The protocol family underneath.
Kotva is not a product — it’s the narrow-waist protocol family the Vulos suite is built on. One small, stable substrate — identity, messaging, transport, distribution, sync and roles — carrying thin protocol profiles for mail, work, commerce and more. Signed records and content addressing, no token, no blockchain.
Many profiles above. Many bindings below. One waist in the middle.
The waist is a deliberately small core that everything agrees on. Domain profiles sit above it and transport/crypto bindings sit below it — so a new domain never has to reinvent identity, delivery or sync.
Thin protocols, one substrate.
Each profile is a small spec that reuses the Kotva waist for identity, delivery and sync. They live as profiles under the Kotva umbrella — not as separate stacks.
Email, reimagined from the keypair up — sovereign, end-to-end-encrypted, metadata-private mail, chat, files and identity, with an optional legacy-email bridge. Your key is your identity.
DraftCoordinating work without a middleman — issuing, offering, assigning, tracking and proving work between independent parties. The issuer assigns; nothing else needs consensus.
DraftCommerce without a marketplace — a seller’s catalogue is a signed feed they publish, a buyer’s cart is CRDT state on their own devices, delivery is computed locally from published rate cards.
DraftA substrate you can reason about.
Kotva is designed to be small where it must be shared, and honest about where central infrastructure is still required.
Narrow waist.
One small, stable core — identity, MOTE messages, transport, PUB distribution, sync and roles. Everything above it is a thin profile; everything below is a swappable binding. The waist is what stays.
Profiles, not products.
Mail, work and commerce are protocol profiles that reuse the same substrate — not separate stacks. Add a domain by writing a profile, not by rebuilding identity, transport and sync from scratch.
A checkable coordinator contract.
Where transitional central infrastructure is unavoidable, its role is a written, checkable property with an explicit content-visibility class — safe-centralisation stated as an invariant, not a promise.
Adopt, don’t reinvent.
Kotva profiles libp2p, standard cryptography and existing formats rather than minting bespoke wire protocols. No token, no blockchain — just signed records and content addressing.
Read the full specification.
The Kotva whitepaper is authored and maintained in the kotva repository and rendered here directly — the same document, one source of truth.
The substrate is open. So is the reasoning.
Kotva is a specification, not a platform — read it, implement it, disagree with it in the open. The profiles that ship in Vulos speak it; nothing stops anyone else from speaking it too.