Parley is a federated, decentralized chat network that utilizes plain IRC protocol, allowing users to run their own instance for their domain and communicate with others using their existing IRC clients, such as irssi or WeeChat, without requiring any plugins. Each instance acts as a separate entity, finding and connecting with other instances through DNS and identity documents, and exchanging signed messages over HTTPS. Users can communicate with each other using email-like addresses (e.g. user@domain), and instances can federate on the spot, presenting a unified network to clients. The project is currently a working proof of concept, demonstrating its design end-to-end, but is not yet fully hardened and has some limitations.