Introduction
+Tesseras is a peer-to-peer network for preserving human memories across millennia. Each person creates a tessera — a self-contained time capsule of memories (photos, audio, video, text) that survives independently of any software, company, or infrastructure.
+What is a tessera?
+The word tessera comes from the small tiles used to make mosaics in the ancient world. In Tesseras, each tessera is a collection of memories packaged into a format designed to be understood even thousands of years from now, without any special software.
+A tessera contains:
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- Memories — photos (JPEG), audio recordings (WAV), video (WebM), and text (plain UTF-8) +
- Metadata — when and where each memory was created, who it involves, and what it means +
- Identity — cryptographic signatures proving who created it +
- Decoding instructions — plain-text explanations of every format used, so future humans can read the contents +
Core philosophy
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- No company dependency — your memories are yours, stored locally and replicated across a peer-to-peer network +
- No format lock-in — every tessera includes instructions for decoding its contents +
- Availability over secrecy — public memories are not encrypted, because long-term accessibility matters more than hiding things +
- Minimal encryption — only private and sealed content is encrypted; everything else is open +
- Quantum-resistant — dual signatures (Ed25519 + ML-DSA) protect integrity even against future quantum computers +
Current status: Phase 4
+Tesseras has completed through Phase 4 — encryption and sealed tesseras. The project now covers local tessera management, networking, replication, a mobile app, and cryptographic privacy.
+What’s available today:
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- Identity generation (Ed25519 keypair with proof-of-work) +
- Tessera creation from local files +
- Content-addressed storage (BLAKE3 hashing) +
- Integrity verification and self-contained export +
- Full node daemon with QUIC transport +
- Peer discovery via Kademlia DHT +
- Tessera pointer publishing and lookup across the network +
- Reed-Solomon erasure coding with automatic fragment repair +
- Flutter mobile app with embedded Rust P2P node +
- Private tesseras — encrypted content only the owner can access +
- Sealed tesseras — time-locked content that opens after a specific date +
- Hybrid post-quantum encryption — X25519 + ML-KEM-768 key encapsulation +
- AES-256-GCM content encryption with AAD binding +
Key concepts
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+ | Concept | Description |
|---|---|
| Tessera | A self-contained time capsule of memories |
| Memory | A single item (photo, recording, video, or text) within a tessera |
| Content hash | A BLAKE3 hash that uniquely identifies a tessera by its contents |
| Visibility | Controls who can access a tessera: public, private, sealed, or circle |
| Sealed tessera | A time capsule that can only be opened after a specific date |
| MANIFEST | A plain-text index listing every file in the tessera with its checksum |
| Memory type | Categorizes a memory: moment, reflection, daily, relation, or object |
| Node | A device running the Tesseras daemon, participating in the P2P network |
| DHT | Distributed hash table — how nodes find tessera pointers without a central server |
| Bootstrap | The process of joining the network by contacting known seed nodes |