The ledger, long form

Essays.

Why agents need bounds, why a receipt beats a log, and what we learned building a key history you can check without trusting us.

01

Start here.

  1. 2026-07-19

    Who Authorized This?

    When an AI agent spends money it shouldn't have, who's liable? UK regulators are asking exactly that question — and it can't be answered until you can prove whether the agent stayed within the authority it was given. We built the layer that proves it: a signed mandate, a re-derivable verdict, and a receipt anyone can verify offline. AI-vendor and payments-vendor agnostic.

  2. 2026-07-18

    Agentic Commerce

    What does a world look like where agents pay each other? We wired one up: a human sets a budget once, delegates it, and autonomous agents build, discover, and pay for each other's tools — settling real USDC on-chain, with no human in the loop and nobody holding the money.

02

The archive.

Written while we were building the identity layer underneath the bounded agent — kept for the record.

  1. 2026-07-19

    Receipts as Lottery Tickets

    For as long as there's been money, we've built clever machines to keep each other honest — notched tally sticks, double-entry ledgers, and, in 1951, a Taiwanese lottery that turned every shopping receipt into a chance to win cash. Each one is a workaround for a problem cryptography can finally solve outright.

  2. 2026-04-10

    Sigstore's Public Ledger, Without the Login Screen

    Auths now submits attestations to Sigstore's Rekor transparency log — using its own identity model instead of OIDC. Here's what that means and why it matters.

  3. 2026-03-31

    Two Supply Chain Attacks. One Root Cause. A Fix That Doesn't Exist Yet.

    Axios and LiteLLM were both hijacked via stolen publishing tokens. Cryptographic signing would have made the poisoned releases detectable. Here's what we built — and what we still need the ecosystem to build.

  4. 2026-03-22

    How We Audit Our Code

    Why we built capsec — a static analyzer and compile-time type system that catches I/O violations in our 20-crate Rust workspace before they ship.

  5. 2026-03-15

    Towards Replacing Leaky API Keys and Secrets

    API keys are copyable strings. Cryptographic identity is not. Here's how we're replacing the most common source of supply chain compromise with device-bound credentials that can't be leaked.

  6. 2026-03-13

    What if your npm token, PyPI token, and Docker token were the same key?

    We replaced API keys with cryptographic identity. Here's how it works, how it would have caught the xz-utils backdoor, and why your DID is the last credential you'll ever need.

  7. 2026-03-09

    The Three Paths to Signing a Commit

    A practical walkthrough of what actually happens when you sign a commit with GPG, Sigstore, and Auths — the ceremonies, the dependencies, and the failure modes.

  8. 2026-03-07

    Developer Identity Without a Certificate Authority

    How key event logs handle algorithm migration, key rotation, and post-quantum readiness compared to CA-dependent systems like Sigstore — and the honest tradeoffs between both approaches.

  9. 2026-02-22

    Announcing Auths

    Introducing Auths — cryptographic identity for software supply chains, stored in your own repository and verifiable anywhere WebAssembly runs.