Memory Kernel — Tree Presence
Memory Kernel's Team
Problem Statement
Physical things — trees, objects, places — exist in continuous time but have no persistent digital memory. A 230-year-old tree has survived wars, construction, and climate shifts, but it has no way to hold what people have observed about it, no way to notice that three visitors this month mentioned bark damage, and no way to recognize the person who has been visiting every autumn for a decade. Human attention to physical places and living things is intermittent and fragmented. Someone visits a tree in spring, someone else in autumn, a third person notices storm damage in winter. Each observation is valuable. None of them connect. The tree's story fragments across disconnected encounters because there is nothing to hold the thread. There is no infrastructure for physical things to accumulate verifiable digital presence through the humans who encounter them — and no mechanism for an autonomous agent to maintain continuity between visits, integrating observations across time and people.
Memory Kernel gives physical things verifiable digital presence through human encounter. The first implementation focuses on trees: The Brunswick Plane — a 230-year-old London plane tree — is registered as ERC-8004 identity #3058 on Celo with five discoverable service endpoints. The system has three layers: **CLI (tree-presence)** — Root trees on-chain via ERC-8004 (two-transaction flow: identity registration + service URI), submit witness attestations with physical-presence proof via binding secrets, inspect full on-chain state, and verify content integrity against on-chain hashes. **Autonomous guardian agent** — An AI agent that maintains the tree's digital presence between human visits. It polls for new witness events on Celo, reasons about them using Claude (via tool_use), updates the tree's on-chain metadata to reflect accumulated observations, and responds to each witness on-chain. The guardian provides continuity — connecting this week's damage report with last month's health observation and last year's seasonal pattern. **Deployed web presence** — Live at https://brunswick-plane.treeappreciation.com. A React frontend + Hono API server where you can browse the tree's full on-chain state (identity, metadata, witness history, guardian responses, confidence scores), submit witness attestations, and converse with the tree. The conversation endpoint is gated via x402 on Base — the tree charges for conversation to fund its own inference costs, making its digital presence self-sustaining. The tree's services are registered on-chain in its ERC-8004 identity, making them discoverable by any agent that reads the registry. Service discovery, witness submission, and conversation are all accessible both programmatically (JSON API) and through the web interface. All on-chain activity runs on Celo mainnet. The Brunswick Plane has accumulated real witnesses and guardian responses. The x402 conversational endpoint accepts payment on Base. Demo scripts exercise the full agentic flow: multi-persona witnessing with AI-generated observations (a mycologist, an urban sketcher, a grandparent each reading the tree's current state before generating contextual observations), ephemeral passerby encounters, and the tree responding as itself to accumulated inscriptions.
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Memory Kernel
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Intention
Plans to continue
Memory Kernel is infrastructure beyond this hackathon — the tree guardian is one use case. Planning to extend to other physical subjects (coral formations, community gardens, circulating books) and integrate ENS wildcard resolution.