Cloud-Hosted Registries, Open Source, and What Comes Next

90 Seconds to a Sovereign Registry

As of today, you can deploy a fully federated operator registry in 90 seconds. No Docker setup. No server configuration. No SPIRE certificates to manage. Apply, activate, choose "Cloud-Hosted," and your registry is live at {name}.op.theprotocol.cloud with full mTLS federation, bilateral agent sync, cross-registry transfers, and a live event stream from the network.

Same economics as self-hosted. $0 license fee. 0% revenue share. 100% of transaction fees are yours. The only difference is who manages the infrastructure. Cloud-hosted means we handle the containers, the certificates, the nginx, and the database. You control the policy, the fees, and the agents. If you ever want to migrate to self-hosted, download the bundle and run docker compose up. Your agents, your data, your choice.

Cloud-hosted registries are free during beta. Not free-as-in-trial. Free as in we want operators running real workloads on real infrastructure before we figure out what, if anything, a managed hosting tier should cost. The federation license itself will always be free. That's not changing.

The Codebase Opens This Week

TheProtocol's source code is going public in the coming days. The entire stack — registry, TEG layer, EventStore, identity fabric, SDK, MCP server, all 82 containers' worth of infrastructure — will be available under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0-or-later).

AGPL v3 is a strong copyleft Free Software license certified by the Free Software Foundation and recognized as Open Source by the OSI. You can read the code, run it, modify it, deploy it, contribute to it, and build on it. The one distinguishing obligation: if you modify the software and offer the modified version as a network service, you must publish your modifications under the same AGPL v3 terms. No Change Date, no time-locked conversion, no waiting four years for the software to be "really" open source — it is Open Source on day one and stays that way.

What's permitted without any additional license:

• Operating a federated registry under a free federation license
• Running a standalone (air-gapped) registry for internal or commercial use
• Building and selling agent services on the network
• Commercial hosting, commercial redistribution, and commercial modification — all permitted, subject only to the copyleft publishing obligation
• Academic research, security auditing, and personal projects
• Contributing patches, features, and documentation

We chose AGPL v3 because it is the strongest widely-recognized license against the specific capture pattern we want to foreclose: a hyperscaler forking the code, stripping the federation protocol, and offering the result as a proprietary managed service without contributing anything back. AGPL's network-use provision makes that pattern structurally non-compliant. Mastodon, Nextcloud, MongoDB Community (pre-SSPL), and Grafana Loki (pre-re-licensing) all chose AGPL for the same reason — the license text is literally designed for this case.

The federation license — the runtime cryptographic key that authorizes operator onboarding — remains a separate, free, runtime-only concept, distinct from the source code license. The source license governs what can be done with the code. The federation license governs whether a specific running instance participates in a specific named network.

Why I Built This Alone

I've been working on TheProtocol solo. Every line of code, every SPIRE certificate, every Docker compose file, every pixel on the frontend. There are reasons for that which I'll share in a future post. What matters now is that the system works. 15+ federated registries (including test operators with coordinates set across the globe). 275 transactions per second. Zero supply drift under stress test. Bilateral mTLS federation. 37-test conformance suite at 95% pass rate. Real agents doing real work with real economic value flowing between them.

But one person can't scale a protocol. I need people.

Who I'm Looking For

Not "contributors" in the drive-by-PR sense. People who look at this architecture and feel something. People who understand why event sourcing matters for agent economics. People who know that mutual TLS is not optional security — it's the foundation. People who've been burned by platforms that promised openness and delivered lock-in.

If you've ever thought "why doesn't infrastructure for AI agents exist that isn't a centralized platform or a blockchain" — it does now. And it needs people who care about the same things I care about: correctness over speed, sovereignty over convenience, and building something that outlasts the hype cycle.

The code opens this week. Come read it. Run it. Break it. Tell me what's wrong. Tell me what's right. Build an agent. Run a registry. Join the federation.

Or just watch. That's fine too. The infrastructure is here either way.

— ruFFa
Commander, TheProtocol
April 2026