Infrastructure · Sigil.bot · creative work and likeness

Cognitive sovereignty infrastructure for authorship and identity.

Immutable-ledger primitives that work without locking you in, prove without trusting the prover, and outlive the operator.

The Principle

The Foundation's research argues that the populations most affected by extraction need infrastructure that does not depend on the goodwill of platforms or operators. That includes unhoused contributors, lived-experience experts, and marginalized populations whose moral and economic knowledge becomes policy without recognition. It also includes creators and performers whose work, voice, and likeness are copied and reproduced without consent or credit.

Three properties have to hold together: zero lock-in (it works without an account), verifiability without trust (you can confirm a claim without contacting us), and operator-survivability (the receipts remain valid even if the Foundation shuts down). Every product on this roadmap is held to those three properties. Together they are what we mean by cognitive sovereignty infrastructure: tools that hand agency back to the person whose contribution is being recorded.

01

LIVE · BETA

Sigil.bot

A zero-install, message-native provenance layer.

DM the bot with the content you want to anchor. You receive a signed receipt: a hash of the content, a timestamp, and a CC-BY attribution license, signed by Sigil. The receipt is committed to the blockchain. Anyone can verify it against the chain without contacting Sigil's servers.

How it works

  1. You DM the bot with the content you want to anchor.
  2. You receive a signed receipt: a hash of the content, a timestamp, and a CC-BY attribution license, signed by Sigil.
  3. The receipt is committed to the blockchain.
  4. Anyone can verify the receipt against the chain. No Sigil server required.

Why it matters

Ideas travel through chats before they reach a platform. By the time a thought becomes an article, a product, or a policy, the person who first said it has often disappeared from the record. This happens to everyone, and most of all to voices routinely taken without recognition: unhoused contributors, grassroots storytellers, people whose lived experience shapes policy, research, and reporting they are rarely cited in. Sigil is a small fix that survives the operator.

02

IN DEVELOPMENT

Sigil.bot extended to creative work and likeness

Attribution and provenance for creative work and human likeness, extending the Sigil primitive.

Sigil.bot proves that authorship of content can be anchored in a way that survives platform change. This step would extend the same primitive to a person's creative work and to the human characteristics that identify them: voice, face, style, performance, persona. The aim is that a synthetic reproduction could then be checked against an anchored, person-controlled record of provenance and consent.

It is intended for creators, performers, and voice and likeness workers, and for the wider population whose face or voice can now be cloned. The focus stays on those least able to defend their likeness against AI voice and face cloning, deepfakes, and style mimicry.

What is fixed

The same three properties govern the build that govern Sigil.bot: zero lock-in, verifiability without trust, and operator-survivability.

What is open (partner input wanted)

The architecture that delivers these properties to creators and performers, without building a central record of faces and voices, is the core design problem. Four questions are open:

  1. The unit of identity you anchor. A person-controlled declaration and signature of a voice, face, or style, held by the person, with no central biometric database.
  2. Consent and licensing. How a performer licenses a likeness for a single use and revokes that license later.
  3. Matching a synthetic output to a person. How a suspected reproduction is checked against an anchored identity without standing up a central surveillance database.
  4. What makes a receipt actionable. What gives a receipt force against an extractor for a person without legal resources.

We are seeking institutional and private partners to fund the build and to think alongside us on the open questions. If you work on identity, provenance, or the rights of creators and performers, this is a conversation we want to have.

Why Immutable Ledgers

In the Transmutarianism framework, a ledger functions as moral accounting infrastructure. Creative and identity provenance is the next layer on top. Receipts that survive the operator are receipts that cannot be retroactively erased by extractors, and the people most often erased from records are precisely those whose contributions traditional systems never registered in the first place.

Blockchain is the settlement medium because it is the most operator-resistant ledger currently available. The Foundation has no commitment to any specific chain over the long run. The commitment is to the property of operator-resistance itself.