Getting Started

Design Principles

Five principles govern every decision in AIDOS. They are not aspirations to balance against convenience — they are constraints the architecture is built to satisfy. Any feature that would violate one is not shipped.

1. Privacy by default

Shielding is not an opt-in mode a cautious user must remember to enable. Every balance and every transfer is private from the first deposit, with no plaintext path to fall back into. Disclosure is the exception — always explicit, always scoped, always chosen by you.

2. Self-custody always

AIDOS never holds your keys and can never sign on your behalf. It operates pools and verifies proofs; it does not take custody of funds. That is what makes it a protocol rather than a bank in the legal sense: there is no account for an operator to freeze and no balance for a court to seize from AIDOS, because AIDOS never holds it.

3. Compliance without surveillance

Regulation and privacy are usually framed as opposites; AIDOS treats them as orthogonal. Selective disclosure lets you prove a single fact — that KYC was passed, that funds are sufficient, that you are not a sanctioned entity — to exactly one counterparty, without exposing the underlying documents, amounts, or history to anyone else.

Satisfy a regulator without building a database for an attacker

A proof of a fact is not a copy of the data behind it. Selective disclosure gives the verifier the assurance they need and gives an attacker nothing to steal.

4. Verifiable, not trusted

Promises are not a security model. Open-source clients let anyone audit the circuits and code, client-side proof verification lets every user confirm a transaction locally, and TEE remote attestation lets you prove an agent ran exactly the code you deployed. Wherever the design would otherwise ask for trust, it instead provides a way to check.

5. Protocol over product

The Aidos App is the first client, not the whole system. The same primitives that power it — shielded accounts, cards, TEE agents, darkpool routing — are exposed through an open SDK so anyone can build a private bank on top, embed shielded payments into an existing product, or fork the entire stack. Infrastructure outlives any single application.

These principles reappear as hard guarantees in the Privacy Doctrine and as checkable claims in Verification.