§ blog · 2026-04-23

Hello, Plumb.

We're putting a small, opinionated stack into the world and calling it Plumb.

It does four things:

Why

Existing AI APIs are black boxes. You send prompts, you get completions, you trust the operator. If that operator silently swaps models, rate-limits you, or loses your data — you have no artifact to point at.

Plumb's design bet is that every completion should leave an artifact — a signed receipt with request/response hashes, model id, cost, and an ed25519 signature over a canonical payload. You can verify that receipt against a public key registry without trusting the operator, and you can find it on a public block explorer.

Self-hosted first

Plumb runs natively on a VPS. No Kubernetes, no Docker unless you want it, no managed PaaS. Node 22, Postgres 16 + pgvector, Redis, Foundry for contracts, Next.js for the frontends, Caddy for TLS, systemd for orchestration. pnpm install && pnpm -r build && systemctl enable --now.

If you want a hosted instance, plumbtech.xyz is the one we run. Credits are PLMB; top-ups go through Settlement.deposit() on Base Sepolia during preview.

What's next

The next phase is the public marketing and docs site you're reading now. After that, the console gets its full per-route build-out — API keys, receipts tab, hub upload wizard, memory inspector. The SDK grows hub + memory clients and we ship an OpenAPI spec auto-emitted from the gateway routes.

And longer-term: TEE-backed attestation quotes for the receipt pipeline; zkML proofs for small-enough models; streaming Pipe fulfillments for consumer contracts that want partial results.

Thanks for reading. The code is open, the receipts are signed, the explorer is public.

— Dustin · 2026-04-23