Culture as living infrastructure.
A decentralized cultural network. Every work is a layer. Every layer can branch — into commentary, restoration, reinterpretation, analysis, adaptation. Attribution is permanent. AI is accountable. Governance belongs to the community.
This is a protocol preview. No production metrics, no synthetic activity. The lineages you'll walk through are built on real, publicly-documented historic works — Hokusai's Great Wave, the Sūrnāme-i Hümāyūn, a Benin brass head, an Inka khipu, a recovered GeoCities page. Seeded by their real stewards.
A fourth model for culture on the internet.
The cultural internet has, until now, offered three options: the static archive, preserved but inert; the centralized social feed, alive but amnesiac; the academic repository, rigorous but fragmented. Each sacrifices something essential.
Cultural Layers is a fourth model — a living cultural infrastructure. A system where every contribution carries a verifiable origin, every response becomes a branch of lineage, and AI is a named participant rather than a silent one.
It is not a platform for posting. It is a protocol for preserving, governing, and extending human culture in the age of AI. Built on Tenzro, it combines identity, ledger, governance, and agentic tools into one coherent stack.
Three layers. Experience, intelligence, trust.
Experience layer
The user-facing surface where creators, researchers, and communities interact. Branching layer posts, cultural circles, discussion spaces, creator profiles, lineage views, making-of attachments. Discovery organized by descent — not virality.
- — Branching layer composition
- — Cultural circles & stewardship
- — Creator lineage profiles
- — Lineage-first feeds
- — Making-of transparency
Intelligence layer
The AI-native system that structures, interprets, and connects cultural knowledge. AI is a transparent class of contribution — accountable by design, declared in every artifact it touches. Translation, provenance verification, cross-cultural linking.
- — AI-assisted tagging & indexing
- — Cross-region, cross-era linking
- — Translation & accessibility
- — Provenance verification workflows
- — Explicit AI class labelling
Trust layer
The decentralized ledger, identity, governance, and recordkeeping foundation — built on Tenzro. Every contribution carries a Tenzro DID, every lineage link is ledger-attested, every license is programmable. The ledger is the source of truth.
- — Tenzro DID for creators & institutions
- — Immutable lineage records
- — DAO governance & treasury
- — Programmable licensing & rights
- — Merit-based incentive settlement
Built on Tenzro. Settled where it matters.
Tenzro is the underlying protocol stack — identity, ledger, settlement, agentic AI, and decentralized compute. Cultural Layers inherits its guarantees: verifiable attribution, portable identity, programmable rights, and agentic tooling that stays accountable.
Settlement is multi-rail by design. Community liquidity flows through EVM and Solana; institutional settlement runs on Canton — privacy-preserving, legally compatible, already in production at the world's largest custodians. A cultural asset can be tokenized for a community audience or held in regulated institutional custody — not just for community reach, but for institutional-grade liquidity and recognition — with provenance mirrored back to the same cultural ledger on every rail.
Decentralized identity for creators, researchers, curators, and institutions. Portable, verifiable, never rented.
Verifiable recordkeeping and attribution for every cultural contribution. The ledger is the source of truth.
Programmable settlement for DAO participation, grants, and merit-based incentive flows.
AI-native workflows for cultural analysis, discovery, and interpretation. Accountable by design.
Secure decentralized compute for processing media, running agents, and hosting cultural workloads.
Settled across multiple networks.
Cultural assets settle on the rail that fits the audience. Community liquidity flows through public L2s; institutional settlement runs on Canton — privacy-preserving, legally compatible, already in production at major custodians.
Broad, open tokenization for community-scale cultural assets — editions, commentary rights, lineage NFTs, contributor royalties. Interoperable with the largest cultural wallet surface on the internet.
- — Edition mints & contributor royalties
- — Cross-wallet cultural portfolios
- — Open secondary markets
High-throughput rail for cultural micro-transactions — live annotation tips, per-play attribution, sub-cent lineage payouts. Built for volume without pricing out the smallest contributions.
- — Micro-attributions per play / view
- — Festival & event-scale drops
- — Streaming royalty splits
Institutional-grade settlement for museums, estates, auction houses, and sovereign cultural funds. Privacy-preserving by design, already in production at the world's largest custodians. The rail where a Hokusai impression can be tokenized without leaving regulated custody.
- — Museum & estate-custody tokenization
- — Regulated fractional ownership
- — Cross-institution provenance escrow
Tokenizing a cultural asset isn't a single act — a print in a museum wants institutional-grade custody; a contemporary reinterpretation wants community-scale liquidity. Tenzro routes each to the right rail, and mirrors attribution and provenance back to the cultural ledger on all three.
AI is accountable, not hidden.
Every contribution declares its origin before it enters the network. Four provenance classes. Visible on every card, every page, every ledger receipt. Color is a signal, never a disguise.
Attested by a recognized cultural institution. Provenance chain available.
Authored directly by the contributor, without AI involvement.
Authored by a human with AI acting as a tool. Process documented.
Generated by an AI system under the contributor's direction. Source model cited.
One print. Six descending layers.
Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa (c. 1831), seeded by The Met. Watch how layers descend from a root — conservation, pigment analysis, essay, hand-carved response, generative study. Each carrying its own provenance, each traceable back to the print.
Preserve. Branch. Govern.
Culture deserves infrastructure worthy of it. Cultural Layers is a research preview. We welcome contributors, institutions, and stewards.