Governance · Who runs what
A founder-led company.
A network with no single owner.
Two things, kept separate on purpose. A company builds the software and is accountable for it. The network it serves is the part no single party controls. Here is how that works, plainly.
Potluck AI, Inc.
Builds and maintains the software. Founder-led, accountable for the code, the IP, and the commercial side.
The mesh
The shared compute pool and its routing rules. Member-operated, with no single owner, governed over time by the people who power it.
The company
Potluck AI, Inc. is a founder-led Delaware company. It builds and maintains the software, holds the code and the IP, and runs the commercial side. It is led by its founder, not owned by its members. We say that plainly, because an honest structure holds up better than a feel-good one.
The commitments that matter to members do not live in a membership share. They live in the company’s charter and its published policies, where they bind the company regardless of who runs it:
- No selling your data, and no training on it without explicit opt-in
- Local-first by default. Your conversations stay on your machine unless you choose otherwise
- An open-source client you can read, fork, and leave with
- The blinded-routing privacy invariant enforced in code and tested in CI, not promised in a policy
The network
The network is the part with no single owner. The shared compute pool, the routing rules, the question of who runs what. These are member-operated and, over time, governed by the people who power the network, not by the company alone.
Governance is bounded and staged. Early on, a foundation stewards the network’s parameters. Over time, control of those parameters moves to network governance held by the people who contribute, after an independent review confirms the network is genuinely distributed and not controlled by any one party, the company included.
Network governance covers a specified set of parameters:
- Routing policy for the trusted pool, including defaults and fallback behavior
- Slashing rules for nodes that misbehave on the public side
- Treasury allocation for shared infrastructure the network funds
- Fee parameters for public-pool usage
It stops there on purpose. Network governance does not reach the company’s code, product, or operations, and it never overrides your own per-request routing choice. Compute should not buy control of the network, so governance is scoped and staged to keep any single party, including the largest contributor, from capturing it.
How contributors share in it
Running a contributor peer, sharing your hardware with the network, is real work. It should earn a real stake.
Day to day, contribution is a ledger, not a market. You earn credits for the compute you serve, and you spend them to run inference yourself. No wallet, no speculation, the same shape as cloud credits. The credit you earn for work cannot be traded or sold, and it never converts into the governance token.
Over time, the people who power the network also come to share in its governance token, the voice described above. We are designing that distribution carefully, with securities counsel, and we are not publishing specifics until the structure is right. What we will commit to now: it rewards genuine, sustained participation in the network, and it is not a scheme to turn contribution into a speculative payout.
It is opt-in. Many contributors will simply earn credits, offset their own usage, and never touch the token at all.
| Compute credit | Governance token | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is for | Using the network | Governing the network |
| How you get it | Earned for compute, or bought with cash | Shared over time with those who power it |
| Tradeable | No, ever | Yes, in a later phase |
| Needed to use Potluck | No | No |
No token needed on your own machines or in your trusted circle. It only enters when you opt into the open public pool.
What this means for you
- You can stay entirely local
- Your device, your models, your memory. You can use Potluck without ever touching the network, a wallet, or a token. The local product stands on its own.
- If you contribute compute, you earn credits
- Contribution is a ledger, not a token: credits offset your own usage, no wallets, no speculation, the same shape as cloud credits. The credit cannot be traded.
- Over time, you share in governing the network
- The people who keep the network alive come to hold a voice over its parameters through the governance token. It is opt-in, it is being structured with counsel, and it is never required to use Potluck.
- If you leave, your setup goes with you
- Your local models, your local memory, your mesh configuration. The network is one layer you can opt out of. Your data was never in our cloud to begin with.
When does this land?
The engineering stack (memory, mesh, inference dispatch) is the v0 foundation, shipping and measured today. Company formation and the network foundation structure are in process. The credit ledger starts in trusted-circle scope, then extends to the public pool once the network has real density.
The governance token launches only after the network has substance, with security audits, under the applicable regulatory framework. A token launched into an empty network coordinates nothing, so the mesh ships first. The structures described here are designed and reviewed but not yet fully executed. The roadmap page has the current state.
See where things stand and what is in flight.
Roadmap