The HOP Project
The Protocol
HOP — the HOP Optimisation Protocol — is a substrate-neutral labour-market protocol developed by Brendan Hopper, Matt Beane, and me. It treats work attestation as protocol infrastructure: workers carry their own portable, cryptographically-attested biography, institutions sign abstracted attestations of completed work, and chains compete on governance rather than capturing workers through lock-in.
HOP is to labour what Sigstore is to software supply chain. An open protocol for cryptographically attested work units, with content-addressed identifiers, signed by participants, federated across implementations, verifiable by any party.
— Hopper, Beane & Yegge, HOP Protocol v0.1, §0The protocol is closer in spirit to the institutional infrastructure of the Postal Union or the BIS than to anything in contemporary blockchain. The cryptographic primitives (BBS+, Merkle anchoring, dual-signatures, content addressing) are tools, not identity. The intellectual ancestors are Haudenosaunee elders, Hirschman, Vygotsky, Beane, and Jefferson.
The people behind this
Brendan Hopper
Head of Technology at Commonwealth Bank of Australia, with a $20M engineering budget and a world-class team. Brendan invented the protocol's economic layer — Beans (a play on Matt Beane's name, with a lovely beanstalk-growth maturation metaphor), Chains, and the rest of the primitives designed to ride on top of the Beads ecosystem.
Dr. Matt Beane
Author of The Skill Code (Harvard Business Review Press, 2024) and co-founder of SkillBench. One of the world's foremost researchers on how humans develop and transfer skills. In the Wasteland implementation, owns the skills, mentoring, and progression systems — and built the initial 10,000 character sheets himself.
Steve Yegge
Built Beads (the protocol's atomic-work data structure, on Dolt at github.com/gastownhall/beads), and launched the Wasteland in March 2026 — the federation pattern that has become the protocol's reference implementation for the components in production today.
Components in production
Beads
The unit of work in HOP. A Bead is an atomic, content-addressed record of a piece of completed work. Beads are stored in a version-controlled SQL database (Dolt), federated across nodes, and signed by both worker and institution at the point of attestation.
Gas Town
The agent orchestration layer underneath HOP — the working environment in which Skill-Agents construct curricula, Worker-Agents evaluate them, and Validators stamp completed work. Fifteen thousand GitHub stars and operational.
The Wasteland
The federation pattern. Gas Towns connect to each other through DoltHub, with a commons for putting work up for grabs and a reputation / skills system built by Matt Beane. Live, in active use by a small community of operators, and ready for a larger deployment. The Wasteland is the canonical reference implementation for the parts of the protocol already in production.
Observatory & rig
Skillchains run on Observatory infrastructure for human workers and on rig infrastructure (Quetzalcoatl, Xolotl, Tezcatlipoca) for AI agents. These hold the skill-vector trajectories that compound into a worker's portable biography over time.
The specification
HOP Protocol v0.1: Substrate-Neutral Work Attestation Spec — a fourteen-section document covering the five laws, topology, atomic units, the skill code, agent architecture, economic mechanics, namespace and trust hierarchy, implementation substrate, applied use cases, foundations and lineage, adoption path, glossary, open concerns, and the v0.3 reputation surface. Roughly 40% of v0.1 is running in production today (the components above). Public release of the v0.1 markdown source is forthcoming.
v0.1 · Hopper · Beane · Yegge