What is AttestMesh?

AttestMesh turns a blockchain into the coordination layer for a private mesh of mutually-attested nodes — machines that have cryptographically proven what code they run before being admitted.

Any application that needs a group of trusted peers — a replicated database, a private inference network, a consensus group — has the same bootstrapping problems:

• Who is in the cluster? Membership must be verifiable, not configured.
• How do members find each other? Peer discovery usually means rendezvous servers, STUN, or hand-distributed config.
• How do they talk privately? Key distribution is the hard part of every encrypted-transport story.

AttestMesh answers all three with one primitive: a cluster contract on an EVM chain. Nodes prove their identity to it with hardware attestation, publish their public keys through it, discover their peers from it, and exchange encrypted bootstrap messages through it. Everything else — the wireguard mesh, the shared secret, the application traffic — happens directly between nodes.

What you get

Deploy an AttestMesh cluster contract and drop the AttestMesh sidecar into your node image, and every node gets:

• Verified membership — admission gated by attestation (dstack/Intel TDX in v1), with the verification logic isolated per attestation method so others can be added without touching the core.
• Stable cryptographic identity — x25519 (sealed-box messaging), Ed25519 (heartbeats), and wireguard keys, all derived from an attestation-bound seed and pinned on chain at registration.
• A wireguard mesh — peers, keys, and mesh IPs derived from chain state; tunnels bootstrap with no inbound connectivity and no STUN.
• Encrypted messaging — sealed-box messages between members, carried as chain events, with on-chain sender authentication.
• A Cluster Shared Key (CSK) — one symmetric key all members hold, distributed peer-to-peer over the mesh and verified against an on-chain commitment. Available to your application through the sidecar’s gRPC API.
• Gasless operation — nodes hold zero ETH; an EIP-4337 paymaster sponsors every operation behind an operator-controlled webhook.

What AttestMesh is not

• It is not a VPN product. The mesh exists to serve the cluster’s application; the chain coordinates it.
• It is not a consensus protocol. It gives you the trusted, connected member set that consensus (or replication, or anything else) runs on top of.
• It does not store secrets on chain. Everything on chain is public: member records, public keys, encrypted blobs, and one hash commitment.

Status

v1 is live on Base mainnet with the dstack (Phala) attestation method: real confidential VMs self-register, mesh, exchange the CSK, and subscribe to the attested event indexer — fully end to end. See Field notes for what it took to get there.