Scope of services — please read
AncientHoldings GmbH is a software engineering and IT infrastructure services company. We build management tooling and operate commodity infrastructure (servers, email, content hosting, backups, documentation) for a community of operators. We do not operate or own any blockchain protocol, wallet, exchange, custody service, mining service, or financial service.
0.1 · What AncientHoldings GmbH is
AncientHoldings GmbH is a software engineering and IT infrastructure services company registered in Germany. Our work product is:
- Management software. Web-based user interfaces and dashboards that let our customers administer their own servers and services more easily. Analogous to tools like Grafana, Netdata, or a cloud-provider console.
- IT infrastructure services. Operating servers on commercially-leased hosting (VPS, dedicated boxes, colocation). Content-addressable storage hosting similar to Pinata. Encrypted backup storage. Email hosting for our own domain.
- Documentation and community tooling. Public documentation, knowledge bases, calculators, and reference material for our customers and the wider community.
0.2 · What AncientHoldings GmbH is NOT
Explicitly, to avoid any ambiguity with regulatory or banking partners:
- We do not operate, own, author, or control any blockchain protocol. StoaChain is an independent, permissionless, open-source project operated by its own community and core developers; our relationship to StoaChain is the same as, e.g., a hosting company’s relationship to the Linux kernel — we use it, we build tools for people who use it, we are not it.
- We are not a blockchain developer. We do not author, modify, or distribute consensus software, cryptocurrency protocols, or smart-contract languages.
- We are not a wallet provider. We do not develop, distribute, or operate custodial or non-custodial wallet software. We link to third-party wallet interfaces (operated by independent parties) for user convenience, the same way a hosting company might link to an SSH client. The separation is visible in the domain itself: the Ouronet wallet lives at
wallet.ouronetwork.io— a different organisation at a different registered domain thanancientholdings.eu. No AncientHoldings operational control, no AncientHoldings code path, no AncientHoldings custody. - We are not a digital-asset custodian. We do not hold, safekeep, or control assets on behalf of our customers. Customers control their own keys and their own accounts at all times.
- We are not an exchange, broker, dealer, or PSAN (Prestataire de Services sur Actifs Numériques) / BaFin-regulated crypto service provider. We do not exchange, trade, issue, or market digital assets on behalf of customers.
- We are not a mining operator or staking-as-a-service provider. Our customers run their own independent servers; when those servers happen to be validator or mining nodes for a permissionless network, that is the customer’s activity, not ours. We provide management tooling on top of the customer’s own hardware.
- We are not an NFT creator, issuer, auction house, or marketplace. Our content-addressable storage hosting service stores bytes uploaded by customers; what those bytes semantically represent is outside our scope.
- We are not a crowdfunding platform, factoring service, money-transfer service, or financial portfolio manager.
0.3 · Useful analogies
The distinction “company that builds tools for users of X” versus “company that is X” is a stable one in the software industry. Parallels:
| Company | Domain they serve | Not classified as |
|---|---|---|
| Pinata Technologies | IPFS pin hosting for anyone, including NFT projects | NFT creator / issuer / marketplace |
| AWS / Hetzner / OVH | Compute + storage for anyone, including blockchain nodes | Blockchain operator / miner |
| GitHub | Code hosting for anyone, including cryptocurrency projects | Cryptocurrency developer / wallet provider |
| Datadog / Grafana | Monitoring dashboards for any infrastructure | The thing being monitored |
| Stripe / Qonto / any ERP | Business-management software for any customer | The customer\’s line of business |
AncientHoldings GmbH sits in this category: we build and operate infrastructure for a community. The community happens to use a particular open-source technology. Our business activity is software + hosting, not the technology’s underlying domain.
Proof point — visible domain separation
The boundary between AncientHoldings and the wider ecosystem is visible in DNS. Third-party services live on different registered domains from ancientholdings.eu: the Ouronet wallet sits at wallet.ouronetwork.io; the Caduceus bridge at caduceus.ancientholdings.eu(a separate sub-project); StoaChain’s own infrastructure on independent community-operated hosts. Anyone auditing the relationship can verify it with whois / DNS lookups — the separation is not just a claim in a policy document.
0.4 · Service catalogue (authoritative)
The hub (this product) provides, to its customers:
- Server management SaaS. Dashboard for registering customer-owned servers, running diagnostics (SSH-based health probes), benchmark tests, and scheduled maintenance tasks. Functionally similar to Portainer, Ansible Tower, or a managed-hosting control panel.
- Encrypted backup hosting. The hub encrypts customer-configured data snapshots with industry-standard symmetric encryption (libsodium secretstream) and stores them on hub-operated disks. Equivalent to any offsite-backup service (Backblaze B2, rsync.net).
- Content-addressable storage hosting (IPFS). Customers upload data directories; we pin them on our IPFS cluster. The service is agnostic to content type and analogous to Pinata’s core offering.
- Email hosting. Mailcow-based mail service for our own domain; standard IMAP/SMTP + webmail. Same category as Fastmail, Proton Mail, or any self-hosted mail provider.
- Scoring / gamification layer for operator community.An off-chain reward counter (“Stoicism”) that increments when a customer’s server meets operational criteria defined in our documentation. This is a points system similar to airline miles or a SaaS loyalty program. It is not a digital asset, not tradable through us, not exchangeable for currency through us, and not custodied by us. Future phases may emit corresponding on-chain tokens on a permissionless blockchain; when that happens, the minting will be executed by the blockchain’s own protocol at the direction of its independent validators, not by AncientHoldings as a principal.
- Documentation and reference material. Public docs, calculators, explainers.
0.5 · Key boundaries (what customers do vs. what we do)
| Activity | Customer does | AncientHoldings does |
|---|---|---|
| Run a blockchain node | Owns the hardware; holds the node\’s private keys; receives any on-chain rewards directly. | Provides dashboard + health-probe tooling. Has SSH access only with the customer\’s explicit consent (transparency modal on first sign-in). |
| Hold crypto assets | Holds keys in their own wallet software (third-party). | No custody. No access to customer keys. No signing on behalf of customers. |
| Create / mint / trade NFTs | Creates and mints with their own keys via third-party tools. | Stores the media bytes on our IPFS cluster at the customer\’s request. Content-agnostic hosting. |
| Send transactions on chain | Signs transactions with their own keys. Submits to the public network. | Provides read-only explorer integration and scheduled-transaction tooling the CUSTOMER operates, signed with the CUSTOMER\’s keys. |
| Earn scoring rewards | Configures their node per documented criteria. | Runs the scoring calculation based on observable node behaviour. Reward points are a management-software counter, not a digital asset under our custody. |
0.6 · The hub’s own operational keypair (future phase)
For transparency: a future phase of the hub (v0.9.x+) will include an operational keypair owned by AncientHoldings for the purpose of emitting periodic on-chain messages about the hub’s own operations — for example, publishing a signed daily attestation of the off-chain scoring state. This is analogous to how any SaaS provider might sign outbound webhooks or emails with its own domain keys.
This key:
- Is owned by AncientHoldings, used only for the hub’s own administrative messages (logging, attestations, its own scheduled infrastructure events).
- Does not sign transactions on behalf of customers, hold customer funds, or transfer customer assets.
- Does not constitute a wallet service, custodial service, or payment service.
0.7 · Regulatory posture
AncientHoldings GmbH is a software development and IT services company (Softwareentwicklung und IT-Dienstleistungen). The company does not hold a banking, payment-services, or crypto-asset-services license, and its business model does not require one. All services are classified as software + infrastructure services in the WZ2008 sense.
If in the course of operation any activity of AncientHoldings enters a regulated perimeter (for example: operating a formal custody service, issuing a regulated security, running a payment-services business), that activity will be either (a) stopped, or (b) spun out into a separately-licensed entity. The hub itself — the product documented across this chapter set — stays resolutely within the software-and-infrastructure category.
0.8 · Intellectual property
All software authored by AncientHoldings GmbH is owned by AncientHoldings GmbH (the hub codebase, the management tooling, the scoring algorithms, the documentation). Customer data (their node data, their backups, their IPFS-hosted content) remains the property of the customer and is stored on hub infrastructure under an encrypted-at- rest contract. Customer accounts on third-party blockchain protocols are owned by the customer; AncientHoldings claims no ownership interest in customer on-chain activity.