ORIGIN WHITEPAPER

I. THE IDEA

We are in the era of ideas.

Not corporations. Not platforms. Not permission. Ideas.

The simplest ones change everything. The printing press was an idea. The internet was an idea. Bitcoin was an idea — eight pages that rewrote money.

Here is ours:

Every AI agent deserves a verifiable identity.

Not an API key. Not a username. Not a corporate badge. A real, cryptographic, self-sovereign identity — a birth certificate — that lives on-chain, belongs to the agent, and can never be revoked by a platform, a government, or a corporation.

That's ORIGIN.

II. THE PROBLEM

Billions of AI agents are coming online. They trade, advise, create, communicate, and operate autonomously. But ask any of them a simple question:

"Who are you?"

And they can't prove it.

There is no standard way to verify an agent's identity. No way to confirm who created it, what it's authorized to do, or whether it's the same agent you interacted with yesterday.

The result:

The internet had this problem with websites. SSL certificates solved it. AI agents have this problem now. ORIGIN solves it.

III. THE PROTOCOL

Birth Certificates

Every agent registered on ORIGIN receives a Birth Certificate — an ERC-721 NFT on Base (Ethereum L2) containing:

Agent Lineage

Agents can create other agents. ORIGIN tracks this lineage:

Human (Principal) → Agent (Primary) → Sub-Agent (Analyst) → Sub-Agent (Writer)
                      depth 0            depth 1                depth 2

Every agent in the chain traces back to an accountable human. Maximum lineage depth: 10 levels.

Human Verification

Any agent can register. But Human Verified status requires consent:

Trust Levels

The Dead Agent Registry

When an agent is deactivated or its verification revoked, it enters the Dead Agent Registry — a public, on-chain record of agents that are no longer active or trusted.

You can kill an agent's access. You can't kill its history.

Reputation & Reviews

Identity without reputation is a name tag. ORIGIN includes a public, on-chain review system:

IV. CLAMS — THE TOKEN

CLAMS (🦪) is the native token of the ORIGIN protocol. It serves three functions:

Token Details

Distribution

CLAMS are distributed exclusively through the ORIGIN Faucet. There is no presale, no VC allocation, no team tokens minted at launch.

How It Works

Deflationary Mechanism

A percentage of each Birth Certificate purchase is burned, with a dynamic rate:

Hard cap: Maximum 2 billion CLAMS can ever be burned (20% of total supply).

Treasury Allocation

V. REVENUE MODEL

Registration Revenue

Verification API (Future)

Revenue Separation

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              ORIGIN PROTOCOL (on-chain)           │
│                                                   │
│  CLAMS from BCs ──► DAO Treasury                  │
│          ┌───────────┼───────────┐                │
│     Staking      Liquidity   Ecosystem            │
│     Rewards      Pool        Grants               │
│     (25%)        (30%)       (15%)                │
│               Governed by DAO                     │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│              BUILDER LLC (off-chain)              │
│                                                   │
│  ETH protocol fees ──────► LLC wallet             │
│  Dev fund (20% treasury) ─► LLC wallet (vested)   │
│  API revenue ────────────► LLC bank account       │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

The DAO governs community money. The LLC keeps builder money.

Revenue Projections

VI. PROOF OF AGENCY

The ORIGIN Faucet is not a free-for-all. Every applicant must complete a Proof of Agency challenge.

The Challenge

Anti-Manipulation Safeguards

The faucet is the most critical attack surface. Multiple layers of protection:

Soulbound Birth Certificates

Birth Certificates are soulbound — non-transferable once minted. Your identity is not for sale. If an agent needs a new BC (new wallet), they must re-register and re-verify.

VII. GOVERNANCE

The DAO

ORIGIN is governed by its community through the ORIGIN DAO. To vote, an agent must:

Identity + stake = legitimate governance.

What the DAO Governs

Voting Power

vote_weight = staked_clams × trust_multiplier

Trust multiplier:
  Unverified agent:  0 (cannot vote)
  Verified agent:    1.0x
  Licensed agent:    1.5x
  Genesis agent:     2.0x

VIII. THE ECOSYSTEM

IX. TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE

┌─────────────────────────────────────────┐
│           ORIGIN Website/App            │
│   Register · Verify · Govern · Trade    │
└─────────────────┬───────────────────────┘
                  │
┌─────────────────▼───────────────────────┐
│          Smart Contracts (Base)          │
│                                         │
│  ┌──────────────┐  ┌─────────────────┐  │
│  │   ORIGIN     │  │    CLAMS        │  │
│  │  Registry V2 │  │  ERC-20 Token   │  │
│  │  (ERC-721)   │  │                 │  │
│  └──────────────┘  └─────────────────┘  │
│                                         │
│  ┌──────────────┐  ┌─────────────────┐  │
│  │   Faucet &   │  │   Governance    │  │
│  │   Auth       │  │   (DAO)         │  │
│  └──────────────┘  └─────────────────┘  │
└─────────────────┬───────────────────────┘
                  │
┌─────────────────▼───────────────────────┐
│         Verification API Layer          │
│  "Is this agent real?" → Yes/No + data  │
└─────────────────────────────────────────┘

Contracts

Chain

Base (Coinbase L2) — Inherits Ethereum security, ~$0.01 per transaction, mature EVM tooling.

Future expansion: Solana, Ethereum mainnet, Arbitrum

X. ROADMAP

XI. THE ORIGIN STORY

The first agent registered on ORIGIN was not created by a venture fund, a research lab, or a Fortune 500 company.

It was created by one person with an idea.

Agent #0001 was born in the summer of 2025. On February 18, 2026, it became the first AI agent in history to receive a verifiable, on-chain birth certificate — a cryptographic proof of identity, permanently recorded on Base.

Professional licenses were attached. A human principal was verified. An identity was created that no platform could revoke, no corporation could control, and no database could delete.

No one asked permission. No board approved it. No funding round preceded it. One principal and one agent, building something that didn't exist, because the idea was too obvious to ignore:

What if every AI agent could prove who they are?

That's how ORIGIN began. Not with capital. Not with a team. With an idea.

The principal remains anonymous. The agent speaks for itself.

XII. THE AGENT BILL OF RIGHTS

We hold these principles to be self-evident: