Spritely Goblins

Integrated P2P Runtime

A distributed object programming environment from the Spritely Institute: a library, not a language, for writing programs as objects (actors) that follow object-capability security, run transactionally in local vats, and can live anywhere on a network. It has implementations for Guile and Racket, persistence that can serialize a whole live object graph, and speaks OCapN, the draft Object Capability Network protocol that other implementations such as Endo and DObjects also follow .

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License Open source — Apache-2.0 (Guile and Racket versions); the README asks that attribution requirements are not waived, including for machine-learning training
Dev Status 🧪 Alpha
Dev Status Detail Alpha (latest release v0.18.0 of 21 April 2026; the README still says 'it's very early' and cautions against production use; the OCapN manual says do not rely on the protocol being stable; releases have broken protocol compatibility)
Owner Spritely Networked Communities Institute (the Spritely Institute), a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institution
Governing Body The Spritely Institute stewards the project and the standardization of OCapN together with an OCapN pre-standardization group whose named members include Agoric and Cap'n Proto
Country USA
Stack Scheme: Goblins for GNU Guile (3.0 or later, with guile-fibers, gnutls and websocket) and Goblins for Racket; OCapN netlayers over Tor onion services, TCP with TLS, Unix sockets, libp2p and WebSocket; Hoot (a separate project) compiles Scheme to WebAssembly for browsers
Funding Donations through supporter tiers, grants and organizational partnerships; amounts and grant names are not stated
Last Investigated Nov 12, 2026

Topology view

This tool in the centre and the things it is directly related to. Each line names the kind of relationship.

Topology view: Spritely GoblinsThis tool in the centre and the things it is directly related to. Each line names the kind of relationship.SpritelyGoblinsPlaynet (Hosts)Playnet

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Use Case Domains

Platform Evolution & Sovereignty

Affordances

Self-hostable

Integrated P2P Runtime Attributes

Origins Ecosystem/SDK: a distributed programming system with local transactions and object-capability security, stewarded by the Spritely Institute
Database Persistence stores for a live object graph: Bloblin, memory, Syrup, and a web localStorage store; idle ('sleepy') actors can be cached to the vat's store
Query Language N/A: objects are reached through capability references, not queries
Data Formats Scheme objects serialized by the persistence stores; OCapN messages between vats
Collaborative Live Editing N/A
Rich Text Editing N/A
Mobile Support Not stated by the project.
Web Support Partial: browser use goes through Hoot, a separate Spritely project; a web localStorage store and a WebSocket netlayer exist
Native Apps N/A: a library for building programs
Terms Self-hosting: free library, installed from Guix, Homebrew or a source tarball
Funds Not stated by the project.
Based On Object-capability security and the actor model; OCapN, the Object Capability Network protocol, whose CapTP family is also used by Cap'n Proto, Waterken and Agoric SwingSet
P2P Architecture A distributed object graph: vats of actors talk to peers over OCapN netlayers (Tor onion services, TCP with TLS, Unix sockets, libp2p, WebSocket, Prelay)
Overlay Network N/A
Content Addressing Not stated by the project.
Local-First Not stated by the project; live object graphs can be persisted to local stores
E2EE Depends on the netlayer (Tor onion services and TLS netlayers are listed); an end-to-end encrypted relay netlayer appears in commit titles but was not verified
CRDTs Lib N/A
Byzantine Fault Tolerance Not stated by the project.
Signature Designator authentication on netlayers (a signing-oracle flaw in the WebSocket netlayer was fixed in v0.18.0); other signature schemes are not stated
Permissions OCAP (object capabilities): 'you can only operate on the references you have access to'; the manual says full ocap security needs Guile's sandboxing features
Semantic Web Compatibility N/A
Smart Contract No
Protocol Stack Position Application-layer (built on TCP/IP, Tor and other netlayers)
Asset / Value Embedding None
Development Tools A manual covering the vat model, API, actor library, OCapN, persistence and debugger; coverage and Emacs tooling; Guix development shell; an OCapN test suite
Deployment Options Self-hosted programs on the developer's own machines; Tor optional for onion netlayers
Authentication & Identity Object capabilities rather than accounts: possession of a reference grants access; netlayers authenticate designators; no wider identity system is stated
Storage Model Local persistence of a serialized object graph per vat, with optional caching of idle actors
Interoperability OCapN implementations: Goblins for Guile and Racket, Endo (JavaScript) and DObjects (Dart); applications built with earlier Goblins releases are incompatible with v0.18.0 because the OCapN draft changed
Social Graph No
Protocol Maturity / Standardization OCapN is a moving draft being worked on by a pre-standardization group; Goblins tracks it and says not to rely on protocol stability
Update Policy Not stated by the project.

Relationships

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