Technology · QR Commerce
Open infrastructure.
No platform lock-in.
Every architectural decision in Economy3 is made for the same reason: the infrastructure must work for a herder in Rajasthan and a compliance officer in Brussels, simultaneously, with no intermediary capturing the value between them.
Architecture
Schema.org → EPCIS 2.0 export path
Full stack
The record, anatomized
Two layers. One record. Every reader satisfied.
The resource layer is schema.org — readable by DPP validators, Google, and every EU registry endpoint. The flow layer is ValueFlows — readable by hREA GraphQL clients and FEP-0837 federated marketplaces. Both live in the same JSON-LD document. No translation layer.
Layer 1 — Resource (schema.org + DPP validators)
{
"@context": ["https://schema.org", { "vf": "...", "om2": "..." }],
"@type": ["Product", "vf:EconomicResource"],
"name": "50/50 Wool-Alpaca Worsted Yarn",
"countryOfOrigin": "US",
"hasMeasurement": { "@type": "QuantitativeValue", "value": 4.1, "unitCode": "KGM" },
"material": { "@type": "Product", "name": "Clean Alpaca Fiber", ... }Layer 2 — Flow (ValueFlows · hREA · FEP-0837)
// ── potentialAction: economic events ────────────────── "potentialAction": [ { "@type": ["vf:Commitment"], "vf:action": "produce", "vf:resourceQuantity": { "om2:hasNumericalValue": 0.9, "om2:hasUnit": "PoundAvoirdupois" }, "description": "Spin 0.5 lb wool + 0.5 lb alpaca → 0.9 lb yarn" }, { "@type": ["TransferAction", "vf:EconomicEvent"], "vf:action": "produce", "vf:fulfills": { "@id": "https://economy3.net/claim/..." }, "vf:resourceQuantity": { "om2:hasNumericalValue": 0.9, "om2:hasUnit": "PoundAvoirdupois" } }, { "@type": ["vf:Claim"], "vf:triggeredBy": { "@id": "https://economy3.net/acceptance/..." }, "vf:resourceQuantity": { "om2:hasNumericalValue": 190, "om2:hasUnit": "UNYT" } } ]
Orange = schema.org · readable by DPP validators, Google, EU registries
Blue = ValueFlows · readable by hREA, FEP-0837
Why we built it this way
Holochain, not Ethereum
Agent-centric. No gas fees. Works offline. Append-only DHT. Global South farmers can sign hops on a basic phone with no internet connection. Ethereum requires gas for every write and fails offline.
JSON-LD, not JSON
W3C standard. EU ESPR mandated. AI/agentic discovery ready. schema.org vocabulary is the only format that satisfies climate compliance regulations AND is natively readable by AI purchasing agents. Plain JSON is opaque to both.
schema.org, not PROV-O
material accepts a Product as its value — chain custody stages by nesting Product records. Full lineage in pure schema.org. No PROV-O required. Custody events map to ReceiveAction/SendAction/TransferAction.
Append-only records
No upstream records are ever modified. All changes are additive. A compliance officer auditing a DoD supply chain sees every version, every correction, every handoff — in the order it happened. Quiet rewrites are impossible.
Federation, not platform
Local value capture. Permissioned minimum shared across borders. Partners own their data. The infrastructure is a digital public good. No platform captures the value that rightfully belongs to the maker.
MCP server, not API
Model Context Protocol is the emerging standard for AI agent tool use. The Economy3 MCP server exposes five tools — get_provenance_record, verify_berry_amendment, check_eu_dpp, get_custody_chain, check_compliance — directly queryable by Claude, GPT, and any MCP-compatible agent. Live now for demo records; DHT connection ships Q3 2026.
Cryptographic signing as legal compliance, not a feature
ESPR Article 11(g) requires 'data authentication, reliability, and integrity' for every DPP record. The EU Joint Research Centre's 2026 DPP methodology elaborates: 'verifiability and attributability: every data addition traceable to the actor that created it, through digital signatures or equivalent cryptographic means.' Holochain's per-agent signing satisfies this requirement by design. Competitors who rely on database records without cryptographic attestation are non-compliant. Source: JRC145830, doi:10.2760/4511279.
ValueFlows, not custom economic vocabulary
VF is the emerging standard for economic coordination on distributed ledgers — used by hREA (Holochain VF implementation) and FEP-0837 (federated marketplace protocol over ActivityPub). Economy3 records are dual-typed: schema.org for DPP validators and regulators, vf:EconomicEvent/vf:Commitment/vf:Claim for VF consumers. One record is readable by both without translation. om2 (Ontology of Units of Measure) provides the unit IRI vocabulary — PoundAvoirdupois, Kilogram, Hectare.
ESPR non-functional requirements
The regulation specifies the stack
ESPR Article 10(1)(d) defines the technical requirements every DPP system must satisfy. Economy3 satisfies all of them by design — not by retrofit.
Source: JRC (2026) doi:10.2760/4511279 · ESPR Regulation 2024/1781
The safe commons choice
Open infrastructure.
No platform to defect.
Catalini, Cremer, and Tucker (2025) showed that in the agentic economy, the verifiable share sv of output expands only through cryptographic provenance — not through marketing claims, not through certificates, not through platform reputation. The signed record is the primitive.
Economy3 is the interoperability layer. Holochain, JSON-LD, schema.org, ValueFlows, om2, EPCIS 2.0 — all published open standards, all freely implementable, all with active communities. Partners own their records. The DHT has no owner. There is no platform to change its terms, no API to be deprecated, no pricing to be raised.
Economy3 records are readable today by hREA GraphQL clients, FEP-0837 federated marketplaces, schema.org validators, EPCIS 2.0 exporters, and AI purchasing agents — without any Economy3 server in the loop. That is what open infrastructure means.
All standards are open, published, and freely implementable.