What’s a CO?

When you currently chat with friends, collaborate on Google Doc, its always you, the cloud and your friend. This middleman processes, stores and therefore also owns all your data, which he may read along and commercialize for other purposes. We’re building the foundation to make this collaboration possible without the middleman.

CO is a private collaboration room that lives on your local device and is directly synced only across your and your participants’ devices over an end-to-end encrypted peer-to-peer network. All apps are built on this fundamental concept.

Nobody can see what’s in your CO, except for you & your peers

• Local, on-device encryption: Any data can be stored in an object-structured format, which allows for incredible flexibility for app developers (CORE), everything fully encrypted. Your login keys work as the password to the encrypted contents.
• Encrypted peer-to-peer sync: All exchange of data is fully end-to-end encrypted. Only the receiver and you have the keys to decrypt the message.
• Your own platform: Each CO is an independent platform that belongs exclusively to its members and is controlled by them. You can decide for yourself who has access to this platform, which rules apply and what the content of the platform is. Your devices. Your data. Your property.

Nobody can block you from accessing your data

• Local data ownership: By default, each participants of the CO stores all contents locally on their devices. Contents might be relocated to other devices within the CO and requested from peers on demand. Since you already have all data physically on your devices, there’s no need to request it from someone else. You always have access.
• Offline account creation: COs utilizes a system of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) for secure authentication and identity management, which are also stored locally on your device. They function like a digital ID card and can be further enriched with additional properties to built a rich profile. Each identity contains a pair of cryptographic keys - a private key and a public key. The private key acts as a password which proves ownership of the identity and allows performing actions under that identity, since everything action taken is signed with the private key.
• No server, no gatekeeper: Currently, in traditional systems, whether you chat with friends or collaborate on Google Docs, it's always you, the cloud, and your friend. This middleman processes, stores, and therefore also owns all your data, which can be read and commercialized for other purposes. We’re building the foundation to make this collaboration possible without the intermediary.

Nobody can mediate the connection between your devices

• Direct sync via peer-to-peer: Devices connect and communicate directly with each other, establishing a direct link between participants. This peer-to-peer approach allows for immediate data exchange without routing through external servers. Your device talks directly to your collaborator's device, creating a direct, unmediated connection for seamless and private synchronization.
• Fragmented relay of user devices: To ensure a reliable connection, even when the peer is offline, your message/changes are fragmented into small pieces and sent encrypted over the peer-to-peer network and buffered, until the receiver comes back only, so only he can puzzle them back together (Relay). We’re building our own network.