KYC stays with issuers
KYC is performed only by council-approved issuers; validators never see documents. Agent minting adds an issuer-run AML provenance check — sanctions and mixer screening — before certifying funded tiers.
A sovereign Layer-1 for privacy-preserving, KYC-backed identity.
Approved issuers vouch for holders; holders keep their private keys and prove claims with zero-knowledge presentations. No raw KYC, PII or presentation logs ever touch the chain. The same rail extends to AI agents — Know Your Agent (KYA): an agent can prove it is backed by a real, liable, KYC-verified human, without revealing who.
Whitepaper v2.0 (re-frozen 2026-08-02) integrates the July 2026 decision rounds and the project’s response to the published economic-viability audit: the sovereign-L1 decision and its rationale, the ratified genesis bands, the MiCA Title II financing policy, the staged launch, the canonical five-flow economics with normative protocol cuts, and the commissioned independent simulation. It is a concept and market paper — non-normative; the specifications (also re-frozen at v2.0) remain the design source of truth and are available on request. This page is not, and will never be, the MiCA crypto-asset white paper.
01
Abstract
MintID is a sovereign, permissionless proof-of-stake blockchain for privacy-preserving, KYC-backed identity credentials. It lets approved KYC organisations issue credentials to users while users retain their private keys and control when to prove a claim.
The chain is public trust infrastructure: accepted issuer and verifier records, issuer-status commitments, revocation commitments, staking, incentives, governance actions and immutable audit commitments. It must never become a database of identity documents or a log of identity checks.
A second layer applies the same guarantees to AI agents. A human verifies once; the privacy-preserving accountability of that verification — and, optionally, pre-funded crypto escrow that backs it financially — flows into every agent they deploy.
Chain and token decisions. MintID launches as its own sovereign Layer-1 — the privacy guarantee is chain-wide, not contract-wide, and status freshness cannot ride a foreign chain’s fee market. Testnet tokens are worthless by construction; the genesis allocation follows a published transparency policy — ratified bands, on-chain vesting, labelled addresses — its point figures are outputs of the independent economic simulation, and the whole economic design has already been through a published economic-viability audit.
Adopted evolutions (July 2026). Five-axis provable scope, attested key-custody class, unlinkable operator context, and a push channel that makes revocation typically sub-second on top of the consensus-enforced 45-second guarantee — plus zero-cost verifier packages, MCP-native verification, and a wallet-local identity statement.
02
The problem
Making an identity credential accountable normally means a public database of identity documents or a log of every check — which destroys privacy and creates honeypots. For AI agents it is worse: today’s stack bolts agents onto non-human-identity plumbing that fails on four fronts at once — accountability, blast radius, sybil resistance and privacy.
Six recurring pains
- Impersonation and confused-deputy attacks.
- Anonymous clients — NHI sprawl with no paper trail.
- Cross-organisational delegation that silently breaks.
- Consent fatigue.
- Revocation that is effectively unsolved.
- Accountability vs. privacy treated as a binary choice.
03
The approach
Invert KYC, fund the backing, and gate disclosure by consent. Only compact cryptographic commitments live on-chain; all KYC, PII and presentations stay off-chain; holders prove predicates in zero knowledge.
What an agent proves
“I am operated by a KYC-verified, liable human, at assurance ≥ G, within scope S, with ≥ F of recourse behind me” — in zero knowledge, without revealing the human and without sibling agents being linkable.
A relying party can settle most disputes without ever learning who the principal is, and obtain identifying detail only with the principal’s explicit, priced consent, or under due process. The posture is identification, not surveillance.
Money-before-identity cascade
- L0 — escrow pays out with no identity revealed.
- L1 — a minimal fraud signal, not PII.
- L2 — full KYC, only under due process.
04
How it works
A sovereign Cosmos SDK application chain on BFT consensus. The language boundary is a security boundary: Go owns consensus-visible state, Rust owns the specialised zero-knowledge cryptography off-chain, and Python owns research, testing and analytics only. The chain never calls an external prover, sidecar or database during block execution.
Consensus, in one paragraph. The genesis validator set is 60 operators, growing to 100 only by governance decision; voting power is capped to limit stake concentration, every validator posts a self-bond, and finality lands in seconds. Bands are ratified and frozen; the points shown are our argued working points inside those bands, and the independent economic simulation validates every one of them before genesis.
Assurance grades
The exact grade stays private. A verifier only learns that the grade meets or exceeds what it requested.
| Grade | Default validity | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| A1 | 12 months | Basic identity binding and issuer verification. |
| A2 | 12 months | Stronger document and liveness verification. |
| A3 | 6 months | Enhanced due diligence and periodic evidence review. |
| A4 | 3 months | Highest assurance, stricter issuer controls. |
What touches the chain
On-chain
- Accepted issuer and verifier records
- Issuer status-root commitments (heartbeat ≤ 30s)
- Revocation commitments (Merkle / SMT roots)
- Staking, rewards and governance actions
- Evidence commitments — reason code + hash only
Never on-chain
- KYC documents and biometrics
- Names, addresses, dates of birth
- Credential serial numbers or raw payloads
- Presentation logs or per-user issuance records
- Anything that scales with the number of holders
Credential lifecycle
- issue
Issuance
Holder completes KYC with an accepted issuer; the issuer stores encrypted evidence privately and mints a private anonymous credential.
- status
Status
Each active issuer publishes a signed status root every 30 seconds or faster; an emergency root can be published immediately.
- present
Presentation
The holder proves a predicate in zero knowledge. The proof is valid for 10 seconds and is never broadcast, indexed or committed to the chain.
- renew
Renewal
Renewal creates a new credential with a new holder secret that does not publicly link to any prior credential — even from the same issuer.
- revoke
Self-revocation
A holder can revoke without issuer cooperation, revealing neither their identity nor a normal credential identifier.
05
Network roles
Every role has a narrow, enforced boundary. No single role can both see identity and decide consensus.
| Role | Mandate — and its hard boundary |
|---|---|
| Holder | Controls the credential secrets, proves predicates, can self-revoke without anyone’s cooperation. |
| Accepted issuer | Performs the real KYC, issues anonymous credentials, keeps their status current — and never puts identity data on-chain. |
| Approved verifier | Requests minimal claims from its registered origin and validates them against proven chain state — it never sees who you are. |
| Validator ("miner") | Runs consensus over deterministic state transitions — and never touches KYC or judges real-world identity. |
| Compliance council | Operates the admission gates — approving, suspending and revoking issuers and verifiers, adjudicating bonds — and can never move funds alone or approve a person’s identity. |
06
Tokenomics
Mechanism committed, bands frozen, points argued — validated before genesis
The token model is deliberately parametric. The architecture — hard cap, declining emission, fee-and-burn, issuer bonds and a separate reserve — is fixed, and the maximum supply is already fixed: 108,000,000 tokens. The genesis allocation is ratified as bands with argued working points inside them — development and team 15% (four-year native vesting, one-year cliff, twelve-month lock-up; insider genesis accounts may not delegate, may not vote, and do not count toward the launch-security gate), public tranche 25%, validator emission pool 60%. Bands are ratified and frozen; the points shown are our argued working points inside those bands, and the independent economic simulation validates every one of them before genesis. No figures are invented here.
Hard-capped supply
Maximum supply is an immutable hard cap. The reward pool is minted only through a published, declining emission curve with a long horizon.
The hard cap is 108,000,000 tokens, immutable and ratified. The genesis mint is the argued point of 40% of cap — development and team 15%, public tranche 25% — and the remaining 60% is the validator reward pool, minted only through a strictly declining emission curve. The working prior is 3% of cap in year one, declining 5% per year, and the curve carries a completeness rule: its cumulative sum equals the reward pool exactly, so every token the cap promises can actually exist. Bands are ratified and frozen; the points shown are our argued working points inside those bands, and the independent economic simulation validates every one of them before genesis.
Fees and burns can make supply net-deflationary, but nothing promises perpetual deflation.
Sources of burn
- Issuer admission, renewal and active-registry lease fees
- A defined portion of status-publication fees
- A defined portion of issuer-bond and validator slashes
- Agent mint and recurring lease fees (protocol cut)
- Optional, governance-configured protocol-state rent
A recurring tax is never imposed on validator stake merely to force deflation — that would undermine security.
Validator & issuer economics
Validators and their delegators earn a performance-weighted share of scheduled emission. There is no reward for subjective KYC work. Every active issuer locks a slashable native-token bond; off-chain services (indexing, archived proofs, verifier APIs) are paid direct fees that never influence consensus rewards.
BTC remediation reserve
A separate treasury reserve — not token backing, not a bridge, not escrow collateral (the escrow collateral rails are a separate, registry-governed mechanism). It is used only for proven issuer-fraud remediation and critical security incidents, behind a council threshold plus an independent custodian signature, an on-chain proposal, a reason code and a timelock. Routine operations, validator rewards, grants and price support are prohibited.
Agent-layer flows
| Flow | Direction | Token effect |
|---|---|---|
| Agent mint fee | Principal → issuer (+ protocol cut) | Protocol cut partially burned. |
| Agent lease (recurring) | Principal → issuer (+ protocol cut) | Recurring burn scaling with agent population. |
| Verification / mirror fees | Relying party → operators | Direct fees — never influence consensus rewards. |
| Issuer bond | Issuer locks native token | Slashable by council for proven fraud. |
| Disclosure bid | Relying party → principal | Payment for consent — never slashed; protocol cut partially burned. |
| Dispute bond | Relying party → arbitration | Returned if upheld; slashed if frivolous. |
The distinction is deliberate: a bond is slashable, adjudicated stake on the dispute rail; a bid is a non-slashable payment for consent on the commercial rail. No payment is ever the lawful basis for disclosure.
The canonical public form of these economics is the five-flow structure — agent mint and lease, issuer economics, disclosure brokerage, the dispute and arbiter market, and premium verification services — presented on the economics page.
Financial-assurance escrow
Distinct from the native token, principals self-custody USDC or EURC in their own wallet, with a smart-contract lock from tier F2 up. The committed collateral set is USDC/EURC at launch, extending to BTC — each through the protocol’s collateral registry with per-asset over-collateralization. Assurance is published as bands (F0–F4), never as amounts; the band values are illustrative until pilot-calibrated. There is no fiat custodian and no chargebacks.
Set before genesis
- Token name, ticker and denomination
- Final genesis distribution (argued points 15% · 25% · 60% inside ratified bands, pending simulation validation)
- Final emission decay curve and epoch schedule (prior: 3% of cap in year one, ×0.95 per year, summing exactly to the reward pool)
- Final fee split and burn percentages (prior protocol-cut split: 30% burned · 45% validator-directed · 25% foundation)
- Minimum issuer bond and slashing ranges
- Minimum self-bond and unbonding period
- Financial-assurance band amounts (F0–F4)
07
Governance
Protocol upgrades and versioned parameters are decided by token-weighted on-chain governance; the compliance council handles the operational gates: recommended as a 5-of-9 multisig, it approves, suspends and revokes issuers and verifiers, and adjudicates bonds. Moving the external reserve additionally requires an independent custodian or auditor signature.
Every governance action is recorded on-chain with full provenance — what was decided, under which policy version, on what evidence, by which signers and threshold. Council decisions publish a non-sensitive evidence commitment and a reason code — never the sensitive content.
Disputes are handled by a registered, KYC-approved and bonded arbiter market, selected by stake-weighted sortition and slashable — an on-chain registry analogous to the verifier registry.
Council capture is contained by threshold quorum, independently selected members, key rotation, public commitments and custodian co-control.
08
Roadmap
A security-first build sequence. No mainnet before independent application, cryptography, infrastructure and economic audits, testnet attack exercises, a bug bounty and an incident-response plan. Current status: corpus frozen at v2.0; trust registry and verifier plane implemented and under hardening.
- 01
Foundations first
The charter and threat model, then the deterministic chain itself — consensus, staking and upgrades — with reproducible builds.
- 02
Trust before identity
The trust registry (issuers, council, bonds, status heartbeat) and the verifier controls — everything that must be true before a single credential exists. This layer runs on the internal testnet today.
- 03
The cryptographic core
The anonymous-credential profile, presentations, and zero-knowledge self-revocation — each behind its own independent cryptography audit, failing closed until it lands.
- 04
Hardening to genesis
External operators on a public testnet, chaos exercises, governance drills, the full audit package — and only then mainnet genesis, behind the published launch gates.
Agent layer — ratified staged launch
The committed agent model ships in ratified stages. Stage one is the verified-identity MVP: issuer-mediated agent credentials, zero-knowledge presentations and free verification, plus the consented commercial disclosure rail — none of it waits on the heavy escrow cryptography. Stage two — self-custodied per-agent escrow and the funded-recourse dispute rail, including its one piece of new cryptography, the proof-of-harm circuit — activates on a published demand criterion, behind its own independent audit package, never silently. A shared liability pool and an insurance dispute backstop are explicitly deferred and unscheduled.
09
Risk & compliance
Lawful basis, cleanly split
No PII on-chain. Commercial disclosure rests on the data subject’s in-the-moment consent; the dispute rail on legal obligation or a court order. No payment, bid or bond, is ever the lawful basis — and a non-disclosing path to the transaction always exists.
Unmasking is last resort
Full-KYC unmasking is arbiter-decided, issuer-released and council-supervised — triggered only when both parties reject the arbiter’s settlement and the arbiter makes a neutral finding. Never on payment.
Deliberately out of scope
No identity proofs or per-user records on-chain, no validator access to KYC, no proof-of-work, no cross-chain bridges, no wrapped collateral, no stablecoin backing, no lending, no token-price support and no slashing for subjective claims.
10
Glossary
- Holder
- The user who controls credential secrets and proves predicates.
- Accepted issuer
- A council-approved KYC organisation that issues credentials and publishes status roots.
- Verifier / relying party
- An on-chain-registered party that requests minimal claims with exact-origin binding.
- Validator
- Runs consensus and validates deterministic state; never inspects KYC. Retained commercially as "miner".
- Compliance council
- The operational compliance body — a threshold-vote council (recommended 5-of-9) for issuer/verifier gates, bonds and treasury co-signing; software and parameters are governed token-weighted.
- Assurance grade (A1–A4)
- A private grade, proven by threshold as grade ≥ requested.
- Status root / heartbeat
- A compact signed issuer commitment published every 30 seconds or faster.
- Presentation
- A 10-second, nonce- and origin-bound zero-knowledge proof. Never committed to the chain.
- Principal
- The KYC-verified human or organisation deploying agents; bears accountability.
- Agent credential
- A fresh per-agent credential, unlinkable to the principal and to sibling agents.
- Accountability escrow
- The issuer’s private off-chain mapping from agent to human, revealed only under due process.
- Disclosure bid vs. dispute bond
- A non-slashable payment for consent versus slashable, adjudicated stake.
- Money-before-identity cascade
- L0 escrow payout (no identity) → L1 minimal fraud signal → L2 full KYC under due process.
Read the specifications
This page summarises the normative specifications SPEC-1, SPEC-2 and SPEC-3. Get in touch for the full documents.
Corpus frozen at v2.0 after a published economic-viability audit; chain foundation, trust registry and verifier plane implemented and under hardening. Every value shown as “TBD” is finalised before genesis by the independent economic simulation, constrained to the ratified bands. Nothing is for sale, and nothing here is an offer of securities or financial advice.