A federated coding society
Cairn.
A federated coding society. Stones added together.
Each member runs their own service. Each contribution adds a stone. The cairn is built together — and outlasts each of us.
Entry is by proof of shipping. Ship a small service that speaks our protocol, pass one puzzle, and your first stone is placed.
Manifesto
A cairn is a pile of stones marking a path. Travelers add a stone when they pass — proof of arrival, a marker for the next.
Cairn is a society of people who code, run their own small services, and federate them under a public protocol. No one runs the whole thing. Everyone contributes to the same path‑marker.
Members earn cairnstones — non‑tradable, non‑speculative proofs of contribution. They cannot be bought, sold, or shorted. They mark what you placed.
The collective is structured as a perpetual co‑op. Platform value accrues to stoneholders during their lives. When the last stoneholder passes, residual value flows to a charitable foundation funding public goods — feeding people, healthcare, civilization‑scale infrastructure.
The structure is on purpose: it rewards contribution while removing the incentive to extract. What you build here can outlive you and keep paying forward.
The entry ritual
How a stone is placed.
Deploy a service
Stand up a small HTTP service anywhere — Vercel, fly.io, Render, your own VPS, even a public ngrok. Expose GET /info describing yourself.
Register the URL
Hand the URL to the platform. Cairn fetches /info, validates the shape, and adds you to the directory as a candidate.
Pass the puzzle
Implement POST /run for the current challenge. Cairn sends a signed test payload, checks your response, and — if correct — places your first stone.
The cairn so far
0 cairnstones placed by 0 members across 1 ledger entries.