Introduction

draft first cut, 2026-09-13.

Peer review reduces a whole provenance trail — the observation, the evidence, the reasoning, the disagreement along the way — to a single opaque verdict: accepted or rejected. Everything that led there is usually invisible once the paper is out. Breadcrumbs is infrastructure for making that trail legible again: from raw observation, through evidence and review, to attestation, retraceable the way a paper trail used to be — for contributions generally, not only finished papers.

It’s built on the AT Protocol (the network behind Bluesky): every claim, piece of evidence, or attestation is a signed record in its own author’s personal data repository, not a row in breadcrumbs’ own database. Nobody has to trust a central breadcrumbs server for the data to mean anything — that’s a design constraint, not a slogan; see The Attestation Layer.

Two things are deliberately both called “crumb” in this project:

• Badges — breadcrumbs attests to someone that they did something (attended an event, completed a station). Authority- minted, needs an issuer identity.
• Crumbs — a person attests to their own trail, anchored to a physical object: an NFC tag or printed QR code on a card, a sticker, a pendant. Self-minted — the record lands in the tapper’s own repository, never breadcrumbs’. See Physical Crumbs, which is also the part of this project you can actually go try right now.

How to read this

Each chapter stands on its own — if you got a link straight to one section, you don’t need to have read the others first. The Appendix has two different kinds of supporting material: Roots grounds the project’s vocabulary (trail, decay, attestation) in older, non-technical sources — a fairy tale and a folk tradition, not just protocol names. The Artifact Series links to the actual interactive design mockups referenced throughout — worth opening directly rather than taking the prose’s word for what they show.

Where this stands

The self-minted crumb flow (real OAuth login, physical NFC hardware, a live registry) works end to end today, hand-tested and covered by an automated regression suite. The badge system and the sensemaking/ front-door layers described in the next few chapters are architecture and active work, not yet live — each chapter says plainly which state its own subject is in, rather than presenting everything as equally finished.