Autonomi is Live
A permanent, post-quantum encrypted archive network that anyone can store data on and nobody can take down.
We said we would build this. Now it exists.
What actually shipped
Autonomi 2.0 is a wholesale upgrade. The architecture has been restructured into separated layers - transport, DHT, trust, identity, applications - each reinforcing the security of the others. The cryptography is entirely post-quantum: ML-DSA-65 for digital signatures, ML-KEM-768 for key exchange, with no classical fallback. Every handshake, every session key, every stored record is post-quantum from the ground up.
To the best of our knowledge, no other decentralised network has done this.
The archive layer is operational. Pay once, store permanently. The Network self-encrypts, self-distributes, and self-heals. Nobody can read your data but you. Nobody can take it down.
Running a node from home now works the way it should. In 2.0, native QUIC handles NAT traversal without STUN or ICE. No port forwarding. No configuration. No technical barrier. If only sophisticated operators can run nodes, the network is not genuinely decentralised. This fixes that at the architecture level.
Why now
Two things are converging.
AI agents - not chatbots, but autonomous systems that reason, plan, and act - need infrastructure they can trust. Somewhere to store data, discover capabilities, and collaborate without depending on centralised cloud services that recreate the exact surveillance and control problems Autonomi was designed to solve.
Meanwhile, adversaries are harvesting encrypted data today, intending to decrypt it when quantum computers are capable enough. Filecoin, Arweave, Storj - still running on classical cryptography. The data stored there has an uncertain future.
Autonomi closes both gaps. Permanently.
Show, don't tell
We could have launched and said "it works, go figure out what to do with it." But hope is not a strategy.
The Autonomi Foundation is using The Network first - immediately, publicly, and for something that matters. The Foundation is funding the permanent preservation of academic papers: the foundational works of computing, cryptography, and distributed systems. Research at risk of disappearing behind paywalls, defunding, or political pressure.
The Reading Room - launching this week at reading-room.com - is where you will find them. Not a library in the traditional sense. A curated exploration of the ideas that shaped the technology we depend on, organised by the questions that connect them rather than the departments that claimed them.
The Reading Room is a statement of intent and a proof point for knowledge protectors, content curators, and creative thinkers alike.
The mind behind it
David Irvine built a $300 million network for Saudi Aramco. 30 patents in networking. Published in distributed computing and cryptography. Building Autonomi since 2002.
But the most interesting thing about David is how he thinks.
His reading path: Einstein (physics), Das Kapital (economics and power), 1984 (surveillance and control). Then he stopped reading and started building. That is not a physicist's reading list or a programmer's. That is someone looking for the pattern underneath all of them.
He draws from nature the way engineers draw from textbooks. Ant colonies, bird flocks, fungal networks. A flock of birds solves coordination problems that blockchain consensus still struggles with - without every bird checking with every other bird in the country. Trees and fungi co-evolved over tens of thousands of years. Faraday put a magnet past some copper and a charge came out - and David traces the entire energy infrastructure of civilisation back to that moment.
His view: the golden age of discovery was golden because people worked across domains without institutional permission. Newton did physics, optics, alchemy, and theology. Einstein was a patent clerk. Then post-war institutions captured research. Specialisation replaced the "what if everything is connected" instinct. Stagnation disguised as progress.
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