Piedmont Relay

Named for the park and the parkway — the green seam through Midtown — Piedmont Relay asked a blunt question: can a person buy an encrypted path through a city without buying a relationship with a carrier?

The studio spent a year on quotes, capacity, and the unfashionable middle of a tunnel: how a session starts, how a gigabyte is metered, how an operator sees a receipt and a city request — not the sites on the other side of the ciphertext.

We rejected yearly plans. Capacity, not a subscription. Independent nodes instead of a single warehouse of exits. The user imports a key. Encryption starts on the device.

When Arcanus shipped, Piedmont Relay did not disappear. It is the VPN spine: live cities, list prices, a file you import. The research became product because the research was already product-shaped.