Layer 0 of the protocol stack is the Friend stack: Friend OS, Friend FS, and Friend SH, a programmable capability substrate in which authority is a grant-graph projected as a file system and the books are shared journals.
Friend OS is the container and network operating system: verifiability, integrity checking, isolation, computational authority boundaries. Friend FS is a distributed, capability-oriented file system: capabilities form a shared grant graph, and the file system is that graph's projection, the delineation and enforcement of authority over shares localized across machines. Friend SH is the programmable shell that glues them into a fully programmable capability substrate.
Friend FS is also an accounting creature: a multi-type, multi-record, programmable accounting system, implemented as shared nostro/vostro journals with programmable file types as views. This is not an analogy. Layer 0 is the partitioned distributed ledger, running: pairwise books held between counterparties, meaning computed at the edge, no global record required.
Why files and a shell: they are the maximum interoperability surface agents already inhabit. LLM-driven agentic software is optimized for exactly this medium; a substrate that speaks files and shell commands needs no bespoke integration, and frontends become side quests. The economic harness is assembled from this running stack.
Status, plainly: Friend OS and Friend FS are built and working, with first members onboarded. Friend SH is in development. The stewards' own organization runs on Friend FS as a capability grant-graph with shared journals — the scale-model organization operates on the layer it describes. The substrate's economic instrumentation, metering verified economic state-changes into uECSA, is what the seed round builds on top of this foundation.
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