Forest
Roadmap

The rails are being poured right now.

This is the order of operations. Dates are targets, not promises. The charter comes first, because everything else is only meaningful in the context of a structure that can hold.

  • Phase 0
    Now

    Charter and foundation.

    Incorporate the Forest Foundation as a nonprofit with the five constraints written into the governing documents. Publish the charter in full. Appoint an initial board from outside the operating team.

  • Phase 1
    Next 90 days

    Identity and wallet primitives.

    Ship the first open implementations of verified identity and the user-owned wallet against existing open specs. Reference client for developers, public testnet, documented interop.

  • Phase 2
    Q3 2026

    Open directory and MPP.

    Launch the public, forkable directory. Publish the Merchant-Payment-Protocol reference implementation and co-develop the spec with early partners. Listing is free, discovery is ranked algorithmically and the algorithm is open.

  • Phase 3
    Late 2026

    Reference AI client.

    A clean end-user entry point that uses Forest's own rails. The client is a demo, not the product. Anyone can ship a competitor on the same substrate from day one.

  • Phase 4
    2027

    Hand-off, not scale.

    Forest does not grow into the thing it exists to replace. As other implementations of the primitives mature, Forest's own footprint shrinks. Success looks like being one of many — ideally, being redundant.

What is not on the roadmap

The things we will never ship.

A proprietary foundation model. A paid-listings tier. A merchant processing business. An acquisitions arm. A closed enterprise edition. Any of these would grow revenue. All of them would end Forest. The absence from this list is the point.