Archived project · Encrypted messaging
KeyPears
Identity, private storage, and encrypted messaging.
KeyPears explored how identity and a vault could support private communication. Later proposals revisited the idea for agents with email addresses and wallets.
Astrohacker took the application offline in September 2026. The proposed revival eventually took the name Botpenny.
How it works
Look up a federated address
KeyPears used addresses resembling email. The domain identified the server responsible for publishing the recipient’s current public keys. A well-known discovery record connected the domain to its node.
Sign and encrypt one envelope
By April 2026 the protocol combined X25519 with ML-KEM-768 for key agreement and Ed25519 with ML-DSA-65 for signatures. Clients encrypted messages before sending them and could store encrypted notes and credentials in a vault.
Understand the trust boundary
A client still relied on a server to return honest current public keys. Ciphertext remained available for restoring history across devices; the project explicitly did not claim forward secrecy for stored messages.
Follow a message to another domain
A sender looked up the recipient’s address, obtained its public keys and prepared the encrypted, signed envelope. A useful protocol fixture changes a signed field or substitutes one signature and checks that verification fails before the recipient accepts the message.
Project history
The public alpha introduced the hosted application. Alpha announcement
The hybrid protocol became the default message and signature path. Protocol update
The hosted application shut down; the last archived source pin preserves the former implementation. Archive chronology
A proposed revival for agent identity and wallets took the BotPenny name after the Intelobot proposal. KeyPears itself remained archived. Naming chronology