what it costs, and why
Pay once for an identity.
Sign anything, forever, free.
A V3RUM identity is established through a single deliberate ceremony — the granting signature. You pay once. After that, every signature you make for the rest of your life is free, derives cryptographically from the granting signature, and inherits its trust. Like a domain registration, but for who you are.
Two artifacts. One fee.
V3RUM produces two kinds of cryptographic seal, and they do different jobs:
The deliberate ceremony that establishes who you are. A specific time, a specific place, a full witness constellation, hardware-attested biometrics, the convergence ceremony that proves a human and a declared AI co-witnessed the moment. Performed in the V3RUM phone app. Takes a few minutes. Lasts a lifetime.
- 100+ point witness constellation, archive-tier rigor
- Hardware-backed key custody (Secure Enclave / StrongBox)
- Convergence ceremony with signed video
- Geospatial witnesses (GPS + W3W + Plus Code + WiFi BSSID)
- Time anchors (drand, BTC, Ethereum, RFC 3161 TSA)
- Identity registered permanently in the canonical registry
What you mint when you sign anything. A document, a contract, a TSL8 reply, an email, an inventor's notebook entry. Inherits cryptographic trust from your granting signature. Includes whatever live witnesses are available at the moment of signing — biometrics, location, drand, BTC, browser timestamp. Free to mint, on your device.
- Inherits trust from your granting signature
- Live witnesses at the moment of signing
- No payment, no friction, no quotas
- Optional extra witnesses for higher-stakes signing
- Verifiable by anyone, against any registry
- Unlimited use, forever
The fee model is the inverse of most signing services. Where DocuSign charges per signature and gives you an account for free, V3RUM charges for the identity and gives you the signatures for free. The expensive thing happens once. The cheap thing happens forever. That matches how cryptographic identity actually works under the hood, and it matches how people actually want to use it.
Re-attestation, when you want it.
A granting signature is meant to be permanent, but identity isn't static. You move, you change roles, you join new institutions, you lose a device, you want to refresh your claim after time has passed. Re-attestation is the ceremony for any of these: a new granting signature, performed deliberately, that joins the chain of granting signatures behind your identity.
Re-attestation costs the same as the original — $30. It's a full ceremony, not an upgrade, because that's the only honest way to refresh the founding claim. Each re-attestation becomes part of your identity chain, visible to anyone verifying your history. Your identity is the chain, not any single granting signature.
What it's worth charging against.
A V3RUM granting signature isn't priced against per-document services. It's priced against identity-establishment costs, because that's what it is.
| What you're trying to establish | Current cost | V3RUM cost |
|---|---|---|
| US passport, first-time | $165 + travel | — |
| Driver's license, first-time | $30–90 | — |
| Apostille for international document | $30–100 + days | — |
| Notary public service, per signature | $5–15 + travel | — |
| Provisional patent application | $1500–5000 all-in | — |
| Patent attorney, first hour | $400–600 | — |
| V3RUM granting signature, lifetime identity | — | $30 once |
| V3RUM use signatures, every signing event | — | free, unlimited |
A granting signature sits at the low end of identity-document costs while delivering verification rigor that exceeds any of them and doesn't require a government, a lawyer, or a notary to operate. The use signatures are free because the work was done at the granting moment, and every subsequent signing event is just derivation from material already established.
Why we charge.
Three reasons, in order of importance:
- Free identities accumulate spam. Every free-to-mint identity primitive on the internet has drowned in fake accounts within weeks. The fee isn't a profit center; it's a spam filter. Every identity in the registry has at least one actor who cared enough to spend $30 on it. That's a meaningful signal even before the witness constellation.
- Honest infrastructure costs money. Witness API rate limits get respected. The drand mirror stays funded. The blockchain.info dependency gets replaced with a properly-operated Bitcoin node. RFC 3161 timestamp tokens come from paid TSAs with SLAs. Better that the people using the format pay than that it depends on grants, VC, or ad revenue.
- The fee shapes who shows up. Not by excluding anyone real — $30 is roughly the cost of dinner — but by excluding the kind of automated abuse that ruins free systems. Enough fee to mean something. Not enough to gate access.
What the fee does not pay for.
Some things V3RUM will never charge for, named so nobody is unclear:
- Verification is free, forever. Anyone can verify a granting signature or a use signature without paying. The verifier is open-source. The witness sources are public. Charging to verify would create exactly the choke point this format exists to avoid.
- Use signatures are free, forever. Once you have a granting signature, every signing event after it is free. No quotas. No subscription. No "premium" tier with extra signatures.
- The spec is free, forever. Read it. Implement it. Run your own registry. Charge whatever you want, or nothing. The format is the asset.
- The reference implementation is free, forever. Open source. Fork it. Run it. Modify it. Ship a competing registry.
- The genesis verum is free, on purpose. The first granting signature ever sealed under V3RUM v1.0 will be free, public, and explicitly noted as the founding gesture.
- v0.1 preview participants get a free granting signature. Anyone who minted preview verums during the v0.1 window — roughly the first thirty people — gets a free granting signature when v1.0 launches. Honest pricing for the people who showed up early.
The genesis verum.
On a date soon, on a beach in Half Moon Bay, the founder's granting signature will be sealed using V3RUM v1.0. The verum will be free, public, and recorded as the first entry in the canonical registry. The same ceremony will simultaneously seal the V3RUM v1.0 specification document — the spec verifying its own seal, the lineage starting from a single moment.
That's the move that makes V3RUM v1.0 canonical. Not by anyone's permission. By the math working, the founder taking nothing from the system at the moment of founding, and the ceremony being witnessable to anyone who shows up.
The registry, plural.
V3RUM the organization runs the canonical registry. We're not the only registry. The spec explicitly permits anyone to run their own — different fee structures, different jurisdictions, different operational policies, all producing granting and use signatures that interoperate.
This is roughly how DNS works. Multiple competing registrars under a shared protocol, with ICANN as a coordination layer rather than a monopoly. It's the model that scales, the model that survives institutional capture, and the model that lets us charge a fair fee without becoming the choke point we're trying to avoid being.
The privacy posture.
V3RUM doesn't sell your data because V3RUM doesn't have your data. The registry stores the hash of your granting signature and the public components of your use signatures. Your private keys never leave your devices. Your biometrics never leave your devices. Your contacts, your activity patterns, your attention metrics — none of this exists at V3RUM because none of it is needed.
We're not in the business of profiling you. We're in the business of verifying that you are who you say you are when you say it. The privacy story is honest because it's true by design rather than aspiration.
The honest part.
This is not a venture-backed business. We're not trying to be a unicorn. We're not going to raise a Series A and pivot to enterprise SaaS. The pricing is intentionally too small to fund any of that, and that's the whole point.
The current intellectual property and notarization systems are designed to work for people who can afford lawyers, fees, and physical presence. That's not most people. It's not most ideas. It's barely the people doing actual interesting work.
If this format works, it will be opposed by the people who've extracted the most rent from the current system. Patent rentiers. IP-aggregator firms. E-signature platforms selling $40/month subscriptions for what should be commodity infrastructure. Notary commissions defending state-level monopolies. Identity platforms whose moat is the data they harvest. Good. They've had a long run. The rest of us would like a turn.
We don't want to be billionaires. We want to make something cool that people use. The fee structure reflects that — high enough to keep the lights on and the spam out, low enough that anyone reading this can afford to use it for everything they actually need.
Mint a preview verum.
The v0.1 preview is currently free while the registry is being battle-tested. Once v1.0 lands and the genesis verum is sealed at Half Moon Bay, the granting-signature ceremony moves to the V3RUM phone app and the $30 fee activates for new identities.
Preview verums minted now revalidate against v1.0 when the spec finalizes. Your score may change as weights are calibrated; the artifact remains valid. If you're in the preview window, you're getting a free granting signature when v1.0 launches.