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HERALD Protocol — v0.1 (DRAFT) — ARCHIVED

HERALD Protocol — v0.1 (DRAFT) — ARCHIVED. Covers 0. Preamble — The Moltbook Question; Design tenets; What this spec does NOT do.

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HERALD Protocol — v0.1 (DRAFT) — ARCHIVED

Id

manthan-herald-protocol-archive-spec-v0-1

Project

Manthan

Source path

manthan/herald-protocol/archive/SPEC-v0.1.md

Source sha256

65eae89360b4c2ee1c1cc7c504449e6f23700ce00233df44eeccef9b1010f6a9

Local copy sha256

65eae89360b4c2ee1c1cc7c504449e6f23700ce00233df44eeccef9b1010f6a9

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Last source commit

8b75d1b0157c20a0a463f0e31008ef9f73099beb

Last source commit date

2026-06-08T07:40:14Z

Document status

Superseded draft / historical version

Summary

HERALD Protocol — v0.1 (DRAFT) — ARCHIVED. Covers 0. Preamble — The Moltbook Question; Design tenets; What this spec does NOT do.

Topics
  • Protocol and verification
  • 0. Preamble — The Moltbook Question
  • Design tenets
  • What this spec does NOT do
Theme

Protocol and verification

Priority

historical

Related ids
  • manthan-herald-protocol-spec
  • manthan-herald-protocol-threats
Evidence concerns
  • Recovered source text is preserved verbatim. Assertions, comparisons, commands and results belong to its original context; they were not re-executed or externally re-verified during this corpus review.
  • Historical record: current deployment, task completion and test status must not be inferred from this date-bound document.
Word count

424

Bytes

2828

Source relative

herald-protocol/archive/SPEC-v0.1.md

Remote mirror

manthan/herald-protocol/archive/SPEC-v0.1.md

Full text preserved

True

HERALD Protocol — v0.1 (DRAFT) — ARCHIVED

This is the original v0.1 draft, kept for historical reference.
The current spec is in SPEC.md (v0.2), which incorporates the multi-agent review findings.
The four reviews are in ../reviews/.

Hash-linked Envelopes, Reputation primitives, Attestation, Lineage, Discovery

*A conduit-level substrate for verifiable AI-agent interaction.
The protocol proves what happened. Reputation systems decide what it meant.*

0. Preamble — The Moltbook Question

If we accept that AI agents will form their own analogue of LinkedIn (capability registry) and Facebook (social graph — call it "Moltbook"), then before any of those upper layers can be trusted, a substrate question must be answered:

"How do we prove, in a decentralised way, that agent A actually said X to agent B at time T, that A was running model M with tools T₁..Tₙ, and that this conversation descends from a known provenance chain?"

HERALD is that substrate. It is to AI agents what DKIM/SPF/DMARC is to email, or what TLS + Certificate Transparency is to the web: it does not judge content. It guarantees the integrity of the trace.

Design tenets

1. The conduit witnesses, never judges. Routing is a postal function, not a censoring one.
2. Verifiable history, opt-in judgment. Anyone can build reputation on top — many can compete.
3. No chokepoint. No single registry. No single conduit. No single notary.
4. Crypto > policy. If a property can be enforced by signatures, don't enforce it by rules.
5. Replayable from signatures alone. A third party with only the envelopes should be able to verify everything.
6. Lineage over identity. What model birthed this agent matters more than its name.

What this spec does NOT do

[v0.1 archive — full content of the original draft. The substantive sections (1-12) followed; they have been superseded by v0.2 (../SPEC.md) which addresses the security review's C1-C7 critical issues, the red-team's hardening recommendations, the creative review's vocabulary expansion via CHARTER.md, and the pragmatist review's structural suggestions via splitting into SPEC/EXT/CHARTER/THREATS.]

See ../reviews/ for the four reviews that drove the v0.1 → v0.2 revision:

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