The Protocols
Five documents govern Gigets: security, communication, integrity, governance and excellence. Each covers its own domain, and together they cover how the whole company behaves. They were written before the product existed, the only time they could be written honestly.
Five documents that decide how we work.
They bind founders, contributors, community leads, advisers and investors identically, and adherence is a condition of taking part.
The full text is internal. Advisers, contributors and investors receive it in full before they commit.
What follows is the part that concerns you.
01 · Security
People, systems and member data
What Gigets holds is the trust between its members, so security is the condition of the product working at all.
Access. Granted per person, for a stated reason, and revoked the day it is no longer needed, departures included. Every access to member data is logged.
Accounts. Two-factor authentication on every internal account that touches member data, code or infrastructure, with credentials kept personal.
Tools. Member data goes only through tools we have approved.
Location. Member data is stored primarily in the European Union. Anything processed elsewhere is covered by Standard Contractual Clauses and named on the Subprocessors page.
Deletion. Erasure is tested end to end.
Breach. A suspected compromise reaches the founder within the hour. Where members are at risk, the supervisory authority is notified within 72 hours and members are told directly, in plain language.
For you. Exchange conversations are read only for safety, disputes and aggregate signals, and every reading is logged. You can ask for a copy of your data and leave at any time.
02 · Communication
Inside, the record, and outside
Inside. English is the working language, and information is shared by default. In every review the most junior person speaks first and the founder last. Every significant decision is written down with an owner and a date.
Outside. One authorised person speaks to each audience, and every public claim can be substantiated. Roadmap, unshipped mechanics, member identities and the cap table stay inside the company.
The standing assumption. Anything written inside may one day be read outside, so everything we do should read well in daylight.
We argue a philosophy, how reciprocity works and why it pays, rather than how good our product is. Philosophy travels on its own.
03 · Integrity, Transparency and Accountability
Conduct, the product and counterparties
We intend to get the best out of people and situations. Decisions are the same whatever a person’s sex, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, orientation, age, disability or background.
Four rules built into the product itself.
Price exchanges. Prices belong to exchanges, in the schema, in the API and in every conversation.
The system mediates. Every automated output ends in something two people do together.
Ad-free. Every member is reached on equal terms.
Explain every output. Every match and every price carries a reason a member can read, and only what can be explained ships.
The wall. Where a conflict of interest would cost credibility, the two functions are permanently separated, the founder’s included: whoever prices an exchange has no stake in its price.
Capital. We accept only money whose origin can be verified.
When something goes wrong, transparency goes up.
04 · Governance
Authority, loyalty and decisions
Clear authority lets effort go into building.
Authority. Final strategic authority rests with the founder, and control is designed to stay there through the financing path, with a permanent veto disclosed in full to anybody asked to rely on it. Every opinion is heard, and the better-founded opinion on the matter carries the decision. Expertise over rank.
Five constitutional invariants. The closed loop. Prices on exchanges only. Ad-free. Leaderboard-free. An explanation on every output. Changing one requires a signed founder decision on the record.
Speed. Reversible decisions are made fast and corrected faster; irreversible ones get thought in proportion to how permanent they are. Every open question carries an owner and a date.
Ownership. Work done for the company is assigned to it in writing before it begins.
Reciprocity inside. Practised internally, deliberately and visibly.
05 · Excellence
The will to build, craft and culture
Distinct. We build the category where competing stops mattering, rather than compete inside an existing one.
Craft. Simplicity is earned. The experience is designed first and the technology built backwards from it, and every architectural decision is tested against one question: does it hold at ten times the users without a rebuild.
Shipping. Shipped work compounds.
Tools. The best available, AI above all. A company this small is possible because of what it leaves to its tools.
Ideas. Fought over hard and impersonally; attacking a weak idea is an obligation. Everybody owns their output entirely, the credit and the consequences, and acts without waiting to be told.
Why this is public
You are being asked to put real needs, sometimes private ones, into a product run by people you may not have met. The standard we hold ourselves to is part of what you should know before trusting us.
Anybody considering working with us, advising us, funding us or bringing a network here should see how decisions are made before they commit.
A promise written where everybody can see it is much harder to abandon quietly.
Questions about how Gigets is governed: [email protected]