Mainstay
There's no place like home.
A unified local-first application that keeps essential information and value available and usable when conditions change.
A dependable place for keys, records, payments, and community continuity.
A local-first approach
Mainstay starts with an ordinary need: people can use important records, service credits, approvals, and payment capabilities locally, where daily work happens. A community office, resort, campus, co-working facility, or local service network may already coordinate members, guests, staff, providers, records, and benefits across several tools. Mainstay gives those capabilities a dependable local home while keeping them connected to the wider systems that already matter.
The goal is cooperative independence, not separation. A local deployment can work with hosted services, regional providers, national registries, outside mints, and ordinary payment networks when those services are useful and available. It can also keep local work understandable when one of those systems is slow, unavailable, or waiting to reconcile.
This is especially relevant for remote and Indigenous communities that want digital tools aligned with local governance, trusted relationships, language, service realities, and cooperative links to regional and national systems. The same pattern also fits hospitality resorts, cruise ships, campuses, and co-working facilities that need smooth local operations without turning every interaction into a dependency on a distant platform.
A home governed together
Our House. Our Rules. Our Business.
A local digital home gives a community practical stewardship over how its essential services work. The people responsible for a community, resort, campus, or co-working facility can define who may issue local credits, which records and attestations are recognized, what approvals are required, and when local activity is reconciled with outside systems.
The aim is shared governance. The rules can be documented, accountable, and shaped through the community's own procedures while remaining compatible with regional institutions, service providers, and open networks. Mainstay gives those locally chosen rules a dependable place to operate.
Here, the house is the community's locally operated domain. The rules are its legitimate, documented procedures within the authority it actually holds. The business is both its ordinary day-to-day work and its reasonable expectation that confidential affairs remain private. External obligations and cooperative relationships remain visible and respected. It is an expression of ordinary civic and institutional dignity, not withdrawal from the wider society.
Records, credits, and trusted local work
Mainstay keeps several practical questions clear:
- Which records are available here?
- Which local services are available and usable now?
- Which credits, vouchers, or balances are confirmed?
- Which transfers or attestations are pending wider reconciliation?
- Which organization, issuer, professional, or community gives a record or credit its meaning?
A resort might issue guest credits, staff allowances, activity vouchers, or meal credits that are recognized by shops, restaurants, and services on its own network. A co-working facility might issue desk credits, boardroom hours, printing credits, locker access, or event passes. An Indigenous community program might issue locally governed service credits or preserve records and attestations according to its own procedures while maintaining cooperative links to external institutions.
In each case, Mainstay keeps the local instrument bounded and legible. It does not imply that a resort credit is legal tender, that two community programs are interchangeable, or that a local attestation replaces the institution normally responsible for a record. It shows who issued the thing, who recognizes it, what can be done locally, and what still needs to be checked or finalized elsewhere.
Preparedness as a benefit
The same local-first capacity also supports preparedness.
Emergency preparedness helps people get through a disruption. Business continuity helps organizations keep operating. Institutional preparedness helps a community preserve the practical capabilities it needs to function: access to keys, funds, records, evidence, payments, and trusted local services.
This does not need to begin with a crisis. It begins with ordinary operating realities: intermittent electricity, limited connectivity, an unavailable cloud service, a payment provider outage, or records that cannot be reached at the moment work needs to continue. The underlying institutions may still exist and the problem may be resolved in a few hours or days. Until then, people still need to carry out day-to-day business.
When connectivity returns, local activity can be reconciled with the wider network rather than reconstructed from paper notes, memory, screenshots, or fragmented application logs. Mainstay helps preserve a clear path between what happened locally and the external systems that later confirm, recognize, or settle it.
Local-first, not local-only
Mainstay can use helpful hosted services in ordinary conditions. It is designed so the user experience can also move toward local infrastructure when a provider, mint, regional link, or wider network becomes unavailable.
The goal is not isolation. It is practical stewardship of the records, keys, funds, evidence, and local services people need to continue operating.
Connected
Use hosted services, public relays, external mints, and ordinary internet connectivity.
Local
Reach local and nearby Mainstay services directly when upstream access is unavailable.
Mobile
Use a phone or nearby device as a temporary bridge while local approval stays close.
Community
Exchange records, events, and value across a local network or participating mesh.
One house, distinct roles
Mainstay is the unified local operating context. Within it, Clear and OpenETR create new practical value, Safebox Web gives people access to that value, and the supporting components provide the focused capabilities that make the whole system work. Each remains independently useful and replaceable.
Value
ClearIssue, transfer, clear, and redeem community-defined value.
OpenETREstablish, recognize, and disclose authoritative digital records.
Access
Safebox WebThe application through which people use records, payments, identity, and recovery.
Supporting capabilities
Acorn
Spurline
Grove
StromaClear boundaries keep an application from becoming the authority, a relay from becoming a mint, and storage from determining the meaning of a record. Open protocols let keys, records, value, and signed evidence move across compatible applications and infrastructure without collapsing those responsibilities.
See how the family fits together
Continuity without ambiguity
Mainstay distinguishes what is available now, what is confirmed, what remains pending, and what can be finalized later. A locally available Clear mint can confirm its own currency inside a community network, while proofs from an unavailable external mint remain pending until reconciliation.
Records follow the same principle: local copies preserve continuity, signed events preserve evidence, and synchronization reconnects local work to the wider network when available.
Policy briefs
Mainstay policy briefs connect local-first technology to the enduring work of communities and institutions. They examine the Clerk and Treasury functions through community-led recordkeeping, Digital Originals, credit, clearing, and transferable value. These are not new institutional inventions, but familiar responsibilities being reconstituted with portable identities, verifiable records, private bearer instruments, and locally operated infrastructure.
A local home when it matters
Lockbox
Lockbox is a hardware platform for supporting a locally running Mainstay instance and its services. It provides a dedicated local home for the family on a small, durable appliance with local storage, service supervision, hardware-backed controls, and physical presence.
The initial target is FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi 4 with a keypad and TROPIC01 HSM.
A working product under active construction
Mainstay runs today as an integrated local service bundle with a dashboard, Safebox Web, Spurline, Grove, Clear, and service workers. Some unified user flows, continuity modes, and the complete Lockbox appliance profile remain under construction; the project status page identifies that work directly.