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Wholefolk — Architecture

Status: [HYPOTHESIS] — no architecture has been designed.

This page describes the expected shape of an architecture proposal. The actual proposal is a Phase 0 → Phase 1 deliverable and does not exist yet. Nothing here is a design commitment.

The working thesis is that an eventual wholefolk platform could leverage MPowerUP (libp2p WebRTC transport, did:key identity, Yjs CRDTs, Circle/mutual-aid model) and Toaster Chef (Phaser 3 + Colyseus headless analytical simulation, plus its real-world Kitchen Garage counterpart). Whether it actually should is exactly what Phase 0 must decide — see Roadmap.

Open questions the proposal must answer [HYPOTHESIS]

  1. Identity — Reuse MPowerUP's did:key identity, or require a different model (legal entity, vendor verification)?
  2. Transport — Use MPowerUP's libp2p WebRTC, a separate transport, or hybrid?
  3. State — Yjs CRDTs (as MPowerUP uses for Circle state), a transactional store, or both?
  4. Simulation — What role does Toaster Chef's headless simulator play in pre-pilot validation of procurement designs? What does Kitchen Garage's real-world feedback loop look like?
  5. Tokenization — Does wholefolk require a settlement token (MPWR? a wholefolk-local token? fiat-only)? The research input lists several token models; none are assumed.
  6. Trust — Inherit MPowerUP's Circle / vouch / revocation primitives, or build a different trust model suited to commercial procurement?

Anti-goals

  • Do not require a blockchain by default. Several systems in the Research survey use blockchain; that is descriptive of the input, not prescriptive for wholefolk.
  • Do not bypass MPowerUP's privacy model. If wholefolk would force more aggressive identity disclosure than MPowerUP's Circles tolerate, that is a design conflict to resolve before any code.
  • Do not reinvent payments. Settlement integrations are the longest-pole item; rely on existing primitives where possible.

On off-grid resilience vs. off-cloud sovereignty [HYPOTHESIS]

P2P architecture inherited from MPowerUP is both a privacy/sovereignty property and a grid-resilience (sustainability) property. These are not the same property and should not be conflated when describing the inheritance. See the Sustainability directive.

Known Unknowns

  • Whether MPowerUP's Circle model scales to a procurement context (member-vendor relationships are different from peer-peer relationships).
  • Whether Kitchen Garage's procurement volume is enough to be a meaningful first pilot.
  • Whether wholefolk has a viable economic model independent of BNI Foundation funding.