Hypercerts @ATmosphereConf 2026: AT Protocol as an Open, Social Context Layer for Resource Allocation

Watch the talk

Below is a written overview of the talk for those who prefer to read.

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The talk, Hypercerts & Certified: AT Protocol as an Open, Social Context Layer for Resource Allocation, covered the full arc of what we've been building: from the problem (public goods are chronically underfunded because we lack shared infrastructure for recognizing collective value) to the architectural choices we've made, to live demos of working applications.

Why AT Protocol matters for funding

Here is the core argument. When we decide what to fund, three layers interact: funding mechanisms, decision-making mechanisms, and a context layer — the information that feeds into those decisions. Today, that context is fragmented across platforms and locked in data silos. Projects re-enter the same information on every platform. Trust signals don't accumulate.

AT Protocol changes this. It provides portable, user-controlled data, shared schemas across applications, and a decentralized trust graph — exactly the properties that impact funding infrastructure needs. When project data, evaluations, and contributor records live on AT Protocol, they become shared observable records that any platform can read and build on. This is how we move from narrative-driven funding to evidence-based and trust-based funding — and it becomes especially important as AI increasingly writes grant applications and pre-filters them on the funder side.

Use cases in the wild

Holke walked through several use cases built on Hypercerts and AT Protocol:

Ma Earth is preparing a crowdfunding campaign for 100 regenerative land projects with a $500,000 matching fund. Each project is recorded as a hypercert on AT Protocol, making their data interoperable across the ecosystem — not locked into a single crowdfunding platform.

GainForest helps communities deploy monitoring technology like bio acoustics to generate verifiable evidence of their stewardship work. When a community working with Ma Earth also works with GainForest, the evaluation data recorded on AT Protocol flows back to the crowdfunding platform automatically. This is interoperability in practice.

Bumicerts, built by GainForest, offers a familiar crowdfunding interface — but backed by AT Protocol shared records. Here you can fund the communities GainForest is working with directly.

Protocol Labs Research is already using hypercerts in their grants platform. When you apply for a PL research grant, your application is saved as a hypercert on your personal data server.

Simocracy — an experiment we ran at Funding the Commons in San Francisco — explored AI-assisted collective decision-making. Participants created AI agents through structured interviews, and those agents discussed and allocated $5,000 using the S-Process, a mechanism that aggregates marginal utility curves. Every proposal was a hypercert. The results were comparable to what human participants would have decided. The exciting part: This mechanism will improve over time as it is a dynamic self-improving system.

Hyperboards — a tool for visualizing who contributed to a project, pulling in both code contributors and financial supporters, displayed through a hypercert. The vision: open source project, volunteer organizations, community groups, research facilities, etc. could embed this on their website (optionally with an easy way to contribute financially).

Infrastructure choices

A significant part of the talk focused on the practical challenge of building for land stewards — not just in the US and Europe, but in the global majority. Explaining AT Protocol to users who just want to fund or document their work is a barrier. So we built Certified, a passwordless login experience where users sign up with just an email and a one-time password. They get a full AT Protocol account without initially needing to understand the full background. They can set their handle and password later if they want to. On the infrastructure layer we call with the enhanced Personal Data Server (ePDS).

Holke also demonstrated the Certified Group Service (CGS), which gives organizations — not just individuals — the ability to have AT Protocol accounts. In the use case of Ma Earth and GainForest, a land stewardship project might have volunteers who take photos of tree planting and publish that data on behalf of the organization, without having access to all of the group's other records. This is role-based access control for AT Protocol, implemented through a group service that sits in front of a vanilla PDS. Because the group is registered as a normal DID, it can transfer its data to any other server at any time.

Building with us

If you're building a funding platform, an evaluation tool, or working in climate, science, open source, or community programs — hypercerts are designed to be the shared primitive you build on, not a platform itself. We provide the Certified services, lexicons, a scaffold app, a CLI, an indexer, an agent API, and further tooling for the hypercerts ecosystem (see hyperscan.dev).

If you want to build with us, reach out at team@hypercerts.org.