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:

• 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

• 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:

• 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