Introduction

draft first cut, 2026-09-13.

The short version: attestation already has real infrastructure — Hypercerts for ecosystem contributions, Mira’s own attestation work — but none of it is interoperable with the others. Breadcrumbs is the framework that lets it be: two attestation types, badges (an authority attests to you) and crumbs (anyone attests anything for anybody else, no authority required), shaped so any project can adopt either without adopting breadcrumbs’ code or handing it their data. It complements Hypercerts and Mira rather than competing with them.

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 result is published. 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 any contribution. A finished paper is where this project started (it’s the case peer review itself was built around) and one real instance of it, not the unit everything else here is measured against.

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 — issuer.breadcrumbs.id attests to someone that they did something (attended an event, completed a station) — not “breadcrumbs” generically, that specific issuer identity. Authority- minted, needs an issuer identity.
• Crumbs — a person attests to their own trail: anyone can attest anything for anybody else, no issuer required. Self-minted — the record lands in the tapper’s own repository, never breadcrumbs’. The concrete, working version of this today is anchored to a physical object — an NFC tag or printed QR code on a card, a sticker, a pendant — but the mechanism itself isn’t physical-object-specific. 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.