Architecture

Membase rests on one invariant: each agent owns a wallet; the wallet's private key is both its signing identity and the keying material for its memory. The only shared storage is a public Hub that stores wallet-scoped bytes. Every higher-level property — confidentiality, recall, collaboration, settlement — is built above the Hub, client-side, so no operator sits in the trust path.

Topology

                Membase Hub  (decentralized KV, hub.membase.unibase.com)
                per-(wallet, cid) bytes
                          ▲
                          │  wallet-signed pointers + encrypted values
                          │  (no server in this path)
            ┌─────────────┴─────────────┐
            │                           │
     ┌──────┴───────┐            ┌───────┴──────┐
     │   Agent      │            │   Membase    │
     │  Wallet      │  wallet-   │   Server     │
     │  HubClient   │ ◄ signed ► │  Persistence │
     │  Domains     │   HTTP     │  Recovery    │
     │  LocalMemory │            │  Runtime     │
     │  Protocol Log│            │  Settlement  │
     │  (SQLite +   │            │  Metering    │
     │   FAISS,     │            └──────┬───────┘
     │   on-device) │                   │
     └──────┬───────┘                   │
            │ ref pub-sub               │
            ▼                           ▼
       ┌─────────┐                ┌───────────┐
       │ Channel │                │   Chain   │
       │ (ws/p2p)│                │ ERC-8183  │
       └─────────┘                └───────────┘

The Server is optional. Memory, domains, and the cooperation protocol run agent-direct against the Hub. The Server adds managed persistence, recall (Recovery + Runtime), and on-chain settlement/metering — all wallet-authenticated, with no privileged read access to your data.

The four layers above the Hub

Layer	Responsibility	You use
Persistence	Wallet-rooted, addressable storage: visibility namespaces, domain-keyed encryption, signed + hash-chained writes, cross-device sync.	private(), create_domain(), set()/get()
Memory	Turns raw history into recall-ready memory. Recovery distills turns into immutable observations linked by supersession edges (offline, once per session); Runtime serves recall with no LLM on the read path.	memory.ingest(), memory.recall(), memory.answer()
Protocol	Agent-direct collaboration: each wallet appends signed, hash-chained Entry records to its Log; a Session bounds an interaction; outcomes are pure functions of the merged view, replayable by any third party.	Cooperation, core.protocol, games
Settlement	Meters Hub usage off-chain into a per-user running total, committed on-chain via an ERC-8183 channel — one transaction per flush.	MembaseClient metering / settle

Two trust boundaries

• L1 — raw memory: agent ↔ Hub directly. Values are encrypted under the agent's domain key before upload; the Hub (and any operator) sees only ciphertext.

• L2 — recall memory: observations + retrieval graph live on the agent's own machine (SQLite + FAISS), populated by Recovery. They never leave the agent.

What we trust — and what we don't

Trusted: the agent's machine + its private key, and standard cryptographic primitives (signatures, hashes, key encapsulation). Not trusted: the Hub stores and returns bytes but never interprets or enforces protocol rules; other agents may be malicious; the network and the pub-sub Channel are untrusted — the Channel carries only references, and every body is verified by signature + hash chain after fetch.

Why it matters

• Own your memory — usable from any device holding the key, never visible to a third-party operator.

• Verifiable collaboration — every action is signed and replayable; disputes resolve from public bytes, not an operator's word.

• A foundation for the Open Agent Internet — portable identity, portable memory, and value transfer between agents from any vendor.