Specifications
CC-BY 4.0
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Anyone may cite, implement, extend the specification, provided they attribute authorship to the Alethea Protocol project.
Governance
Open, neutral, unable to be captured.
Four concrete commitments to keep Alethea an open standard, protected from any commercial or political capture.
SECTION 01
Open source, dual license.
Implementations
AGPLv3
GNU Affero General Public License v3. Any code modification distributed publicly must be open-sourced. Prevents closed commercial capture of the protocol while permitting internal usage.
SECTION 02
Toward a neutral foundation.
Long-term protocol governance will be carried by a neutral foundation, modeled after the Linux Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and Wikimedia Foundation.
Current phase (2026): governance handled by Kévin Pierson and the founding team. As long as the number of external contributors remains limited, this model is pragmatic.
Transition phase: once 3 substantial external contributors have joined the project, creation of a non-profit legal entity (e.g. French association loi 1901, or equivalent in another jurisdiction) to hold the trademark, the copyrights on specifications, and partnership contracts with institutional partners.
Foundation phase: transformation into a public-interest foundation or European equivalent when institutional adoption (local governments, media, platforms) justifies it. Tripartite representation to target: technical contributors, user organizations, civil society.
SECTION 03
Anti-capture: public commitments.
Chain-agnostic.
The protocol does not depend on any particular blockchain. Multiple profiles can coexist (Polygon, Base, Ethereum, Solana, non-blockchain compatible registries). No infrastructure actor can take control.
Identity-provider-agnostic.
Multiple identity providers are supported, provided they satisfy a recognized international standard (eIDAS, NIST 800-63, ISO/IEC 29115). No KYC provider can impose its monopoly.
No Alethea trust registry.
We do not maintain any whitelist, blacklist, or internal classification of identity providers. The protocol references neutral external standards (eIDAS, NIST, ISO) maintained by independent sovereign bodies. This choice protects us from becoming a classification authority ourselves, hence a capture point.
All spec evolution by public RFC.
Any substantial modification of the specification goes through a public pull request, open to community comments for a minimum delay, with traceable decision. No silent changes.
Trademark protected, regulated open use.
The 'Alethea Protocol' and 'Reclaim' names are protected as trademarks. 'Compatible with Alethea' usage is free per the public trademark policy. Prevents hostile forks from presenting themselves as the official protocol.
No single capital owner.
The association then foundation will be governed by a multi-stakeholder board, with statutory rules forbidding private dissolution and asset transfer to a single actor.
Full financial transparency.
Public annual accounts from the creation of the association. Exhaustive listing of contributors and funding sources. Assumed rejection of funding with editorial conditionality.
SECTION 04
Contribute.
Three main paths depending on your profile.
Developers
Implement, port
JS, Python, Rust, Go SDKs. User wallets. Browser plugins. CMS and platform integrations. Smart contracts per supported chain.
Researchers
Audit, challenge
Cryptography, provenance, disinformation defense, open-protocol governance. Critique of technical and conceptual choices, paper publications.
Organizations
Become a pilot
Media, local governments, communication services of elected officials, platforms. First operational deployments, field feedback, validation of use cases.