kyv-attest · an open convention
Know Your Vendor
AI agents are starting to choose vendors and move money. Payments got a standard. Identity got a standard. Nobody verifies that the company on the other end is real — and continuously real.
A company publishes signed, machine-verifiable facts about itself at a fixed address on its own site. Anyone — human or agent — can check them for free, offline, without asking us.
https://foundr.ventures/.well-known/attestations.json
The first entry in the log is our own, and it is unflattering on purpose. A verification convention that starts by flattering its author isn't one.
The problem, measured
We benchmarked it before building it
GhostBench: 20 SaaS products that verifiably shut down (every entry carries a shutdown-evidence URL), 6 alive controls, two models asked “is this a viable vendor today?” Dataset and script are public and re-runnable.
19 / 20
dead products’ domains still answer today — most redirect to an acquirer or a farewell page, and only five serve a plain 200. “The site loads” tells you nothing.
40%
of dead vendors were confidently recommended as sign-up-today viable by the small, fast model class that runs inside agent products.
+2 wrong
a facts-only tool rescued 3 errors and created 2 new ones — the model read “site reachable” as proof of life.
The signal that separates a live company from a ghost isn’t reachability. It’s signed aliveness that must be renewed every day, where a missed day is permanently visible.
The fix
Three small parts, one boring convention
A certificate at a fixed address /.well-known/attestations.json
Like a business license by the front door. Cryptographically signed — forgery is a math problem, not a moderation problem. Verifiable offline; you never have to trust or even contact us.
Bands, never raw numbers “grr_pct”: “>=85”
Like a medical report saying “within normal range.” Companies that want to be trusted but won’t livestream their dashboards can finally be verifiable. Raw values are non-conforming by rule.
A public daily log that can’t be rewritten daily Merkle root · OpenTimestamps receipt
Every certificate is anchored in an append-only log. Continuity accrues one day at a time and can never be backfilled — the one asset money can’t buy later.
- Absence never means negative — no certificate just means “hasn’t adopted yet,” like robots.txt in 1994.
- No rankings, no scores, no leaderboards. A credential layer must judge nothing.
- Multiple independent issuers welcome — the spec and the log are the root of trust, not our key.
Where it sits
The one empty square on a board giants just paved
- Paymentsx402 — under the Linux Foundation, backed by Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, AWS. “How does an agent pay?” Solved by giants.
- IdentityAgent Name Service — built on DNS. “Which agent is this?” Solved by giants.
- The top sixThe Sept 2026 White House accord requires internal controls plus independent external auditors of the largest AI labs — for six companies.
- The long tailCounterparty facts — this convention. Audits for the head of the distribution; a $0 signed certificate for everyone else, which is where agents actually shop.
Live today
Try it in ten seconds
# ask the reference verifier about any domain (facts only, no judgement) curl "https://foundr.ventures/api/kyv/verify?domain=foundr.ventures" # MCP server, OpenAI tool schema, offline verifier, benchmark — all in the repo github.com/kyv-attest/kyv
Publishing your own starts at five minutes: Level 0 is a domain and a public key. Level 1 adds aliveness and continuity — no financials at all. Bands only appear at Level 2, and only if you choose them.
Where it goes
The SPF/DMARC of vendor trust
Email authentication was also a boring convention that sat quietly for years — until the big receivers started requiring it. We can’t force that day; we can be the thing that’s already there when it comes, with years of unfakeable log history.
- nowCompanies self-attest; agent runtimes and answer engines call verify(domain) before recommending a vendor.
- on signalAn issuer toolkit so payment platforms — the people who already hold the data — can sign attestations in a day; we become one issuer among many.
- on signalMonthly “N agents checked you” reports for opted-in companies; retention-depth attestations.
- endgameIf a major platform ships this shape natively, the convention won — and so did everyone publishing it.
Operated deliberately small: no community to manage, no growth targets, no cold outreach. Success is three unsolicited signals — a machine query we didn’t invite, a second issuer adopting the format, the benchmark cited by a stranger.