# Welcome to Boson Network

**Boson** is a fully decentralized, peer-to-peer network for secure communication and data sharing — with no central registry, no usernames, and no certificate authorities. Every node and every user is identified by an Ed25519 public key, and everything else is built on top of a secure Kademlia distributed hash table (DHT).

Boson is **permissionless**: anyone can run a node, join the network, publish a service, or build an application on it.

## What you can build

* **Messaging apps** — end-to-end encrypted, multi-device, federated messaging.
* **Self-sovereign identity** — W3C DID identities anchored to the DHT.
* **Decentralized object storage** — content-addressed, deduplicated, federated binary storage.
* **Self-hosted services behind NAT** — expose a home server or device to the internet with no port forwarding or static IP.

## How Boson is structured

Boson is a **two-layer** network:

```
  Layer 2 — Application Services
  ┌──────────────┐  ┌──────────────┐  ┌──────────────┐  ┌──────────────┐
  │  WebGateway  │  │   Messaging  │  │  Ion Store   │  │ Active Proxy │
  │   (HTTPS)    │  │   (MQTTS)    │  │   (HTTPS)    │  │    (TCP)     │
  └──────────────┘  └──────────────┘  └──────────────┘  └──────────────┘

  Layer 1 — Boson DHT
  ┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │   Kademlia DHT · Ed25519 identity · nodes, values & peers · UDP      │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
```

* **Layer 1 — the DHT** carries node routing, mutable/immutable values, and peer (service) announcements. It is the discovery and signalling layer for everything above it.
* **Layer 2 — services** run on super nodes and announce themselves to the DHT, so clients can find them without hard-coded addresses.

New to all of this? Start with the [Architecture Overview](/core-concepts/architecture.md).

## Choose your path

{% hint style="info" %}
Pick the path that matches what you want to do. Each is an ordered reading list. See [Choose Your Path](/introduction/choose-your-path.md) for the full guide.
{% endhint %}

* 🧭 **New to Boson?** → [Architecture Overview](/core-concepts/architecture.md) → [Node Types](/core-concepts/node-types.md) → [Getting Started](/getting-started/install.md)
* 🧩 **Building an application?** → [Build Applications](/build-applications/build-apps.md) → [Java SDK](/build-applications/java-sdk.md) or [HTTP / REST](/build-applications/http-rest.md)
* 🛠️ **Building a service?** → [Layer-2 Services](/core-concepts/services-overview.md) → [Build Services](/build-services/build-services.md)
* 🖥️ **Running a node?** → [Run & Operate a Node](/run-and-operate-a-node/operate.md)
* 🤝 **Contributing?** → [Contribute](/contribute/contribute.md)

## Project links

* **GitHub:** [github.com/bosonnetwork](https://github.com/bosonnetwork)
* **Open-source SDKs:** [Boson.Core](https://github.com/bosonnetwork/Boson.Core) and the client libraries
* **Public nodes:** [public-boson-nodes](https://github.com/bosonnetwork/public-boson-nodes)
* **Community:** [Telegram](https://t.me/awesameboson)


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