Why I built Mycelium

It started with a thought about a person I've never met.

Somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa, someone too poor for a bank account holds a mobile phone. Crypto currencies, I thought, could give that person something banks won't — the ability to own digital assets, send value, participate in the modern economy. No branch required. No minimum balance. Just a phone and a connection.

Then the next thought arrived, the way thoughts do when you can't stop following a thread: but what if the connection disappears?

It's not a hypothetical. Moscow is one of the most digitally advanced cities in the world. Restaurants, transit, deliveries, payments — all running on apps. Efficient, convenient, modern. Then the network failed.

Restaurants couldn't process cards. Dispatchers couldn't coordinate. People couldn't hail a ride or order food. A city that had replaced its physical infrastructure with a digital layer discovered, very quickly, what happens when that layer goes away. The devices were still there. Millions of phones, routers, laptops — all perfectly capable of talking to each other. There was just no software to let them.

That's where Mycelium came from.

The name is intentional. Mycelium is the underground fungal network that connects trees in a forest — invisible, resilient, able to route around damage. No center. When one node fails, others compensate. Information moves anyway.

I wanted to build the digital equivalent. Not an app for normal times — there are plenty of those — but infrastructure for when normal times end. Chat that works without cell towers. Mail that arrives even if it takes hours. Payments that settle on the mesh. A bulletin board that keeps a neighborhood informed when every server is unreachable.

The WeChat comparison is useful: one app that handles communication, coordination, and commerce. The difference is that WeChat needs Tencent's servers. Mycelium needs nothing but the devices already in people's hands.

This is early. The system works, but it isn't finished. What I need now is what any mesh needs: nodes. Real people, in real situations, telling me where it helps and where it fails.

If you're in emergency services, humanitarian work, or simply someone who thinks resilience matters — I'd like to hear from you.

— Alex