The Problem Worth Solving
Remember when the “sharing economy” was supposed to change everything? The pitch was compelling: people would share their spare rooms, their cars, their tools, and communities would become more connected and resourceful in the process.
What actually happened was something quite different. Uber doesn’t share anything. Airbnb doesn’t share anything. These platforms captured the language of sharing while building some of the most centralized, extractive business models of the digital era. They sit between peers, control the rules of engagement, own all the data, set the prices, and take a cut of every transaction. The people who provide the actual value, their cars, their homes, their labor, have no say in how the platform operates and no ownership of the relationships they build through it.
This is not a sharing economy. It is a micro-service economy with better marketing.
The problem is not that peer-to-peer coordination doesn’t work. It clearly does. Millions of people successfully coordinate through these platforms every day. The problem is who controls the coordination layer. When a single company owns the rules, the matching algorithm, the reputation system, and the communication channel, “peer-to-peer” becomes a polite fiction. The platform is the real intermediary, and it captures the lion’s share of the value.
So the question becomes: what would a genuine peer sharing protocol look like? One where the governance of shared resources is not imposed by a platform operator but embedded in the resources themselves? Where organizations and individuals can coordinate across boundaries without surrendering control to a central authority?
That is the question Nondominium is designed to answer.
What It Looks Like in Practice
Before diving into the history and architecture, consider a simple scenario. A makerspace in Montreal has a 3D printer sitting idle three days a week. A cooperative across town needs one for a short production run. Today, they would probably never find each other, or if they did, it would be through word of mouth with no shared protocol for managing the arrangement.
With Nondominium, that 3D printer exists in a shared network as a resource with a custodian (the makerspace), a governance profile (who can request it, what conditions apply, what maintenance obligations come with use), and a full history of previous custodianship transfers. The cooperative discovers it through the network, initiates a request that triggers the governance rules embedded in the resource specification, and a custodianship transfer is validated and recorded. Both parties receive cryptographic participation receipts documenting the interaction. When the production run is done, the machine returns to the makerspace with its maintenance log updated and its reputation trail extended.
No platform takes a cut. No central authority imposed the rules. The governance traveled with the resource itself.
That is the core idea. Now let’s look at where it comes from.
The Roots: From NRP/CAS to Valueflows to Nondominium
Nondominium does not emerge from thin air. It is the latest chapter in a story that spans more than a decade of practical experimentation, standard-setting, and software development at the intersection of commons-based peer production and distributed systems.
Sensorica and the Coordination Challenge
Sensorica was co-founded in 2011 by Tiberius Brastaviceanu (Tibi) as an Open Value Network (OVN), one of the first organizations to seriously attempt commons-based peer production outside of software. Unlike traditional companies or even cooperatives, Sensorica has no employees, no bosses, and no fixed hierarchy. Contributors self-organize around projects, pool resources, and share the benefits according to transparent contribution accounting.
Running an organization like this surfaces coordination challenges that most economic software simply ignores. How do you track who contributed what when there is no payroll? How do you manage shared equipment when there is no single owner? How do you coordinate resource flows across a network of autonomous contributors without a central authority dictating terms?
These were not theoretical questions. They were daily operational realities.
Lynn Foster, Bob Haugen, and the Birth of NRP/CAS
In 2013, Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen began a close collaboration with Sensorica, working alongside Tibi and other contributors, to build the tools that this new form of organization desperately needed. The result was the NRP/CAS: a Network Resource Planning and Contribution Accounting System. Built as a Web 2 prototype on the Django framework, it was the first serious attempt at software designed specifically for Open Value Network coordination.
NRP/CAS allowed Sensorica to track contributions, manage shared resources, coordinate processes, and distribute benefits. It was functional, and it was groundbreaking. But it also carried a fundamental limitation inherent to Web 2 architecture: as a centralized web application backed by a single database, it could not resolve the question of who controls the platform. Whoever hosted the server, whoever administered the database, ultimately held power over the network’s data and operations. For an organization built on principles of decentralization and shared governance, this was more than a technical constraint. It was a structural contradiction. The very tool meant to enable peer production still depended on a centralized trust model, and by extension, whoever controlled the platform could, in principle, control the network itself.
Despite this limitation, the NRP/CAS was a remarkable learning machine. Tibi, as both co-founder of the network and active participant in the development process, brought the daily operational reality of running an OVN to the design table, while Lynn and Bob brought the software architecture and accounting theory. Years of running a real peer production network on real software produced hard-won insights about what works, what breaks, and what patterns keep recurring regardless of the specific organization using them.
The Generalization: Valueflows
Lynn and Bob did not stop at building one tool for one organization. They recognized that the patterns emerging from Sensorica’s experience were universal. Any network of autonomous agents coordinating economic activity would face the same fundamental challenges: tracking resources, recording events, making commitments, expressing intentions.
The theoretical foundation for this generalization already existed. In 1982, William E. McCarthy published The REA Accounting Model: A Generalized Framework for Accounting Systems in a Shared Data Environment in The Accounting Review, proposing a radical rethinking of accounting theory. Rather than modeling economic activity through the lens of double-entry bookkeeping, with its debits, credits, and abstract ledger categories, McCarthy’s REA model described economics in terms of what actually happens in the real world: Resources change hands, Events record those changes, and Agents are the parties involved. Over the following decades, McCarthy and collaborators like Guido Geerts extended the framework to include commitments, policies, and multi-layered ontological structures, eventually achieving recognition as an ISO standard (ISO/IEC 15944-4).
What made REA particularly well suited to distributed economic activity was McCarthy’s original insight: accounting should describe real economic events rather than accountants’ interpretations filtered through the lens of ownership. This post-ownership perspective resonated deeply with the needs of commons-based networks where traditional notions of property and enterprise boundaries simply do not apply. (For a deeper exploration of REA and its journey to Holochain, see From REA to hREA: A Journey into Decentralized Economic Systems.)
What makes REA especially powerful for distributed networks is its layered ontology. As McCarthy and his collaborators refined the model, they identified three distinct layers that mirror how economic coordination actually works. The Knowledge layer defines the patterns: resource types, process recipes (reusable templates for transformations), roles, and rules. This is where each network or community configures the shared vocabulary to fit their needs. The Plan layer captures intentions and commitments: offers, requests, schedules, and promises about future activity. The Observation layer records what actually happened: the concrete economic events as they occur. This separation means a community can define its recipes once, plan collaboratively, and then track execution independently, all using the same consistent vocabulary.
Drawing on this layered REA foundation, Lynn and Bob co-developed the Valueflows specification. Valueflows extends the original REA model in several critical directions. Its resource model provides flexible primitives (resource specifications, classifications, and open typing) that place no constraints on what counts as a resource, enabling communities to model services, knowledge, energy, skills, or ecological factors like CO2 and water alongside conventional goods and money. It adds a network-first perspective, designed from the ground up to coordinate across organizational boundaries rather than within a single enterprise. And it formalizes the Input Process Output (IPO) pattern for modeling transformations: a Process takes Resource inputs, transforms them, and produces Resource outputs, connecting processes into flows that can span entire supply chains and circular economies.
Valueflows is not software. It is a vocabulary: a shared set of concepts and relationships for describing economic activity in distributed networks. Think of it as a common language that different applications can speak, allowing them to interoperate without having to share a database or agree on implementation details.
It was a generalization born from years of practice, grounded in four decades of accounting theory innovation. It carries the DNA of both McCarthy’s REA ontology and Sensorica’s real-world peer production inside its design.
hREA and the Holochain Connection
The next step was bringing Valueflows to a distributed computing platform that matched its values. hREA (Holochain REA) implements the Valueflows specification on Holochain, providing a reference implementation that any Holochain application can build upon. The vocabulary is now being adopted across multiple projects in the Holochain ecosystem and beyond, creating the foundation for an interoperable network of economic applications that speak the same language.
Nondominium picks up this thread and pushes it into specific, uncharted territory: applying Valueflows to the challenge of resource mutualization across organizational boundaries.
What Is Nondominium?
At its core, Nondominium is a protocol for resource mutualization. Not a marketplace. Not a listing service. A protocol that defines how physical and digital resources can be shared, tracked, and governed across organizations without any central platform controlling the process. (For a high-level overview of the protocol’s goals and scope, see the requirements documentation.)
Custodianship, Not Ownership
The most fundamental shift Nondominium makes is conceptual. In conventional systems, resources are owned. Ownership means exclusive control: I own this, you do not, and if you want to use it, we need a transaction that transfers ownership or grants a temporary license.
Nondominium replaces ownership with custodianship. A resource exists in a commons. It is not “owned” by anyone in the traditional sense. Instead, specific agents are custodians: they are responsible for the resource, accountable for its condition, and authorized to manage its use according to agreed-upon rules. Custodianship can transfer from one agent to another, and each transfer is recorded, validated, and governed by the protocol.
This is not the absence of property relations. It is a different topology of them. Resources still have stewards. There are still clear rights and responsibilities. But the resource is not locked inside one organization’s database, and no single entity extracts rent from the coordination process.
Organization-Agnostic by Design
One of the deepest problems with current resource management systems is that they are organizational silos. Your company’s ERP knows about your company’s assets. Your makerspace’s inventory system knows about your makerspace’s tools. But a 3D printer sitting idle in one shop cannot be discovered by the cooperative down the street that needs it this week.
Nondominium is designed from the ground up to be organization-agnostic. A resource in the Nondominium network is not “Sensorica’s drill press” or “BuildCoop’s crane.” It is a resource with a custodian, a history, a set of capabilities, and a governance profile. It can flow between organizations, cooperatives, individuals, and communities without being re-registered, re-entered, or re-validated for each new context.
Governance as Operator
Here is where Nondominium departs most radically from both traditional ERPs and platform-based sharing services. In Uber, governance is imposed by the platform: Uber sets the rules, the prices, the matching algorithm. In a traditional ERP, governance is implicit in the organization’s internal policies.
In Nondominium, governance is embedded directly in the resources themselves through ResourceSpecifications. Each type of resource carries its own governance profile: who can become a custodian, what conditions must be met for transfer, what maintenance obligations exist, what happens in case of damage or dispute. The governance rules travel with the resource, not imposed from above by a platform and not locked inside any single organization’s policies. (The full governance model is described in the governance specification.)
In practice, this means governance functions as an operator on resource state. The state of a resource can only change after the intended action by an agent is validated by the governance layer and signed by the agent. An agent issues an intent to interact with a specific resource. The governance layer associated with that resource checks that all conditions are met and paves the way for the agent to initiate the process. As the agent initiates the process, the governance layer modifies the resource’s state accordingly: marking it from “available” to “unavailable,” associating a new custodian, updating maintenance obligations, or any other state transition defined in the resource’s governance profile.
This means that when a resource moves from Organization A to Organization B, the governance follows. Both parties operate under the same rules, transparently, without needing to negotiate from scratch or trust a third party to enforce the agreement.
The ERP Bridge: Connecting Existing Systems
Because Nondominium is organization-agnostic and protocol-based, it naturally functions as an interoperability layer. Rather than requiring organizations to abandon their existing tools, Nondominium is designed to connect with open-source ERP systems that already manage organizational resources. We are specifically targeting systems like Dolibarr, ERPLibre (an open-source fork of Odoo Community Edition), and NextERP as bridge partners, because their open architectures and libre licensing align with the values of the commons economy.
Through a bridge service (described in the architecture documentation, with a proof-of-concept implementation currently under development), organizations can selectively publish inventory from their ERP to the Nondominium network, discover resources from other organizations, and coordinate sharing workflows while maintaining full sovereignty over their internal data. The ERP continues to manage day-to-day operations; Nondominium provides the shared substrate underneath, connecting heterogeneous systems through a common economic vocabulary.
This positions Nondominium as a bridge between business-to-business and community-to-community resource flows, something that neither traditional ERPs nor consumer-facing sharing platforms are designed to handle.
How It Works: The Protocol Layer
Valueflows Compliance
Nondominium is fully compliant with the Valueflows specification and built on REA accounting theory. Every economic activity in the system is described using the same vocabulary: Resources, Events, Agents, Processes, Commitments, Intents. This is not proprietary infrastructure. It is built on open standards that have been refined by the Valueflows community over years of collaborative development. (For the full protocol design, see the core specifications.)
This matters for interoperability. Any other Valueflows-compatible application, whether built on Holochain, on the Fediverse through Bonfire, or on any other platform, can potentially interact with Nondominium’s data. The economic grammar is shared.
Private Participation Receipts
Trust in a decentralized system cannot depend on a central reputation authority like Uber’s star ratings or Airbnb’s review system. Nondominium introduces Private Participation Receipts (PPRs): every interaction between agents generates a pair of cryptographically signed receipts, one for each party.
These bi-directional receipts serve multiple functions simultaneously. They create an immutable audit trail of resource flows. They build verifiable reputation over time, based on actual interactions rather than subjective ratings. And they function as credentials: an agent who has successfully managed dozens of custodianship transfers for heavy equipment has a provable track record, not because a platform says so, but because the cryptographic receipts exist. Importantly, Nondominium is designed to support one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many transaction patterns, ensuring the protocol can model the full range of real-world resource sharing arrangements, from a simple handoff between two parties to complex multi-stakeholder coordination.
The “private” in PPR is important. Agents control their own receipts. There is no public scoreboard and no centralized database of everyone’s history. Reputation is portable and agent-controlled.
Specialized Roles in the Resource Lifecycle
Resources do not just sit in one place waiting to be used. They move, they need storage, they require maintenance. Nondominium models this reality through specialized roles that function as protocol-level capabilities, each with their own validation rules and accountability.
Transport covers the movement of resources between custodians: what moved, from whom, to whom, and under what conditions. Storage addresses responsible stewardship while resources are idle, with obligations around environmental conditions, security, and accessibility encoded in the governance profile. Repair and Maintenance ensures that shared resources remain functional over time. This is where mutualization truly diverges from the “use it and forget it” model of consumer sharing platforms. When resources are held in common, their long-term health is everyone’s concern, and the protocol makes maintenance visible, trackable, and accountable.
Multi-Layered Validation
Without a central authority, how do you ensure that transactions are legitimate and that governance rules are followed?
Nondominium addresses this through layered validation rather than centralized enforcement. At the data level, semantic validation ensures well-formed structures and business rules check that governance policies embedded in ResourceSpecifications are respected. At the identity level, cryptographic validation verifies the authorization of all parties involved. And at the social level, the accumulated history of Private Participation Receipts provides a track record that agents can assess before entering into new arrangements. No single layer is sufficient on its own. Together, they provide robust integrity without requiring anyone to trust a central server.
Why Holochain? The Mycelium Beneath the Forest
The choice of Holochain as the infrastructure for Nondominium is not incidental. It reflects a deep alignment between the protocol’s values and the platform’s architecture.
Agent-Centricity for Commons Coordination
Holochain is agent-centric, meaning each participant maintains their own source chain of data and interactions. This is fundamentally different from blockchain’s global consensus model or traditional client-server architectures. In Holochain, you do not need the entire network to agree on the state of the world before you can act. You maintain your own history, sign your own data, and share it with the network on your own terms.
For commons-based resource coordination, this is exactly right. Organizations participating in a mutualization network do not want to expose all their internal operations to a global ledger. They want to share what they choose to share, maintain sovereignty over their own data, and participate in coordination without surrendering autonomy. Agent-centricity makes this possible at the protocol level.
The DHT as Shared Awareness
Holochain’s Distributed Hash Table functions as a layer of shared awareness. Resources, their specifications, their governance profiles, and their custodianship histories are discoverable across the network without being stored on a central server. Organizations can find available resources, verify credentials, and initiate transactions through this shared substrate.
The metaphor that keeps recurring in our work is the mycelium network beneath a forest. The trees (organizations) appear separate above ground, but underground they are connected by a vast network of fungal threads that allow them to share nutrients, send signals, and coordinate responses to changing conditions. Holochain’s DHT is the mycelium for resource mutualization: invisible, decentralized, and essential for the health of the whole ecosystem.
No Global Consensus, Just Local Validation
One of Holochain’s most distinctive properties is that it does not require global consensus. Traditional blockchains need the entire network to agree before any transaction is valid. Holochain uses local validation: each node validates the data it receives according to shared rules (the DNA), and the network achieves eventual consistency through gossip rather than synchronized agreement.
This mirrors how real-world resource sharing actually works between autonomous organizations. When a cooperative lends equipment to a partner, they do not wait for every organization on Earth to validate the transaction. They validate it locally, according to shared rules, and the information propagates through the network as needed.
The physical infrastructure for running this kind of distributed application is also maturing rapidly. HoloPorts provide dedicated hardware for hosting Holochain applications, HolOS offers a purpose-built operating system for running conductors, and Edge Nodes enable always-on network participation without relying on cloud servers. We are actively deploying and testing this infrastructure stack, and the path from development to real distributed deployment is becoming tangible. For Nondominium, this means the physical layer needed to run a truly distributed resource management protocol is not hypothetical; it already exists and is accessible to communities ready to experiment.
The Bigger Picture: Nondominium Within the True Commons Ecosystem
Nondominium does not exist in isolation. It is one component of a larger vision for commons-based economic infrastructure.
The Resource Sharing Engine
Nondominium’s specific focus is resource mutualization. It answers the questions: What resources exist in this network? Who stewards them? What are the rules for access and transfer? How do they flow between custodians? It is the engine that makes shared resource governance operational.
True Commons: The Peer Production Platform
True Commons is the broader platform being developed for commons-based peer production, guided by Tibi’s long-standing vision of a complete infrastructure for Open Value Networks. Co-developed by Tibi as domain architect and Sacha Pignot as technical developer, it is essentially the next-generation NRP/CAS built on Holochain and Valueflows. Where Nondominium handles resources, True Commons handles the full scope of peer production coordination: contribution accounting, benefit redistribution through its redistribution algorithm, stigmergic coordination (enabling contributors to self-organize around visible needs and opportunities), and process management.
How the Pieces Compose
The relationship between Nondominium and True Commons is complementary, not competitive.
Nondominium handles: What resources exist? Who stewards them? How do they flow?
True Commons handles: Who contributed what? How are benefits shared? What should we work on next?
Together, they form the infrastructure for a network economy where coordination happens without extraction. Resources are mutualized through Nondominium. Contributions are tracked and rewarded through True Commons. And the whole system runs on Holochain, ensuring that the infrastructure itself is not captured by any single entity.
This is not just a vision. It is a direct continuation of the work that Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen began with Sensorica over a decade ago, now being built on infrastructure that finally matches the ambition: distributed, agent-centric, and commons-aligned from the ground up.
Future Horizons
One of the natural questions that arises with resource mutualization is: what about the transactional layer? When resources flow between custodians, when maintenance is performed, when transport is arranged, there are often economic exchanges involved. Nondominium tracks these flows through Valueflows events, but the integration of actual currency systems opens another dimension entirely.
This is where projects like Unyt become particularly interesting. Unyt, a subsidiary of the Holochain Foundation, provides professional-grade accounting infrastructure for mutual credit currencies on Holochain, enabling high-volume microtransactions without the consensus bottlenecks of blockchain systems. Unyt already supports one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many transactions, and Nondominium is designed to match this flexibility in its own resource coordination workflows. The potential to integrate Mutual Credit Currencies into Nondominium’s resource flows, allowing custodianship transfers and service contributions to carry economic weight natively within the protocol, is a direction we are actively exploring. Early conversations are underway, though this integration is still in its conceptual phase.
The vision is composability: Nondominium for resource governance, True Commons for contribution accounting, and Unyt-powered currencies for the transactional fabric connecting them. Each piece remains independent, but together they could form a complete economic operating system for the commons.
It is also worth noting the complementary work happening in the broader Holochain ecosystem. The Requests and Offers application, developed by the hAppenings Community, addresses the discovery and matching layer: how agents signal what they need and what they can provide. Built on Holochain, hREA/Valueflows and potentially compatible with Unyt too, Requests and Offers could serve as a natural front door to the resource sharing workflows that Nondominium manages behind the scenes and inspire the matching layer for True Commons.
Where We Are and How to Get Involved
Nondominium is currently in active development. Tibi leads the domain architecture and OVN design, drawing on over a decade of experience running Sensorica as a commons-based peer production network. Sacha Pignot handles the technical development, building the Holochain zomes and protocol infrastructure. The core architecture is defined and the MVP focuses on three foundational zomes: person management (agent identity and roles), resource tracking (specifications, lifecycle, custodianship), and governance (state transitions, validation rules, access control).
We are building this as open infrastructure for the commons economy, and we need collaborators. The full documentation index is a good starting point for understanding the project in depth.
If you are a Rust/Holochain developer interested in commons infrastructure, the codebase is open and we welcome contributions. Building the economic coordination layer for peer-to-peer resource sharing is challenging, rewarding work.
If you represent an organization that manages shared resources, whether a cooperative, a makerspace, a tool library, or any network where resources flow between autonomous participants, we are looking for pilot partners who want to test real-world mutualization workflows.
If you are interested in funding commons-based infrastructure, Nondominium is positioned at a critical intersection: Valueflows compliance ensures interoperability, Holochain provides the distributed substrate, and the protocol addresses a real, unsolved problem in the cooperative and commons economy.
The sharing economy promised that technology would help people share resources more effectively. That promise was captured by platforms that turned sharing into extraction. Nondominium is part of the effort to fulfill the original promise, building the tools for genuine resource mutualization, one protocol at a time.
Nondominium is developed by Sensorica, under the vision of co-founder Tiberius Brastaviceanu, with Sacha Pignot as technical developer. It builds on the foundational work of Lynn Foster and Bob Haugen (Valueflows, NRP/CAS) and the hREA implementation on Holochain. Sacha Pignot also collaborates with the hAppenings Community on the Requests and Offers application, a complementary Holochain project for peer-to-peer needs and offers matching.
To learn more or get involved, reach out through Sensorica or explore the Nondominium repository on GitHub.