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Product Vision

Mainstay is a unified local-first application that keeps essential information and value available and usable when conditions change.

It gives individuals, organizations, and communities a dependable place to manage the information and value they need to continue operating. Hosted services can assist, but the experience remains available when a provider, mint, or wider network becomes unavailable.

The product promise

Mainstay makes sophisticated continuity infrastructure feel ordinary:

  • records remain available locally;
  • confirmed balance and pending value remain visibly distinct;
  • payments can be preserved when finalization is unavailable;
  • local Clear currencies can operate without Bitcoin or Lightning;
  • activity synchronizes and finalizes when services return; and
  • one application works across connected, local, mobile, and community modes.

People do not need to understand relays, proof denominations, blob storage, or synchronization protocols to know what is available and what to do next.

Identity outlives location

Mainstay treats identity as durable while routes remain replaceable. A service remains the same service when it moves from a local container to a LAN address, public endpoint, VPN route, or future FIPS path. Records, wallets, and currencies likewise retain stable identifiers even when the route to the service responsible for them changes.

This turns identity-based resolution into a digital-resilience capability. DNS, HTTPS, and public IP connectivity can remain useful ways to reach a service without becoming the source of its identity or a requirement for local operation. Mainstay can use the best eligible route for the present context, then use another route when conditions change without asking the user to treat the service as something new.

The goal is not an Internet-free system. It is a system in which the Internet is one available path rather than the single foundation for identity, discovery, and continuity. This also lets autonomous Mainstay venues cooperate across a wider network without surrendering their local authority or depending on one central host.

Product principles

  1. Local-first, not local-only. Use helpful network services without making ordinary local operation depend on their continuous availability.
  2. Continuity without ambiguity. Show what is confirmed, what is pending, and what can be finalized later.
  3. The app is not the authority. Preserve portable records, keys, funds, policies, and evidence outside the application boundary.
  4. One experience across modes. Do not turn disruption into an unfamiliar emergency-only product.
  5. Good boundaries, not barriers. Keep the sibling products separately deployable, testable, and replaceable, with clear authority and failure boundaries. Use open protocols so separation preserves interoperability and continuity rather than obstructing them.
  6. Bounded economies remain bounded. Never imply that separate Clear currencies are interchangeable, universally accepted, or legal tender.
  7. Identity outlives location. Preserve stable identities and resolve a currently eligible path instead of storing one network address as permanent truth.
  8. Local stewardship, shared governance. Give each community or organization a dependable place to operate its own documented rules for access, recognition, issuance, and reconciliation while remaining connected to compatible outside systems.
  9. Security includes availability. Treat confidentiality, integrity, and availability as complementary obligations. A network route is only one contributor to keeping authorized services and information usable.

The product model

Mainstay is the application.
Lockbox is the appliance.
There's no place like home.

Our House. Our Rules. Our Business. is the governance expression of that model: local stewardship, accountable procedures, ordinary work, and appropriate confidentiality within a community's legitimate scope.

Mainstay is the primary user entry point. Lockbox is the preferred integrated deployment when durable local operation, appliance simplicity, and hardware-backed controls matter. Continuity is the shared result across keys, records, storage, events, and payments: the important things remain close enough to use.

What Mainstay does not become

Mainstay is intentionally not a system of record. It does not become the mint, the relay, the institutional ledger, or the holder of every authority key. It presents and coordinates state preserved by the underlying components without claiming that the application itself is the final authority.

Working in conjunction with OpenETR, however, Mainstay can help an institution or community preserve independently verifiable records without making the app their source of authority. OpenETR identifies exact Digital Artifacts, preserves signed evidence in Digital Controllable Records, and derives consequential state under defined rules. Mainstay keeps the artifacts, evidence, and resulting state understandable and available when conditions change. The responsible institution, community, or relying party still decides whether to recognize that state and what practical or legal effect to give it.

That distinction allows the app to evolve without trapping the user. Acorn keys and proofs remain portable. Stroma keeps the Nostr wire boundary narrow and replaceable. Grove blobs remain content-addressed. Spurline events remain standard Nostr events. Clear currencies retain their own governance and ledgers.

Direction

Safebox Web is the practical application foundation. Mainstay already assembles the working service bundle around it. Current development continues proving each component independently, strengthens local operation, simplifies the shared user experience, and builds out the complete Lockbox profile.

The result is calm capability: keys, records, payments, and local resource coordination remain understandable when conditions change.