A laptop has gigabytes idle. A mid-size IT department has terabytes. Daisy unlocks both — with cryptographic attestation on every contribution, every retrieval, every custody handoff. Built so individuals and corporate IT both come out ahead.
Install Daisy. Scan your drives. Pick what to contribute — file by file or whole categories. Every contributed byte earns cooperative storage credit, signed and posted to the ledger.
For: individual contributors (today) · corporate IT pilots (Q3 2026, contact us) · operators of always-on anchor nodes (rolling)
Install Daisy →Free for individuals. macOS today. Win + Linux soon.
Back up your data across the cooperative. Blind custody by mathematical construction — hosts can't see what they hold. Erasure-coded across fault-domain-diverse nodes. Every retrieval signed both ways.
For: regulated businesses needing audit trails · Tennessee orgs requiring data sovereignty · anyone tired of "trust me" cloud
See how it'll work ↓Phase 4 — peer protocol in development.
Nobody ever holds your files. They hold encrypted ciphertext fragments. Even if they tried — even if AmericaFirst4Us were compelled by a court — the math prevents the lookup.
Three operations, in order, all before any byte leaves your device.
Your file gets encrypted locally, with your own key, before anything goes anywhere. Custodians never see plaintext. AF4U never sees plaintext. Your ISP never sees plaintext.
The ciphertext is split into N shards. One shard reveals nothing. Even all N shards reveal nothing without your decryption key. Each shard is just random-looking bytes.
Shards go to fault-domain-diverse custodians. Each signs a receipt over the hash, not the contents. They prove they're storing something — they cannot know what.
Cloud providers always say "your data is encrypted." Read carefully — by whom, with whose keys?
| Who can read your file? | AWS / Google / iCloud | BackupTN cooperative |
|---|---|---|
| The provider | Yes — they hold the keys (or can compel KMS) | No — operator has no path to plaintext |
| A court order to provider | Provider can be compelled to decrypt | Nothing to compel — operator literally cannot |
| A malicious employee | Insider risk is real, mitigated by policy | No insider; nothing to insider |
| Your peer who holds a shard | N/A (single provider, no peers) | No — they see ciphertext, signed-blind |
| A hacker breaching the operator | Catastrophic — keys + data both present | Negligible — no keys, no plaintext anywhere |
| You (with your key) | Yes | Yes — the only party who can |
They hold one encrypted shard. Even all N shards don't decrypt without your key. AES + Ed25519 — same crypto your bank uses. Brute-force is computationally infeasible.
Files are reconstructable from K of N shards — lose a few peers, your data's still intact. The protocol re-replicates automatically to maintain target redundancy.
Custodians sign a receipt when they accept a shard. If retrieval fails, that signature is tamper-evidence on the public ledger — bad actors get revoked and lose all future cooperative storage credit.
We have nothing to steal. No keys on our servers, no plaintext anywhere on our infrastructure. The worst a breach could do is post a defacement — your data is safe by virtue of never being in our reach.
Cloud providers ask you to trust them. Auditors won't accept that. Daisy generates Ed25519 receipts on every action — designed to support the audit trails your compliance program already needs.
Every storage transaction produces an Ed25519-signed receipt from both requester and custodian. The pair posts to a tamper-evident ledger. Designed to support HIPAA, SOX, CMMC, and PCI-DSS audit-trail requirements — bring the receipts to your assessor.
Most IT shops have more idle capacity than their backup needs. Contribute 50 TB, consume 5 TB — you're net positive in the cooperative. Storage stops being a cost line and becomes a balance-sheet asset.
Domestic-only custodian selection. Region, jurisdiction, and fault-domain filters at the protocol layer. Your contracts and regulators say where the data goes — the cooperative respects that at the math layer, not in a policy doc.
Open protocol. Multi-custodian. Open-source daemon. Files are encrypted under your keys before they leave your machine. Migrate out at any time, take all your data — no export fees, no rebuild, no permission needed.
Erasure-coded shards distributed across geographic, ISP, and power-grid fault domains. An AWS us-east-1 outage doesn't take you down — neither does a regional ISP failure, neither does any single cooperative member going dark.
The cooperative doesn't build datacenters — it reclaims capacity already manufactured and powered. Lower marginal carbon per stored byte than any cloud provider's lifecycle analysis. ESG-reportable, with the same signed ledger as audit.
Cloud storage is extractive — every new customer pays the provider's shareholders. The cooperative inverts that: every new participant makes the network cheaper, more durable, and more provable for everyone already in it.
A SaaS adds a customer → provider extracts more rent. The cooperative adds a contributor → the shared pool grows and per-byte cost falls for everyone. Network effects flow to participants, not to a corporate parent.
Erasure coding works better with diversity. A new contributor in a new region, on a new ISP, on a new power grid improves recovery odds for every file already stored, not just their own.
Every storage transaction posts a signed receipt. The ledger accumulates evidence of honest behavior — auditable, tamper-evident, public. The longer the network operates, the stronger the proof of reliability becomes.
The capacity already exists — on laptops, file servers, SANs. The cooperative is a coordination layer over hardware that's already manufactured, already powered, already paid for. No datacenter capex. No new carbon footprint.
Same install pattern as enrolling a chip card on verifythecard.com — small local helper plus a browser extension.
One-line curl install plus the Daisy Chrome
extension. No sudo. Runs entirely in your user account.
Daisy walks Downloads, Trash, Caches — and reads partition tables for unallocated space. Read-only.
Per-file or per-category checkboxes. Running total updates live. Nothing happens until you click Claim.
Files move to Trash (recoverable). DDS sparse container created. Capacity attestation signed and posted to ledger.
curl | bash?"You shouldn't — not on our word. Curl-pipe-bash from an unfamiliar domain is a legitimate red flag, and "trust me" isn't a security model. Here are the receipts you'd need to actually verify Daisy before running anything.
curl https://backuptn.com/install/install.sh — no pipe to
bash. Read it. Diff it. Grep it for anything that
doesn't look right. Same for the daemon: tar -tzf
dds-bridge-bundle.tar.gz lists contents without extracting,
then read daemon/dds-daemon.py — plain Python, no
obfuscation, ~1,000 lines, no eval, no exec.
Every release artifact ships with a detached signature from the
AmericaFirst4Us corporate Ed25519 key, published
at americafirst4us.com/keys/.
Verify with openssl pkeyutl -verify or any Ed25519
tool. If the signature doesn't validate, don't install.
Same key that signs every ELAI ledger entry.
AmericaFirst4Us Inc. — Tennessee corporation, principal office in Franklin TN, registered agent in Memphis. Look us up in the TN Secretary of State business records. Not anonymous, not a shell. If anything goes wrong, there's a real entity to send the lawyer after.
The installer asks for zero admin privileges.
Everything lives under ~/Library/ — your user account.
Nothing in /usr/local, nothing in
/Library/, no system-wide registration, no kernel
extensions. If anything was malicious, the blast radius is
your user account, not your machine.
Create a fresh macOS user account (System Settings → Users), log in as that user, run the install, watch what happens. Confirms zero system-wide impact, lets you inspect the file footprint, then you delete the user account when done. Or run it in a VM (UTM, Parallels) — same workflow.
./uninstall-dds-mac.sh --wipe-storage reverses
everything: LaunchAgent removed, daemon deleted, native messaging
manifests pulled from all browsers, sparse containers ejected and
erased. ~10 seconds, no residue.
Test, then trust — or test, then walk away.
Not better-faster-cheaper marketing. Different architecture, different incentive shape, different math.
| Hyperscale cloud | Legacy backup vendor | BackupTN cooperative | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Pay per GB-month, forever | Per-seat or per-device, forever | Contribute capacity → earn credit. Net positive for most. |
| Audit trail | Provider-controlled logs | Vendor dashboards, no crypto proof | Ed25519 receipts on every action, public ledger |
| Custodian privacy | Provider has full access | Vendor has full access | Blind custody — host sees hash, not content |
| Vendor lock-in | High (egress fees + APIs) | High (proprietary format) | Open protocol, open daemon, exit anytime |
| Jurisdiction control | Coarse region selection | Wherever the vendor's DC is | Custodian filter by region + fault domain |
| Carbon footprint | New datacenter buildout | Vendor's datacenters | Reclaims existing capacity. Net-new = zero. |
DDS is built on the ELAI signing infrastructure that already powers chip-card enrollment, document signing, and federal-fraud demos across the AmericaFirst4Us ecosystem.
Every storage transaction produces a signed pair: requester's signature over the blob hash, custodian's signature over the custody receipt. Both go to the ledger. Either side can prove the transaction independently. Patent pending.
Custodians sign hash(blob), not the blob itself.
You can prove you stored something without ever seeing what
you stored. Mathematical separation, not a policy promise.
Patent pending.
Erasure-coded shards distribute across nodes selected for geographic + ISP + power-grid diversity. Regional outages can't take down a stored file.
The Daisy daemon is plain Python — read it before you run it. The Chrome extension is unminified. Native messaging only, no telemetry, no analytics.
A trust membrane protocol. It wraps any entity — a person, a laptop, a server, a company, a chip card — in a cryptographic identity that can attest, evaluate, and handshake with any other ELAI-wrapped entity. Same protocol scales from a single chip-card enrollment to a 200-person IT department contributing 49 TB of storage.
<entity₁> | ELAI | ELAI | <entity₂> = gate
Two entities, each wrapped in ELAI, evaluate each other. The "gate" opens (1) when both sides agree the trust relationship is valid. It stays closed (0) for anyone unknown, anyone revoked, anyone whose attestations don't check out.
Most "trust frameworks" sprawl into dozens of layers. ELAI is deliberately minimal — the whole spec fits on a long single page.
A deterministic hash derived from credentials. No server assigns it. Same credentials, same hash — anywhere, forever. Your identity belongs to you, mathematically.
A signed proof of claims. Tamper-evident. Portable. Verifiable offline. Tamper with any field — claims, timestamp, nonce — and the signature stops validating.
A local graph per entity. No central authority. No blockchain. No global consensus. Each ELAI keeps its own record of who it trusts. Revocation is append-only and permanent.
Encrypted state. The server holds a blob it cannot read. Blind custody by construction — the same primitive that powers DDS storage. Custodian sees a ciphertext, never the cleartext.
SHA-256 for hashing. HMAC-SHA256 and
Ed25519 for signatures. Standard primitives that
the entire internet relies on every second. Zero
custom crypto invented.
The complete spec ships inside the OuiAmi app at /elai/PROTOCOL.md.
~300 lines, no hidden behavior, no proprietary
extensions. Read it, implement it yourself if you want.
ELAI signs chip-card enrollments on verifythecard.com, PDFs on 4PDFs.com, identity credentials in the Trust Suite, and storage custody on BackupTN — today, not someday.
No "ELAI server" you have to trust. No central CA. Each entity holds its own keys, its own trust graph. If AmericaFirst4Us vanished tomorrow, the protocol and your data keep working.
ELAI wasn't designed for a defense pitch. It was built for OuiAmi — a peer-trust network where ordinary users vouch for each other. Battle-tested by everyday humans before it touched any enterprise use case.
Core ELAI primitives (hash-pair gate, blind custody construction) are the subject of active patent prosecution. That's not a marketing flex — it means the architecture has been examined by a patent attorney and looks novel enough to defend.
"Where there is safety, there is love." — ELAI Protocol v1.0
BackupTN doesn't ask you to trust an anonymous startup. It's one product in a portfolio of cryptographic-attestation tools from a Tennessee company that has been building this trust layer for years.
Tennessee corporation, principal office in Franklin, TN. Founded by Jesse Loflin — 27 years of federal IT systems engineering, building the cryptographic attestation tooling that now powers every AF4U product. Public corporate records at the TN Secretary of State.
One Ed25519 corporate signing key sits underneath every product. One public ledger records every signed event. Verify trust once — it composes across the whole portfolio.
Each product below solves a different attestation problem, but they all sign with the same corporate Ed25519 key. Verify a signature on one — you've verified the foundation for all.
The company itself. Hosts the public corporate signing keys and the ELAI ledger. This is the "root of trust" — every signature in the ecosystem chains back here.
Civilian EMV chip-card signing. Your real chip card produces a cryptographically attested transaction. Same Ed25519 root that signs your DDS storage contribution.
Sign and verify PDFs with embedded provenance. Used by title companies, notaries, and any business that needs tamper-evident documents. Penny is the chat assistant; Daisy is her cousin.
Multi-credential identity attestation platform — driver's license, passport, FIDO2 passkey, chip card, all bound to one entity record. Same architecture; the Trust Suite is the personal identity sibling to BackupTN's storage identity.
Cooperative storage with cryptographic attestation. Peer sharing, secured by ELAI — the same Ed25519 key that proves a chip-card transaction proves a DDS custody handoff.
Public, append-only log of every signed event across the ecosystem. Chip-card enrollments, document signings, storage custody receipts — all land here. Auditable by anyone. Tamper-evident by construction.
Same signing infrastructure has signed thousands of chip-card events, PDFs, and identity attestations. BackupTN inherits, doesn't reinvent.
Your signed chip card on verifythecard.com is the same identity that contributes storage here. One audit covers the whole portfolio.
Read the TN corporate filing. Visit the live products. Inspect the public ledger. The ecosystem exists, not just the promise.
One Terminal command for individuals. A pilot conversation for IT departments.