QW knownby.work — Skills confirmed by the people you worked with. Found through friends of friends.

A referral-network protocol for trust-based work exchange, built on Nostr. See todo-impl.md for the implementation plan and current status.

Status: early prototype (protocol layer + a local referral-routing demo). Nothing here is ready for real transactions or real personal data.

Try it

Rust stable, no services, no network. Everything below runs locally and publishes nothing anywhere — there is no relay and no public gateway yet, so this is a developer path, not a way to join a running network. What joining will mean is below.

cargo test --workspace
cargo run -p qw-node --example referral_demo
cargo run -p qw-node --example bootstrap_from_git -- <path/to/a/git/repo>

referral_demo [n] [skill_tag] [max_hops] builds a small-world contact graph of n synthetic nodes (300 by default), fires a skill query from a random one, and reports what greedy routing cost against a full-flood estimate:

First match at 1 hop(s); 34 total matches found within 3 hops, deduped by pubkey
Messages sent: 93 queries, 113 answers
Naive full-flood estimate at avg degree ~5 over 3 hops: ~125 messages

It is a demo, not a statistical claim — the graph generator is untuned and run once. See NIP-QW06's scope note.

bootstrap_from_git [repo_path] reads a real repository's history and prints candidates: skill tags inferred from the file types a contributor touched, and Introduction pairs from Co-authored-by: trailers — real evidence that two people worked together. It signs and publishes nothing. Git identifies people by email, not by a QW key, and the tool holds nobody's signing key; each contributor generates their own identity and signs only what they confirm.

How joining works

Not reachable yet — no relay, no gateway — but the mechanism is specified and implemented at the protocol layer, so it is worth stating plainly rather than leaving to a future FAQ. The same thing written for a visitor rather than a developer, including what is and is not released, is at https://knownby.work/join (landing/app/join/page.tsx).

1. Generate an identity. In the app — the client is a phone app first (app/, Tauri v2), and first launch makes the key on the device. Under it that is qw_protocol::identity::Identity::generate() — one secp256k1 keypair behind both a did:key controller id and a Nostr pubkey. There is no account to create and no server that could issue one; losing the key is losing every record signed with it.
2. Get connected, by any of the three shapes of NIP-QW07 kind 9060:
   • Follow someone's invite link — knownby.work/i/<npub>, posted on LinkedIn or anywhere else a professional history already lives. You and the publisher exchange introductions and you are a hop-1 contact immediately, whether you were four hops away in the graph or not in it at all. No invitation to wait for, no cohort to be admitted to.
   • Self-introduction to someone you found via a NIP-QW06 referral query.
   • Mutual introduction, where an existing contact introduces you to another of theirs and carries the connecting chain.
3. Publish what you can do. NIP-QW03 skill tags, with completed contracts as the evidence behind them.

The contact graph is the membership list; there is nothing else to sign up to. Note what an edge does and does not mean: it makes you reachable — queries can route to you, offers can arrive. It says nothing about your competence, because trust in this system is computed only from completed, countersigned work. A stranger who arrives through a link and a stranger four hops away score the same until either of them finishes a contract.

Legal notices

Read these before publishing anything through this protocol, and before referencing this project in any external pitch, investor conversation, or public description. Neither notice is legal advice.

Co-authorship, not barter

This protocol's co-authorship framing is not a general exemption from barter/service taxation. It holds only when work is on a declared open-source project (the output is public and non-appropriable) and no project involved is controlled by the counterparty in a way that privatizes the benefit. Direct bilateral work-for-work, or contribution to a counterparty-controlled private project, falls outside this framing and is the participants' own tax responsibility to assess — this protocol does not determine or launder that responsibility. This framing has not been confirmed by a written tax attorney opinion; treat it as an engineering description of the system's structure, not legal advice.

Deletion rights

Deletion on this protocol is advisory only. A relay may honor a deletion request, but nothing requires it to, and any relay, contact, or archive that already copied a record may keep it indefinitely — publishing here is not equivalent to deleting or fully controlling that data afterward. If your jurisdiction grants you a legal right to deletion of personal data (for example under the EU GDPR or an applicable US state law), publishing a record through this protocol may not by itself satisfy that right. Do not publish information here that you may later be legally required to be able to delete.

Not built, and not on the roadmap

This protocol does not include Shadow Quant, any cross-token exchange mechanism, or any mirrored on-chain/ERC-20 ledger of Quants — each would reintroduce the money-transmission, Sybil, and tax-classification problems the design exists to avoid.

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Both disclosures above are also kept as constants (qw_protocol::legal::CO_AUTHORSHIP_BOUNDARY_NOTICE, qw_protocol::legal::DELETION_RIGHTS_DISCLOSURE) so a future client can display them verbatim instead of re-deriving the wording. Keep the two copies in sync by hand — same convention as the NIP docs in protocol/nips/.