Some bonds need a body
Every culture has always known that trust requires giving something of yourself.
Moving through a hyperconnected age, we find ourselves with the power to carry permanent traces to every person we choose to be close to. As we adapt we will develop habits for how we bridge trust within these nascent technologies.
We are seeking an open standard for how agents leave traces of each other behind. The extent to these traces we call Depth.
The history of relationships
Trust has always been built through the body. The shared cup passed around a circle before anyone spoke. The kola nut broken and distributed before any agreement was made. Wrists bound with cord. These are not superstitions. They are technologies for making trust legible, felt, and remembered.
Every one of these gestures does the same thing: it marks a threshold. Something happened here. These two people chose to be present together, and they gave something of themselves that cannot be taken back. The gesture becomes a shared memory that both carry forward. It changes how they know each other.
We carry these histories in our bodies and in our communities; a texture of chosen encounters, each one leaving a small permanent mark.
Depth is built to honour that logic. We are fascinated by finding ways to give those marks a form that persists, travels with you, and can be offered, carefully, to others you choose to be close to.
How agents carry and share that history
Imagine two people standing in the same room who do not yet know each other, but whose communities are already intertwined. A cooperative that needs to decide who can vote. An assembly that wants to know who has shown up before. A working group that needs to trust the person sitting opposite them before they share something that matters. In each of these moments, people need to know: who is this, really, and what have they given of themselves before now?
Depth gives each person an agent that holds that answer on their behalf. The agent knows your name and your role. It knows how trust works where you come from. It carries the traces of every person you have already chosen to be close to, and the depth at which those encounters happened. When two agents meet, they can share as much or as little of that history as their humans choose to give.
The sharing happens through a Depth Sync: each person holds their card to their own phone or a shared reader. The card is the physical arbiter of the exchange. It must be present and consciously held for anything to pass between the agents. The longer you hold, the more passes through. A brief touch and the other agent learns your name and your cultural framing for trust. Stay longer and it learns what you are working on and what you intend. Hold for the full duration and it receives the whole relational history: who else has trusted you, what they carry from that encounter, the full texture of your past bonds.
That trace is written into both agents at the moment of the sync. It persists even if the bond later breaks. Your agent becomes richer for having been close to another. The history of who you have trusted is something you carry forward and can offer, in layers, to the next person who chooses to hold their card to yours.