Kunekt Book

A protocol for building a private-by-default internet. Select a chapter from the sidebar to start reading.

Introduction

Kunekt is a protocol for building a private-by-default internet. It implements the KryptOS Privacy OS vision: a unified system where people communicate, collaborate, store data, transact, and govern — all without exposing who they are, what they're doing, or who they're doing it with.

The problem

The internet was built without privacy. Every message, document, and transaction leaves a trail — who sent it, who received it, when, how often, from where. Encryption hides content but metadata remains: connection graphs, timing patterns, access logs, group membership.

Existing tools solve pieces: Signal encrypts messages, CRDTs enable offline collaboration, zero-knowledge proofs enable anonymous credentials. But no system combines them into a coherent whole where privacy is the default at every layer.

What Kunekt is

Kunekt is three things unified under one protocol:

A private communications protocol. Groups of people collaborate on shared documents, chat, and data in real-time. Content is end-to-end encrypted. Members can be anonymous. No central server coordinates anything.
A decentralized private data store. Encrypted, content-addressed data distributed across untrusted backends. Users own their data. Storage providers can't read it, can't correlate access patterns, can't even tell what kind of data it is.
A privacy application SDK. Developers build private-by-default applications — chat, documents, marketplaces, voting, anything — using Kunekt as a library. The protocol handles encryption, sync, anonymity, and storage. The developer writes application logic.

Core concepts

A space is a private collaboration group. Inside a space, all shared content is represented as documents. Each document is a CRDT — a data structure that merges concurrent edits without conflicts.

Participants can be online, offline, or on flaky connections. Everyone converges to the same state when they sync. There is no leader election, no consensus rounds, no single point of failure.

Design principles

These come directly from the KryptOS philosophy:

Privacy as default — protection applies automatically, not through opt-in. Encryption, anonymity, and metadata protection are on by default. Users choose to reduce privacy (for convenience), never the reverse.
Cryptographic verification — zero-knowledge proofs replace institutional trust. You don't trust the server, the relay, or the storage provider. You verify mathematically.
System integration — components function as cohesive layers, not isolated tools. Sync, encryption, anonymity, storage, and credentials are designed together so there are no gaps between them.
Developer accessibility — building a private application should not require cryptography expertise. The SDK abstracts the complexity.
Open standards — all protocols, specifications, and code are community-driven. No vendor lock-in, no proprietary components.

Building on what exists

Kunekt is not built from scratch. It composes proven technologies:

Layer	Technology	Why
Sync	Merkle-CRDTs	Leaderless replication with efficient anti-entropy
Document CRDTs	Automerge	Mature conflict-free editing for text, JSON, etc.
Group encryption	OpenMLS	IETF-standard group key agreement with forward secrecy
Anonymous credentials	zk-promises	Anonymous moderation with accountable consequences
Relay infrastructure	Nostr relays	Thousands of deployed dumb-storage servers
Network anonymity	Nym / Tor	Metadata-resistant transport
Zero-knowledge proofs	Groth16 / PLONK / Nova	Anonymous credentials, private transactions, verifiable computation
Content addressing	CID (hash-based)	Self-verifying, location-independent, deduplicated storage

Each technology is mature on its own. Kunekt's contribution is the integration — making them work together as a seamless private-by-default system with no gaps between layers.

See Building Blocks for details on each technology and how it integrates, and Development Phases for the order we build them in.