A record of what people do for each other.
A medium to help two people exchange or cooperate.
A mutual scale that all parties can understand.
Welcome to HEP
An ancient practice, with a modern memory.
Used HEP before, on another phone or in the browser? Bring your chain in now.
Install to your home screen
Your chain lives on this device. Adding HEP to your home screen gives it a stable place to live: faster to open, available offline, and your chain stays put if you ever clear your browser data.
First, let us secure your thread. Choose a PIN that you will remember. This is the only key to your identity. There is no recovery process, no reset email, no customer service. If you lose your PIN, your thread cannot be accessed by anyone, including you. This is by design. Your thread belongs to you completely.
Create your PIN
Confirm your PIN
Enter it once more to make sure.
Take a picture of yourself. It does not need to be perfect. This is not social media. It is just you.
By taking this photo now, you anchor an image of yourself at the very beginning of your encrypted chain. The original is sealed in your genesis record and cannot be changed. From this moment forward, no one can ever say this chain belonged to anybody but you.
When you exchange with someone later, they can compare your current photo to this anchor and see that you are the same person who started this chain. It protects you. It also protects the people who exchange with you.
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Skipping this means your chain has no identity anchor. You can add one later, but it will be harder for people to verify the chain is yours.
What should people know you by? You can use your real name, a nickname, an alias, whatever feels right. There is no authority here, no verification, no rules about this. Most people use what the people in their life already call them, but you decide.
You can change this anytime. Life changes. People change. Names change. That is all part of being part of a community, and it is all welcome here.
Make your first declaration
Declarations are things you record about yourself that help people understand who you are. This is yours to write. There is no authority to please, no profile to optimize, no algorithm reading it.
You can come back and add more anytime. Most people start small and build over time as they remember the things that matter.
If there are things you do over and over again with people, add them here. Anything you are proficient at. Anything you have certifications in. Anything you care about. You decide what counts.
How value works here
Long before money, when people made decisions about whether to help each other, they weighed cost against benefit in their minds. Was it worth the time? Was the trade fair? They measured these things using whatever was at hand: the hours they had, primitive weights, a stick, a shared sense of effort. Two people would arrive at some sense of what was reasonable, or they would not, and the cooperation either happened or it did not.
That same principle is alive in HEP. You weigh cost against benefit yourself. The system records the result; it does not compute it for you.
HEP uses a shared scale from 0 to 1,000,000. Everyone who uses HEP uses this same scale. When your sense of a thing's worth meets someone else's sense, you are comparing numbers on the same ruler.
The rare, exceptional things one person can do for another, like curing a disease or saving a life, sit at or near the top of the scale. The simplest, most effortless help sits near the bottom. Most everyday cooperation lives much closer to zero than to a million.
As you start using HEP, your sense of where things sit on this scale becomes your personal measuring stick. It is how you decide whether what someone is offering or asking is worth carrying on your chain. Whoever asks for a lot, the other person carries that weight on their own chain. You decide whether the trade makes sense for you.
If this sits comfortably with you, continue. If you would like a moment to think it through with examples, the worksheet walks you through three small valuations to help you find your own sense of the scale.
Show that your phone is a phone
Real phones, held by real people, behave in ways software cannot fake. They move around. The temperature changes. They connect to networks that come and go. They sit in a pocket, then on a desk, then in a car. The pattern of those signals is what proves a person is real, not the signals themselves.
We do not need to know who you are. We do not need to read your data. We just need your phone to behave like a phone. The signals are hashed before storage. Raw data never leaves your device.
Location
Proves your chain spans real places over time
Motion sensors
Proves a real hand holds a real phone
Captured automatically
Battery, temperature, network type, and other device signals are captured during exchanges with no permission needed.
You can change these anytime in Settings
Generating your identity...
Creating your keys and securing with your PIN.
You have just created the beginning of your thread.
Right now it has one entry: you, declaring who you are. Everything that follows, every cooperative act, every exchange, every moment of real effort recognized, builds on this foundation.
As your life evolves, new skills, new experiences, new things you want to declare about yourself, you can add them anytime. Your photo can be updated. Your declarations can grow. Your thread grows with you.
If you are not exchanging with someone right now, we recommend starting with the learning tools. They will walk you through the concepts that make exchanges meaningful. The learning section is always available from the home screen.
Human Exchange Protocol
Enter your PIN
Take a breath. Try again in 10s
Your Chain
Your records are only in this browser
You are using HEP in Safari. Your exchanges are saved in this browser, not on your phone as an app.
Safari can erase them. It clears a website's saved data if you do not open it for 7 days, if you clear your history, and as soon as you close a Private Browsing tab. If that happens, these exchanges are gone.
HEP is a web app you can add to your home screen. Once it is installed, your records stay on your phone when you open and close it.
Installing does not bring your browser records with you, so back up first:
Close this and tap Back up now under your standing. Send it to yourself by Mail or Messages; a copy is also saved to this phone.
In Safari, tap the Share button, then Add to Home Screen.
Open HEP from your home screen, tap "Recovering a previous chain? Import here" and choose the file you saved.
Your standing is your currency minus your cosmic share: everything you have produced for others, less everything you have received from them. The two totals sit on one scale, and the dashed piece between the ends of the bars is your standing. When currency is longer you stand above; when cosmic share is longer you stand below.
Neither total ever goes down. Your standing moves only because a new exchange adds to one side or the other, and any exchange can change it. There is no floor and no interest.
Every unit was written in one exchange on two chains at once, produced on one and received on the other, signed by both people. That is why, across everyone, all standings add up to zero. The Wave shows how your standing has moved over time.
Two-column ledger (double-entry bookkeeping, Pacioli, 1494). HEP keeps the rule that both sides must match, and moves it out of your own book and across everyone. What it removes is the debt: nothing is owed, nothing falls due, no interest.
Ratio in lowest terms. The sentence under the number is a description, not a rate.
Your standing is what you have produced minus what you have received. Above the line, you have produced more than you have received. Below it, the reverse. There is no floor and no interest, and any exchange can change the direction.
The line can sit below even when you provide more often, because what you receive can be worth more than what you provide. The bars under the line show how often, so both are visible.
Week, Month and Year draw where you stood at the end of each block, like a closing price. The bars count the exchanges in each block.
Typical evens out the few exchanges far bigger than your usual, using one fixed rule that is the same for everyone. Your chain itself is never altered.
How Typical is worked out
Most exchanges in a life are ordinary. Now and then a few are extraordinary: a windfall, a big job, a medical bill, a loss. Those few can take over the whole picture.
Typical evens out those few, the very good and the very hard alike, so you can see your everyday pattern. Nothing on your chain changes.
Exchanges are sorted into two kinds: what you provided and what you received.
For each kind, the app finds the middle-sized exchange (the median) and how far exchanges of that kind usually sit from it.
Any exchange more than 3.5 times that usual distance away is counted as a middle-sized exchange of its kind instead.
Every other exchange stays exactly as it was. The line and the blocks are redrawn from these.
Typical needs at least 20 exchanges of a kind before it evens any of them out.
Method: modified z-score with median absolute deviation, threshold 3.5 (Iglewicz and Hoaglin, 1993), applied separately to provided and received exchanges. Flagged exchanges are replaced with the median of their kind. The chain itself is never altered; Typical is a view of it.
People
Whose work you did
Each person who gave you credit, over time; bigger marks, more credit
Credit of each exchange
Whose work you received
Each person whose work you received, over time; bigger marks, more credit given
Credit you gave in each exchange
first exchangetoday
How this is drawn
Each row is one person, in the order you first exchanged with them, with no names. Each mark is one exchange at the time it happened, sized by its credit. The bars beneath show each exchange's credit on the same stretch of time. Week, Month and Year add up the credit in each block.
Everyone's pattern looks different, depending on the work you do and the exchanges you make. If something looks odd, it is there to be looked at and understood. Receiving is not a debt: the credit you gave someone is your recognition of what they did for you, not a bill.
Someone reading your chain sees the rows only: uniform marks, no sizes, no bars, no numbers.
Customer concentration (Pareto, Lorenz, Herfindahl) for how your exchange spreads across people. Supplier concentration on the receiving side.
Cohort and retention analysis (direct marketing) for who comes back over time.
Sums per time block (time-series resampling) for Week, Month and Year.
What HEP removed: the index, the ranking and the targeting. Rows stay in the order people first appeared, never by size.
Reach
How far the people you exchange with are from you
Locations come from phones and are not guaranteed.
How this is drawn
Reach is the distance between you and the person you exchanged with, at the time of the exchange. You are wherever you are; they may be across town or across the world. Only a rough distance is kept for each exchange, never a place.
The rings are distances, not borders: nearby (under 25 km), your region (to 300 km), across your country (to 1,500 km), across your continent (to 5,000 km), and across the world. Marks are spread around each ring, so the picture shows distance only, never direction. No place names are drawn and there is no map.
Older exchanges that carry only a typed town and state are placed when they match your usual town or state; ones farther away are counted but not drawn, because how far they were was not recorded.
It is on your phone only and never shown to anyone you exchange with. Nothing on your chain changes.
Distance decay (geography, the gravity model of interaction, Zipf 1946; Tobler's first law). Interaction falls off with distance. Here the fall-off is drawn and nothing is done with it: no catchment, no market area, no prediction.
Activity space (urban geography and mobility studies). Used to describe and to track. Here names and direction are removed and the picture never leaves the phone.
Device
Pending
Recent Acts
Tap any act to pre-fill a new exchange
Cooperate
New exchange
1
Connect
2
Read
3
Compose
?
Confirm they have this mark
Ask them if this mark is on their screen.
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Connected
What are you doing?
The provider describes the act and sets the price. The receiver reviews and confirms.
Waiting for their proposal
Waiting for their proposal
How are you connected?
Choose how to share this with the other person.
📴 We can scan
You're together or can show each other your screens. Fastest path.
💬 We're not together
Send via text, email, WhatsApp, or any messaging app.
🔉 We'll pair with codes
Read each other a short code. Works on a phone call, in person, or days apart. No scanning, no internet needed right now.
Pair with codes — no scanning needed
Your code
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Read this to the other person. They'll read theirs to you.
Both people fill out their own side. When either phone reaches a server, the halves are matched. If values agree and directions complement, the exchange resolves automatically.
Connecting session...
Your code
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Read this to the other person
Waiting for them to scan...
Having trouble scanning? Tap "Switch to message" above to send as a link instead.
Send the proposal via text, WhatsApp, email, or any messaging app.
They're reviewing your proposal...
Waiting for their response
When they confirm, the exchange will continue.
Recording... sharing with the other person
Your record is saved
Now share the settlement so their record updates too.
Exchange recorded
Both chains have grown by one record
Start another exchange
Incoming Proposal
📴
How did they send it?
Scan their QR code or paste what they sent you.
Your record is saved. Sharing with the other person...
Confirmed
Now share your confirmation so their record updates too.
● Auto-settling via server…
Waiting for their settlement...
Waiting for their response
They're completing the exchange on their side. Once done, your record will be fully settled.
● Listening for auto-settlement…
Done. Both recorded.
Act Recorded
Both chains are written. The cooperative act is memorialized.
My Chain
Share Chain
Share a read-only snapshot of your chain for negotiation. No counterparty names are included. Only your work patterns, density, and categories are visible.
Their Chain
Share App
Share the Human Exchange Protocol with someone. They'll be able to install it on their phone and get started.
Want to introduce them with a guided first exchange? Send the link below instead — it includes your identity so they can practice with you.
Invite Someone New
One code does both jobs. It brings them into the app, and it opens an exchange with you, so the invitation and your first cooperative act are the same gesture.
Learn
Start Here
The Cooperative Act
What actually happens when two people help each other — and why it matters
Value Is Yours
You decide what your work is worth — nobody else
Beyond the Moment
How your record lets you cooperate with anyone — not just the person you helped
Find Your Unit
A thought exercise to calibrate your own sense of value before your first exchange
Go Deeper
Foundations
How exchanges work, what your chain is, and what you can build
Price Discovery
How pricing emerges from your history and negotiation
Exchange & Parity
Exchange ratios, purchasing power, and cross-chain trust
Building Community
Seeding networks, growing trust, and collective strength
Your Phone, Your Server
Offline-first design, data sovereignty, and no dependencies
Privacy & Safety
Controlling what others see, protecting yourself, deleting everything
What you can do for others: trades, crafts, services, licenses, certificates.
Education
What has shaped what you know: degrees, courses, books you have read, mentoring you received, self-study.
Describe yourself truthfully, the way you want to be known. Everything here stays on this phone.
Your photo helps show you are a real person.
Skills and qualifications
Education
How this is different from a CV
Everyone learns differently. Some people are brilliant and never finished high school. Some learned a trade from a grandparent, a friend or a neighbor. Some read one book, or met one idea, that changed how they see the world. Others spent years in school and earned degrees and certificates. All of it counts.
This is where you describe your body of knowledge: what you can do, and how you came to know it. A mentor, a school, an author you value, a philosophy that shaped you, years of practice. Your skills and your education are yours. Nobody grades them here.
A CV is built to be judged. It ranks you against other people and opens or closes doors. This is not that. Nothing here is scored, compared or checked, and nothing here is needed to exchange with anyone.
It is here for one reason: so that when you work with someone, they can understand where you are coming from and the way you learned what you know.
It is optional. Write as much or as little as you like, change it whenever you want, or leave it empty.
Scale Exercise
Think about how you value different kinds of effort. This helps you understand where you sit on the shared scale.
Value:
Time it takesPhysical effortWhat feels fairSkill requiredWhat I'd charge in $Years of learning
Value:
Time it takesPhysical effortWhat feels fairSkill requiredWhat I'd charge in $Years of learning
Value:
Time it takesPhysical effortWhat feels fairSkill requiredWhat I'd charge in $Years of learning
This exercise helps you calibrate how you think about value. You can redo it anytime.
Replace this phone's chain?
Importing a backup replaces them with what is in the backup. Anything on this phone that is not in the backup will be gone.
If you want to keep them, back up this phone first.