a format for proving a moment was real
V3RUM is a portable cryptographic identity, witnessed by a constellation of independent sources that can't be faked together. One deliberate ceremony establishes who you are. After that, every signature you make is free, derived, and inherits the trust of the founding moment.
Open standard. No vendor lock-in. The math is the trust anchor; the artifact carries its own proof. Pricing intentionally too small to fund a venture-backed company.
§ 01 · what it is
One signature can be forged. One GPS fix can be spoofed. One biometric reading can be lifted. A timestamp from one server can be replayed.
Forging the agreement between witnesses — phone GPS and watch GPS within three meters of each other, both clocks within fifty milliseconds, the WiFi BSSID set matching the public registry for that neighborhood, the drand beacon value matching the round published four seconds earlier, the AI envoy's signed acknowledgment arriving 1.2 seconds after the human's biometric assertion — that's a different category of problem.
You'd need to compromise multiple unrelated vendors, predict unpredictable beacons, and synthesize physically-consistent sensor data across uncoupled devices. The attack surface is the intersection of every system, not the union.
parallel
The same logic that makes nuclear test detection work. Seismic, infrasound, hydroacoustic, radionuclide. Any one is fakeable. The four agreeing is not.
The Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization runs the International Monitoring System with four modalities chosen specifically because they fail independently and lie independently. The treaty's credibility rests on cross-modal coherence, not on any single sensor's accuracy.
V3RUM applies the same epistemics to a much smaller question: did this moment really happen?
§ 02 · the witnesses
A verum is built from witnesses. Each witness contributes points. Nothing is required; everything counts. Stack a few for a casual seal, stack many for a foundational one. The score is on the artifact, the breakdown is auditable, and a single failed witness doesn't break the seal — it just doesn't add its points.
Cryptographic attestations, time anchors, biometric devices, geospatial witnesses. Load-bearing. The constellation that does the work.
Defined by category, not by vendor. If NWS dies, EUMETSAT slots in. If FreeTSA shuts down, DigiCert slots in. The category is the contract; the members come and go.
Easter eggs. They contribute nothing to fabrication-resistance. They contribute to the seal's character. Sign from the Burj Khalifa. Sign during a thunderstorm. Sign with your heart rate at 140. Strangers will read it later and form opinions.
Numbers illustrative. Final weights live in the spec. Diminishing returns within categories. Independence requirements between witnesses. The point isn't the math — the point is that the math exists, is auditable, and doesn't require trusting V3RUM.
§ 03 · how strong
§ 04 · mint
Drop a file or paste some text. Your browser hashes it locally. A WebAuthn passkey
ceremony binds the hash to your device. Public world-signals — a drand round,
a Bitcoin block, the current time — get pulled in as witnesses. The result is
a downloadable .verum.json that anyone can verify against the spec.
v0.1 preview. This is the demo seal. Witness count is intentionally minimal. Verums minted here will re-validate against v1.0 when the spec finalizes, but the score will be modest. Use it to feel the shape of the thing.
§ 05 · why this stands
The right model isn't trusted root DNS servers. It's closer to Certificate Transparency logs or OpenTimestamps calendars — public infrastructure where the spec is canonical and any operator can implement against it.
A verum produced by V3RUM today is verifiable by anyone, anywhere, without contacting V3RUM. The verifier reads the spec, fetches the public witness values from their original sources, and checks the math. We could vanish tomorrow and existing verums would still verify.
That's the property that makes this credible. Patents depend on the USPTO existing and the courts honoring its records. Notarization depends on the notary's commission. Verums depend on some qualifying witness existing in each category at verification time — and the bar for "some witness exists" is very low.
the genesis verum
On a date soon, the V3RUM v1.0 specification will be sealed using V3RUM. The verum will be public. The spec will verify its own seal. The lineage starts there.
That's the move that makes V3RUM v1.0 canonical. Not by anyone's permission. By the format being good enough to be worth adopting, and the math working.
§ 06 · soft spots