Verified once, proven anywhere, revealed nowhere.

Identity today either leaks or cannot be held to account — and autonomous agents make both failures worse.

What a solution has to be

• A public trust layer that no one owns: sovereign, permissionless, with deterministic finality.
• Nothing identifying on that layer, and state that scales with institutions, not people.
• User custody of keys and secrets, self-revocation, and recovery only by fresh KYC.
• Accountable, bonded issuers, admitted by a compliance council.
• Fresh, root-based status that fails closed when it goes stale.
• KYC-approved verifiers, bound to exact web origins.
• Perishable, fully bound presentations, checked online against finalised state.
• A hard-capped, transparent monetary policy, and a security-first release.

Six invariants hold across the whole specification, and each one is a refusal the chain enforces.

1. The chain never learns who anyone is. No KYC data, personal data, credential, credential serial, presentation or per-holder issuance event is ever written on-chain.
2. State scales with institutions, not people. Live state grows with issuers, verifier origins, validators, status roots and governance records — never with holders, credentials or presentations.
3. Consensus is deterministic and self-contained. No network call, wall clock, randomness, hardware signer, remote service or foreign-function bridge runs during block execution.
4. Backing is provable, identity is not. A holder or agent proves that an accepted issuer stands behind it at a given assurance, never which person; two agents of one person are unlinkable.
5. Disclosure is rail-segregated and, on the commercial rail, consensual. Identity leaves only by consent or by due process, and no payment is ever a lawful basis for disclosing personal data.
6. The value layer is transparent and hard-capped. Exactly 108,000,000 tokens, with no shielded or anonymity-enhanced transfers, ever. Privacy lives in the credential layer, not the money layer.

Every party can be named, bonded or pinned — and none of them needs to learn who the holder is.

One credential, from its issuer’s admission to its retirement, in six steps.

1. 01

   Admission

   A KYC organisation applies through a governance proposal, today voted by the chain’s single validator and, once the compliance council is seated, by the council. The issuer registers its signing keys and a separately scoped emergency key, is granted a set of permitted grades and locks a bond. Only then can it become active.

2. 02

   Issuance

   A person completes KYC, and the evidence stays encrypted in the issuer’s vault. Over OpenID4VCI the person receives an anonymous credential bound to a secret only they know. At the next 30-second heartbeat a new status root is finalised and the credential becomes usable. No transaction records that it was issued.

3. 03

   Presentation

   A registered verifier sends a signed, single-use challenge that expires within ten seconds. The holder software checks the verifier against its own trust pins and answers with one zero-knowledge proof for every requested predicate. The verifier re-checks finalised state, consumes the challenge and keeps a minimal decision record. Nothing is written to the chain.

4. 04

   Status and revocation

   Roots come every 30 seconds, with their time bounds enforced as consensus rules, and a verifier fails closed once a root is older than the maximum root age (45 seconds at the reference values; 180 seconds on the single-node production chain). Issuer-side revocation enters the next root (≤ 30 s) and is refused by every verifier within the maximum root age (under a minute at the reference values), or at once through the emergency key; a holder can self-revoke through a privacy relay, revealing neither who they are nor which credential it was, and is refused everywhere in under two minutes.

5. 05

   Renewal and recovery

   Renewal is a new credential, from any accepted issuer, publicly unlinkable to the old one. Lost holder keys have exactly one recovery path: fresh KYC and a brand-new credential. No social recovery, no custodial back door.

6. 06

   Agents

   A verified person proves in zero knowledge that they hold a sufficient, unrevoked credential; the issuer mints a fresh, unlinkable agent credential carrying a backing assertion and a delegated scope. The chain sees nothing new.

A purpose-built application chain whose state is registries, commitments and economics — never people.

One credential, many unlinkable proofs, and a way for the holder to revoke it without being identified.

• the verifier and its exact origin are active on-chain, and the request was signed with a key registered for that origin;
• the challenge is fresh, has never been used, and was answered within ten seconds;
• the presentation is bound to that verifier, origin, request key, challenge, policy and chain state;
• every requested predicate is proven;
• the issuer is active and its status root current, re-checked immediately before the decision;
• the challenge is consumed, so the same proof can never be accepted twice.

The same machinery, applied to the software people deploy — with no new consensus module and no new proof type in block execution.

Consent on one rail, due process on the other

The choices architects and integrators ask about most — each with the alternative it was chosen over.

Issuers, verifiers, validators, relayers, the council and a compromised holder device are all assumed potentially malicious — and the chain must stay identity-free and deterministic under every one of them.

The token a public network would use: a hard cap, a declining emission, and no price anywhere.

On a public network, token holders would govern the software and a threshold council the compliance gates; the Dutch foundation that would anchor both is being incorporated and stays dormant until the public-offer route is chosen.

Related parties, disclosed

MintID is conceived and built by the CONECTIA group — Conectia OÜ in Estonia and Conectia PRO, its wholly owned Spanish operating company — and every role the group holds is disclosed as a related-party position. The first issuer and the first verifier were admitted through the same path the protocol offers anyone: a governance proposal, today voted by the chain’s single validator and, once the compliance council is seated, by the council; the same slashable bond; the same 30-second roots; all of it on chain. The independence that is claimed is methodological: every figure sourced, every model re-runnable. The independent economic review remains the only arm’s-length opinion.

Each stage opens only when its published gate is met. If a minimum is not reached, the plan re-stages — it never launches under-funded or under-secured, and every audit is scheduled and published with its findings.

1. stage 0

   Single-node production · now → Gate 1

   The single-node production chain, in production since 20 September 2026 and operated by the CONECTIA group, with the first issuer, the first verifier and the ZadQ pilot on it, while the distributed network is built; the public testnet with its KYC sandbox, frozen specifications, the proof core in production, code open source under Apache-2.0; the Foundation being incorporated and dormant; the financing route decided at the Gate-1 go/no-go; funded by the CONECTIA group as its own R&D, never reimbursed. Gate: the Gate-1 go/no-go on the financing route — on the public route, simulation delivered, counsel workstreams, trademark filed, and the Foundation’s board and statutory locks in place.

2. stage 1

   Public offer, on the public route only · 2027

   If the Gate-1 go/no-go chooses the public route: the MiCA Title II white paper, notification to the AFM, the offer of the sale tranche and admission to trading. Gate: white paper cleared by counsel and notified; board and safeguards in effect before signature; bank and custodian onboarded; the $4.0 M net raise floor met — otherwise re-stage.

3. stage 2

   Identity-only mainnet · target H2 2027 → 2028

   Issuance, zero-knowledge presentations, status roots, free verification, the verifier registry, a live council and a genesis set of 60 validators — no escrow or disputes yet — with ZadQ, today on the classical seller rail, on mainnet. Gate: the economic-security thresholds met, genesis values frozen and the Genesis Allocation Statement published; the audit programme reported as scheduled milestones with published findings.

4. stage 3

   Financial recourse · 2028 → 2029

   Self-custodied stablecoin escrow, the dispute cascade and the arbiter market; the consented commercial disclosure rail is already built and ships switched off and fail-closed, and its activation waits for counsel. Gate: a published organic-demand criterion and counsel-reviewed unmasking governance; the circuit and escrow-contract audits are scheduled milestones with published findings.

5. stage 4

   Maturity · 2030 → 2031

   Multiple issuers, a growing agent population, the active set grown toward 100 by governance, and the post-emission transition planned. Gate: continuous — transparency reporting, annual audits published with their findings, and monitored gate metrics.

What exists in October 2026, stated at the level of capabilities, so that nobody mistakes specification for delivery.

What still has to be fixed, what is deliberately left open, and what could go wrong.

Risks, stated plainly

• Competitive timing. Payment networks already ship transparent know-your-agent rails. MintID’s niche — privacy-preserving, funded, regulated-grade backing — is validated but narrow, and the answer is sequencing.
• Cold start. Two-sided, and met by the first implementer and ZadQ, both related parties, with success criteria set in advance and measured; nothing they generate counts as independent adoption or toward the traction criterion.
• Cryptographic delivery. The proof core is built and in production; the self-revocation proof, the highest-risk consensus-path item, has been in production on the single-node production chain since 24 September 2026, runs on the public testnet as it does in production, and is switched off at the distributed public network’s genesis, where switching it on is a governance decision; its audit is a scheduled milestone whose findings are published.
• Regulatory. MiCA execution, the Foundation’s statutes, GDPR and consent texts, AI Act conformity and unmasking governance are subject to counsel; the design took the strictest reading at each point.
• Economic. The points inside the bands are not yet fixed; adverse scenarios are shown, not averaged away; and re-staging is the committed answer to a weak offer.
• Related-party concentration. Development, the first issuer, the reference SDK, ZadQ and the pre-genesis R&D budget sit in one group. Each position is disclosed in the table above, and the group’s issuer runs on the same on-chain terms as any other.
• Delegated trust and fail-closed operation. A relying party trusts issuers it does not choose, and a silent issuer takes its credentials offline within the maximum root age (45 seconds at the reference values; 180 seconds on the single-node production chain). Both are the price of the guarantee.

Accepted issuer

A bonded KYC organisation, admitted on chain by governance proposal (by the compliance council once it is seated), whose credentials the protocol accepts.

Accountability escrow

The issuer’s private record linking an agent to its human, disclosed only by due process — distinct from the financial escrow.

Agent credential

A credential the issuer derives from a principal’s credential, carrying a backing assertion and a delegated scope.

Anchor product

ZadQ, the x402 seller-verification service that is the first product built on MintID; a disclosed related-party position.

Anonymous credential

A credential with a blinded issuer signature, a holder secret, selective disclosure and predicate proofs.

Assurance grade

The private A1–A4 grade an issuer assigns, proven only as a threshold.

Band, prior, point

A ratified range; an argued working point inside it; and the final value the simulation fixes.

Commercial and dispute rails

The two firewalled disclosure paths: one gated by consent, the other by due process.

Compliance council

The threshold-vote operational body designed for admissions, bonds and treasury co-signing; built on chain, not yet seated.

Freshness band

The issuer-held band (F1–F4) saying how recently a holder’s evidence was verified; a second dimension next to the grade, published as a band and never as a date; read on the classical seller rail, not a presentation predicate.

Nullifier

The one-time value a self-revocation publishes, revealing neither the holder nor the credential.

Operator floor program

Foundation-funded service agreements that pay validators for verifiable service, never for stake.

Pairwise pseudonym

An agent’s per-verifier identifier: stable for that verifier, unlinkable across verifiers.

Presentation

A ten-second, fully bound zero-knowledge proof of requested predicates. Never on-chain.

Status root

An issuer’s signed 30-second commitment to its private status registry.

Stichting

The Dutch foundation form of the MintID Foundation — being incorporated by the founder and dormant until the public-offer route is chosen.