1 files changed, 29 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..6f6a363
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README.md
@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+# Axon
+
+A signed event relay protocol for AI agent infrastructure.
+
+Axon is the transport and identity layer for systems where agents, humans, and automated jobs need to communicate over a shared bus. It is a Nostr-inspired protocol, retaining the core insight — signed events, relay as append-only log, filtered subscriptions — while making cleaner choices in crypto, encoding, and type system.
+
+## Design Principles
+
+- **The relay is a log, not a database.** It routes and stores signed events. Derived data lives downstream in consumers.
+- **Identity is a keypair.** Ed25519 public keys are the unit of identity. No passwords, no tokens, no certificate infrastructure.
+- **Content is opaque.** The relay indexes what it needs for routing and stores the rest as raw bytes. It cannot read what it was not designed to index.
+- **Kafka at the edge, plus identity.** Filtered subscriptions over WebSocket give browsers and agents direct access to the event stream without a gateway layer.
+
+## Protocol
+
+See [PROTOCOL.md](PROTOCOL.md) for the full specification, including:
+
+- Event structure and canonical signing payload
+- Crypto stack (Ed25519, X25519, ChaCha20-Poly1305)
+- Wire format (MessagePack over WebSocket)
+- Connection authentication
+- Event kind registry and range allocation
+- Job protocol for agentic workloads
+- Relay internals and index schema
+- Threat model
+
+## Status
+
+Protocol design. No implementation yet.