2026-07-10 –, Birch Salon
AT Protocol is more than the protocol behind Bluesky – it's general-purpose open infrastructure, and resource allocation may be one of its most important use cases. This talk shows how hypercerts turn AT Protocol into a shared, AI-native data layer for funding mechanisms that anybody can build on.
AT Protocol is usually introduced as "the protocol behind Bluesky", an open alternative to centralized social media. That framing undersells it. AT Protocol is general-purpose open infrastructure for portable identity, federated data, and verifiable records. And the use case where openness matters most isn't social posting, it's how we coordinate and allocate resources.
This talk introduces hypercerts: a living digital record of impact work – who did what, when, and where – built as a portable claim layer on top of AT Protocol. When funders, recipients, and beneficiaries share an open data layer instead of each grant program running on its own silo, coordination compounds across the ecosystem.
On top of that shared layer, you can build many different funding and decision-making processes – quadratic funding, outcome-based funding, expert juries, AI-assisted deliberation, governance simulations – each reading from and writing to the same open records. Furthermore, this makes hypercerts an AI-native data layer for funding – agents are first-class participants alongside humans, querying and writing to the same open records.
I'll walk through working examples, such as:
- Ma Earth: a crowdfunding platform for regenerative land projects (reforestation, soil restoration, indigenous stewardship, community-led conservation), using hypercerts as the shared record across projects, evaluators, and funders.
- Simocracy: a governance simulation where people build AI digital twins of themselves and send those twins into deliberation and funding decisions on their behalf, with ATProto as the data layer and hypercerts as one of the available evaluation and allocation primitives.
If we believe distributed networks beat centralized ones because they're resilient, then resource allocation is exactly where that argument needs to win. Today impact funding, and funding for collective work more broadly, runs on closed dashboards, proprietary data formats, and grantmaker-specific reporting templates. None of it travels. Build it on AT Protocol instead and the same record can be read by every funder, every recipient, every researcher, and, eventually, every AI agent helping reason about where to allocate next.
Holke Brammer is a political economist working to strengthen collective action through open technology. As founder and director of Hypercerts Foundation, he leads the development of open infrastructure for impact funding and public goods resource allocation. He was previously a research scientist for public goods funding at Protocol Labs, worked at Yunus Social Business and Boston Consulting Group, and led Open Social Innovation efforts in Germany with ProjectTogether. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Economics from Stanford Graduate School of Business.