The manifesto.

The internet moves information, but it cannot prove what happened. Institutions that anchor economic activity have thinned into interfaces, yet every payment, contract, and agreement still depends on someone to vouch for it.

This is not a limitation of any single application. It is a missing layer of the internet: a neutral record of events and their order, shared across systems, owned by no one, and verifiable by anyone.

Open Value starts with a simple thesis: separate what happened from what it means.

Networks today bundle three important functions: recording events, ordering them, and deriving state from them. The bundling traps trust inside each system. To accept a system’s record, you must also accept its execution, its economics, and its politics.

We believe these functions need to be split. A content-blind base layer proves what happened and in what order. A bank still proves what it knows; a platform still proves what it executed. Their proofs can stack because a shared order sits beneath them.

Every chain of trust must end somewhere. Follow any proof far enough and you reach the question every system eventually asks: says who?

Our answer is neutral ground: a content-blind base layer that records events and their order without reading them. It executes nothing. It interprets nothing.

Above it, semantic layers preserve their own meaning, economics, and governance.

Sovereignty above, neutrality below.

No one should own a layer this fundamental. Open Value is being organized as a Swiss association (verein), modeled on the Linux Foundation and RISC-V International: open research, open standards, and public credit for every contribution. The work begins in two groups, Base Layer Network Design and Semantic Layer Standards, and advances through public proposals.

The question before us is difficult: can such a substrate be secure, permissionless, sustainable, and free of a native token? The answer remains open. If it is yes, it will change what the internet can settle.

If you are working on these problems, join us in answering it.