The point of decentralization is to guarantee the rights of individuals and communities on the Internet. Pulling that off is a balancing act between practicality and ideology.

In 2025, hypercerts shifted toward an open, networked architecture built on ATProto, enabling shared records of action, evaluation, and value. In 2026, we are putting this infrastructure to work—connecting action, evaluation, and funding through real-world use cases.

Holke recently joined Matthew from Ma Earth on the podcast The Regeneration Will Be Funded to explore how hypercerts can act as a foundational “Lego block” for fixing a core failure of today’s financial systems—their inability to adequately fund public goods like nature restoration.

ATProtocol's inter-service authentication currently has no way to identify which client is making a request on behalf of a user, forcing services to rely on forgeable headers or clunky workarounds to establish trust relationships. Adding an optional client_id claim to inter-service JWTs would solve this cleanly, enabling service-to-service trust, rate limiting, and feature flags using the cryptographic infrastructure we already have.