How It Works
PLANET is a personal vault and trust network client. Not a platform you join — a tool you own.
Your vault
When you set up PLANET, you get a vault. It lives on your device, encrypted, and it belongs to you. Your photos, documents, contacts, and connections can all be stored there so they're secure and you have complete control over access to your data.
Think of it like a wallet for your digital life. Your identity, your credentials and relationships — all in one place, but portable. If you ever switch to a different client, everything comes with you. Zero lock-in.
Your network
PLANET connects your vault to a trust network built on open protocols. When someone you trust invites you, you're connected through a verifiable chain of real relationships — not an algorithm, not a platform, not a database of strangers.
Your identity on the network uses decentralised identifiers (DIDs) — a proven open standard. No company controls your identity. Your credentials and your reputation travel with you wherever you go.
When you connect to someone, or introduce two people, you're building your personal trust graph — a rich, contextual picture of real relationships. Not a score. Not a rating. A web of trust stored in your vault.
Apps on the network
PLANET ships with the essentials — contacts, chat, and the ability to invite people you trust. Beyond that, a growing set of apps plug into the trust infrastructure: First Person Pages (your verified public profile and blog), Introducer (connect people who should know each other), Communities (member-owned groups with their own governance), and more over time.
The trust infrastructure is open. Members can design and deploy new apps that leverage the network's trust graph, identity layer, and encrypted communication.
For communities
Communities can set up their own community vault — and access a growing suite of tools for running their group on trust-based infrastructure: membership, messaging, credentials, governance templates, and total data ownership. Members keep their data. The community keeps theirs. Nobody's locked in.
The co-op
PLANET is operated by The Open Co-op — a cooperative owned by its members. No shareholders, no venture capital, no exit strategy. The infrastructure is commons, held in trust for current and future generations.
Every member gets a vote, and the budget is fully transparent. Once PLANET reaches a working product, members will also fund the features they want through feature bounties: anyone can propose a feature, members debate and price it, the cost is crowdfunded on Open Collective, and a developer picks up the work — so development ends up directed by the people who use it. That part is still ahead of us; today the focus is getting PLANET's core built. When you set up your vault, you're not signing up for a service — you're joining a cooperative with a say in how the whole thing evolves.
Where we are
PLANET is a work in progress. The technology exists. Decentralised identifiers, verifiable credentials, end-to-end encryption, peer-to-peer data — these are proven open standards. The First Person Network is building the protocol infrastructure. Our job is to build a client that people actually want to use, and to seed the network with communities that make it thrive.
Parts of that base infrastructure are already running. Members sign in with their wallet instead of a password, across the member portal and operator console. The community app has step-by-step onboarding for applicants and vetters. The stack reads credentials from EU and Swiss (swiyu) wallets, checks signatures and revocation lists, and works with phone-chip keys.
Still to come: one full end-to-end exchange with a real swiyu wallet, the phone approver app for families, and an independent review of the proof library behind private vetting. Progress is published weekly in the OpenVTC build reports.
So there's still a lot to build — and you can help. Get involved.