What it's for
Built for makers, small producers and communities who want to sell without a platform taking a cut or deciding who may trade. It's meant for lawful goods and services. Each operator sets and enforces their market's rules, and the software includes reporting and moderation tools.
Why the name?
A monoculture platform is one big field owned by one company: efficient, fragile, and one decision away from wiping out everyone planted in it. A polyculture is many different plots, each tended by its own grower — if one fails, the others stand. This software is built for the second picture. The name comes from James C. Scott's writing on diverse, resilient cultivation; its sister project is Manioc Server, which can run it as a ready-made recipe.
How it works
- Direct payments, no middleman. Before selling, a seller's own wallet software generates and signs a pool of payment subaddresses, which the seller uploads. For each order, the server assigns one address from the pool and the buyer pays the seller directly. The server never holds keys, never sees funds, and never takes a fee.
- Sellers attest, the server doesn't spy. When payment arrives, the seller marks the order Paid in their own wallet's judgement. The server records the attestation — not transaction IDs, not amounts, not proofs it has no business holding.
- Ciphertext-only messaging. Buyers and sellers message with OpenPGP encryption done on their own machines. The server stores and forwards ciphertext it cannot read. There is no plaintext mode.
- No JavaScript. The whole marketplace is plain server-rendered pages (Rust/Axum + PostgreSQL). It works in Tor Browser at its strictest setting, so nobody has to turn on JavaScript to buy or sell.
- Reputation with receipts. Reviews are weighted by completed trade, disputes present signature-checked evidence that both sides can verify, Operators can close accounts that break their rules. Closed accounts' listings come down, and their history stays visible.
What it is not
- Not a shop. You cannot buy anything from this website or from this project. If someone is selling under this name, that's an independent operator's instance, not ours.
- Not escrow. Version 1 has no escrow, no multisig holding pattern, and no buyer-protection fund. Buyers and sellers trade on reputation, exactly as its design documents state up front.
- Not finished for mainnet. The software's MVP is built and test-gated (see below). A public mainnet instance is a separate decision for each operator, and this project still has legal review and a GPG usability test ahead before recommending one.
Where the project is
The full MVP — stages 0 through 10 of its specification — is built and has passed its gates: independently authored blind security tests at every stage (32/32 at the final stage), with the whole workspace at 489 tests passing, 0 failing after the Polyculture rebrand. A demonstration instance runs on Monero stagenet — play money, seeded fake users and listings — for review. Still ahead before a public launch: publishing the source for multi-reviewer code audits, legal counsel for operators, and the GPG usability test with real users.
Questions, briefly
- What does it cost? Nothing. AGPL-3.0+ open source. If you run a modified version as a network service, the licence asks you to share your source too — that's what keeps the polyculture a commons.
- Does it work without Manioc Server? Yes — any suitable server with PostgreSQL. Manioc Server simply offers it as a one-click recipe for home hosting over Tor.
- Can I try it? The stagenet demo is available for reviewers — ask via the contact links below. Never send real Monero to a demo instance.