10 principles
1. A stranger must be able to verify.
If proof requires being inside the network — a membership, a key, a relationship — it is permission, not proof. Permission is fine. Don't call it trust.
2. Fail closed.
When evidence is missing, stale, or unverifiable, the answer is no. Absence of evidence is not evidence of innocence; it is an unanswered question, and unanswered questions do not authorize money.
3. Test the tester.
The verifier is part of the claim. A scoring engine that nobody probes is an unproven proof. We run our own runner against mutants that try to defeat it — and publish the results.
4. Truth derives from bytes.
Metadata can lie. Sidecars can lie. Dashboards can lie. Signatures over canonical bytes cannot be talked out of position. Ground truth is derived, never declared.
5. Freshness is two-sided.
A credential dated in the future is as broken as one from the past. A window has a lower bound and an upper bound. Check both, or check nothing.
6. Revocation is part of issuance.
Publishing proof without publishing how to un-publish it is publishing half a promise. Keys, runners and policies must be revocable — and a disconnected verifier must be able to catch up with one signed note.
7. Anchors live outside the anchor's control.
The record of what was published must live where the publisher cannot rewrite it. We anchor every release into a public transparency log (Rekor / Sigstore) whose inclusion proofs verify against keys we do not hold.
8. No key, no gate.
Verification that demands an API key is verification that can be switched off, priced up, or logged. Verification must run offline, keyless, in milliseconds, on any device.
9. Reproducible or it didn't happen.
If a stranger cannot rebuild the artifact from public source and get the same bytes, the artifact is an article of faith. We rebuild ours byte-for-byte and prove it.
10. Receipts over roadmaps.
A promise is marketing. A receipt is a checksum in a log nobody can edit. Show the commands, not the slide. Anyone can audit us. Here are the commands.
Verify everything
— AliceLabs / MarketNow, 2026-09-09