idea what's being shared. It also has no concept of an account or an identity. It only knows about connections.

Layer 2 handles content and domains. It covers what an app actually shares over a connection, such as pools, posts, or contacts, and how that content propagates. Each domain defines its own.