The Volt4
Platform Architecture
Volt4 is a decentralised platform for the secure, peer-to-peer sharing of services, data, files and analytics — giving every participant complete, policy-driven control over who can reach their resources. There is no central server: identity, trust and encryption live in each node. This page annotates the architecture, from the core services inside a single Volt up to the Synapse and Cortex layers. Source: volt4.ai documentation ↗.
Every Volt has the same shape. Consumers connect through one of five interface points; each call is mediated by the same core services, so identity, policy and encryption travel with the data rather than living in a gateway.
Volts are peers, not clients of a server. Synapse and Cortex collaboration services run across them; Relays carry end-to-end encrypted traffic between peers; the Registry lets peers discover and verify one another.
The engine that turns a node into a Volt. Each service is local to the node, so security and policy travel with the data rather than living in a central gateway.
Identity Services
Decentralised identity (W3C DID) — every Volt, peer and resource is addressed by a self-sovereign identifier, no central authority required.
Policy Engine
Fine-grained, declared access control. You define who can reach which data and service; the engine enforces it locally and continuously.
VC Services
Issue, present and verify signed W3C Verifiable Credentials — the trust primitive behind data-centric security and provenance.
Resource Manager
A generalised container model — data, services, files and analytics are all Resources with uniform identity, policy and access.
Service Manager
Registers, exposes and orchestrates the services a Volt offers to its peers, mediated by policy.
Database Services
Encrypted-at-rest persistence plus a Sync Database for conflict-free, lazy peer-to-peer replication of state.
Five interchangeable surfaces over the same core. Pick the one that fits your stack — embed natively, call REST, stream gRPC, subscribe to the Wire, or wrap an external system.
In-process bindings for js / Python / C++ / Rust — embed a Volt directly in your application.
REST surface described by OpenAPI — the lowest-friction way to drive a Volt from any language or tool.
Strongly-typed, streaming RPC for high-throughput, low-latency service-to-service calls.
Message / event publishing — the pub-sub channel over which Volts exchange signed updates.
Bring third-party and legacy systems into the fabric — surfaced through Cortex agents as first-class APIs.
Volts are peers. Relays surface capabilities on any system with end-to-end encryption, and the Registry lets peers find and verify each other before any data moves.
Volt Relay
A secure pass-through service that surfaces Volt capabilities on any system, end-to-end encrypted between peers with no intermediate server able to read the traffic.
Volt Registry
Identity, addressing and discovery — the service peers use to find and cryptographically verify one another before any data is exchanged.
Volts & Clients
Each participant runs a Volt (or a light client). There is no central hub — every node holds its own identity, policy and encrypted store.
On top of the Volt primitives sit two service families: Synapse for synchronisable, signed documents, and Cortex for AI-agent workflows — each backed by a marketplace for shared schemas and deployable agents.
Synapse Services
DataCreate, publish, audit and policy-control peer-to-peer synchronisable complex documents at near real time. Synapses give you full peer-to-peer lazy sync of structured, signed data.
Cortex Services
AICreate, manage and orchestrate AI agents and lambda processes in complex workflows across peer-to-peer collaboration. A Cortex is a directed agent workflow that transforms, ingests and analyses data.
Schema Marketplace
SemanticsDefine interoperable, signed ontologies for type-checking, interoperability and shared semantics — so heterogeneous parties can fuse data with verifiable structure.
Agent Marketplace
DistributionPublish secure, TAIBOM-instrumented AI agents for deployment — provenance-tracked capabilities that peers can discover, trust and run.
Self-sovereign, decentralised identity for every actor.
Signed claims that carry trust and provenance.
Declared rules; enforced at the edge, not a gateway.
Uniform container for data, services and files.
Lazy, conflict-free peer-to-peer state replication.
File-storage abstraction over encrypted state.
Signed message / event publishing channel.
Pluggable key management, with quantum-safe options.
- Languages
- JavaScript (Web / Node)PythonC++RustCLI
- Runs on
- WindowsmacOSLinuxRaspberry PiOpenWrt
- Deployment
- Public cloudPrivate cloudOn-premEdgeAir-gapped
- Architectures
- x86-64ARM64ARM