A memory capsule that outlives you

An essay by Denis Skomarovskii. Founder, Pastpond.

My grandfather left behind a hard drive in his desk that nobody could log into. Three thousand photos. Forty years of letters scanned and indexed for nobody. Voice messages from his brother, who was gone before him. The password was on a piece of paper in his other apartment, in another country, that the family no longer had keys to.

I used to think the problem was the password. I now think the problem is much larger than that.

The problem is that almost every record of a person who lived in the last twenty years is hosted on a platform that either shuts down, kicks them off, or quietly stops returning their data. Facebook deactivates inactive accounts. Google deletes Drives after two years of dormancy. iCloud holds your photos until your credit card on file expires. Skype is gone, and with it years of conversations that families thought they could go back to. The systems we trust with our memory were not designed to outlive us, because they were not designed for memory in the first place. They were designed for engagement.

I'm building Pastpond for the opposite reason. To preserve who you are in a way that will be readable to people who are not born yet — and is not at the mercy of any company, country, or chip architecture that exists today.

I'm starting with people who do dangerous work.

This is not a marketing choice. It's the wedge that has the cleanest emotional contract. A person who deploys, climbs, dives, drills, or jumps for a living already buys hazard insurance and already writes a will. They have already done the difficult thinking that everyone else postpones. They will pay $89 a year, or $2,799 for a hundred-year prepaid plan, for the same reason they pay for life insurance: not because they expect the worst, but because if it comes, the next generation should not be left with a hard drive nobody can log into.

Here is what I owe these customers that the existing options do not give them.

I owe them privacy that survives me. Their data is encrypted on their device with a key derived from a passphrase I never see. Pastpond holds only ciphertext. I cannot read it. I will write that promise into our infrastructure so deeply that no future executive of Pastpond, including the version of me that runs the company in ten years, can reverse it without breaking the math.

I owe them durability that survives platforms. Storage on Cloudflare today — a second cloud and a cold archive in a second jurisdiction are next — with integrity timestamps anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain. Not because blockchain is fashionable but because a Bitcoin block from 2034 will be a public, verifiable proof that their capsule existed in its current form, regardless of whether Pastpond the company still exists in 2034.

I owe them a succession that works. They name the people who get the capsule. They choose the conditions: after they're gone, plus a twelve-month escrow window so an heir can claim it without anyone forcing the trigger; or on a fixed future date, like a daughter's eighteenth birthday; or when a specific recipient reaches a chosen age. The default succession if they configure nothing is not erasure — it is anonymized donation to a public archive. The customer who never thought about this gets the most generous, least destructive default.

I owe them, finally, the honesty that this product is impossible to build perfectly. No cryptographic algorithm in use today will still be unbroken in two hundred years. No company guarantees its own survival across a century. I will say all of that out loud, and the architecture will be designed to hedge against every one of those failure modes.

No one is doing all of these things together today. That is the gap.

I'm building Pastpond as a solo founder, because the leverage I get from modern AI tooling lets one person operate a real software business at a scale that would have needed twenty people ten years ago, and because the trust I'm asking customers to extend to me — to hold their memories for the rest of their life, and the rest of their children's, and the rest of theirs — is the kind of trust that does not survive an org chart. I want my name attached to it.

I want to make a memory capsule that outlives me.

I'm starting with people who already know they might not come back. The rest of us will follow.

— Denis Skomarovskii Phuket, May 2026 hello@pastpond.com