About

On July 24, 2026, Presearch announced it was shutting down, effective immediately. Users were given four days to withdraw. Support closed a week after that.

The stated reason was that the platform never reached one million legitimate daily searches - the threshold its operators believed would have made it sustainable.

We are not here to debate that. The people who ran Presearch made their assessment and acted on it. What matters now is that a nine-year effort to build an alternative to monopoly search went dark, and a lot of people who gave it time, money, computing power, and daily habit were left with nothing to show for it.

That is the honest starting position. Anything written here that ignores it isn’t worth reading.

Three things.

The problem. One company still decides what most of the world can find. Search still runs on surveillance by default. Nothing about the last nine years made that less true.

The token. PRE is an ERC-20 contract on Ethereum and Base. It does not depend on any company’s servers, hosting bill, or continued existence. It was there before the shutdown and it is there now.

The people. Node operators who ran infrastructure for years. Developers who wrote code. Users who changed their default search engine and never changed it back. That’s a network, and networks don’t dissolve because a corporate entity does.

Long-time community members. Some of us were here in 2017 and worked on the original platform. Some arrived years later as node operators, developers, or people who simply refused to go back to Google.

We are not a company. There is no funding round, no board, no cap table. This is a grassroots effort, and we intend to keep it that way for as long as it’s workable.

We are not publishing a roster of names right now. Not to hide - but because we think a list of names is the weakest form of accountability on offer, and we’d rather earn trust the expensive way. Every contribution to this effort is recorded on-chain. Every release of funds is tied to a confirmed event with a block explorer link. You do not have to believe anything we say about ourselves. You can check the ledger.

Names will follow work. Not the other way around.

First: this platform. A place where the community can propose work, argue about it in public, fund what it wants funded, and watch the money move. This has to exist before anything else does, because everything else depends on being able to organize and pay for work without a company in the middle.

Second: the search engine. A community member has already built a working decentralized search aggregator on Nostr. It runs entirely in the browser. There is no backend to pay for, no crawler farm, no central index to maintain. Every search checks a Nostr-hosted cache first, then queries multiple providers in parallel, then publishes what it finds back to Nostr - so the next person’s search is faster because you ran yours. The code is open source under an MIT license. Anyone who wants to run the full self-hosted stack instead can.

This matters more than it sounds. The single hardest constraint on the old platform was that decentralized search was being delivered by expensive centralized infrastructure. That contradiction is now solvable in a way it wasn’t in 2017. A search layer that costs almost nothing to operate cannot be shut down by a hosting invoice.

Third: Community Search Engines. Custom-branded search engines that non-technical people can launch and run themselves - for a town, a trade, a language, a community of interest. Fees for this are paid in PRE.

The full roadmap is still being developed, in public, with input from anyone who shows up. We would rather publish three milestones we can actually fund than twelve we can’t.

PRE is the working currency of this system, not a bet on it.

It pays fees for Community Search Engines. It carries weight in governance through staking. It funds specific development goals through this platform. In certain cases it rewards contributed work.

We make no claims, projections, or promises about the price or future value of PRE, and nothing on this site should be read as investment advice or as an offer to sell anything. If you contribute here, contribute because you want the work done.

Every funding goal begins with a confirmed on-chain event. Contributions and releases are copied from the ledger, not from our accounting. PRE and USDC stay in their native units - no invented conversions, no blended totals that flatter anyone.

Contributions are held in escrow against specific, named goals. Funds release against completed work, after a confirmation gate. Surplus is reported, not absorbed. Every movement carries a block explorer link.

Monthly reports are exportable by anyone, at any time, without asking us.

This is deliberately the most boring possible way to handle money. That’s the point.

You can propose a project. You can comment on anyone else’s. You can vote. You can direct your funding at the specific work you want to see and refuse the work you don’t.

Voting weight comes from staked PRE and from a record of contribution. People who show up and do the work carry more weight over time than people who arrive to vote once.

The finances are fully transparent by construction. Not “we publish quarterly summaries” - the ledger is the accounting, and it is public before we see it.

Standing in the governance of the project, weighted into your voting power. PRE rewards, in defined circumstances. Credit - your name and link on the page describing the work you helped fund.

That is the complete list. You are not buying a share of anything. You are paying for work you want to exist, in public, with a receipt.

Node license holders. Keyword stakers. People who accumulated search rewards for six years and found nothing withdrawable when the window opened.

We’re not going to pretend this effort makes you whole. It doesn’t, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. We have no access to the old company’s books, no authority over its decisions, and no ability to reverse them.

What we can do is refuse to rebuild the conditions that caused it. Costs low enough that the platform survives a bad year. Books open enough that nobody has to guess. A codebase that is open source, forkable, and not dependent on our continued goodwill or existence. Decisions made by the people who show up rather than announced to them.

If this effort fails, we want it to fail in public, slowly, with everyone able to see it coming.

No claims about token price. No investment returns. No relaunch date we can’t back with funded work. No roadmap items without a funding goal attached. No closed-door decisions. No treasury you can’t inspect.

We are rising from the ashes of Presearch, and we are not pretending to be Presearch. What this becomes, and what it ends up called, will be decided by the people who build it.