Universal Manifest

What this is

Universal Manifest is a small signed package of context for fast handshakes between things that meet: people, agents, devices, vehicles, drones, assets, facilities, and public infrastructure.

An airport checkpoint, an autonomous-vehicle intersection, a drone corridor, an AR factory floor, and a hotel door all need the same basic move. Exchange the smallest trustworthy context needed. Verify it. Apply policy. Record what happened.

The manifest is packet-size-aware. It carries claims, proofs, pointers, permissions, terms, freshness, and receipt data instead of dragging every file, record, model, or sensor stream into the handshake. Heavy files stay where they belong. Private data can stay sealed. The receiving system gets enough context to decide, and nothing extra just because the format made it easy to leak.

Universal Manifest is built for changing systems. Today the exchange might happen between a phone and a door, a robot and a facility, a drone and a work zone, an AI agent and a service, or a 3D asset and a spatial scene. Tomorrow it may happen across file formats, devices, networks, and transport layers that do not exist yet. The point is the same: a compact, verifiable context envelope that can travel with the subject and be evaluated by the receiver.

Every exchange leaves a structured receipt. What was verified, accepted, refused, expired, sealed, unsupported, or left unread is recorded instead of guessed. That makes UM useful for personal control, agent delegation, spatial computing, industrial operations, and compliance-aware infrastructure without reducing it to any one of those use cases.

What a manifest contains

  • Subject. Who or what the manifest is about: a person, agent, device, vehicle, organization, asset, place, facility, or environment.
  • Facets. The claims and context selected for this encounter, including identity, authority, capability, credential, asset, state, preference, policy, or provenance facts.
  • Pointers. References, hashes, locations, or handles for heavier files and records that should not ride inside the handshake.
  • Terms and policy. Rules for scope, purpose, expiry, consent, authorization, use, and receipt handling.
  • Proof. Signatures and freshness checks that let the receiver verify what it received before acting on it.
  • Sealed or unsupported entries. Data that remains encrypted, unreadable, unsupported, refused, or out of scope is recorded honestly.
  • Receipt. Both sides keep a structured record of what actually happened.

Each evaluator runs the same bounded evaluation sequence on the manifest it receives. The result is a fast context handshake with an audit trail, not a silent data dump. See how it works.

Choose your path

Many doors into the same manifest layer.

Universal Manifest is not only identity, consent, portaling, spatial computing, or payments. Those are entry paths into one open specification for bounded context exchange.

Standards

Standards and protocols

See how UM composes with identity, credential, asset, spatial, and cryptographic standards instead of replacing them.

Standards fit

Spatial

Spatial and 3D assets

Carry avatar state, asset pointers, usage terms, device context, and environment rules across spatial boundaries.

Spatial scenarios

Agents

Agents and automation

Let agents prove who they represent, what authority they carry, what provenance backs them, and what scope is allowed.

Agent scenarios

Governance

Privacy and governance

Attach consent, purpose, expiry, sealed data, unsupported entries, and receipt evidence to the context being exchanged.

Evaluation model

Entitlements

Commerce and rights

Carry purchase rights, licenses, invoice pointers, access claims, and usage terms without becoming a wallet or payment rail.

Entitlement paths

Builders

Builders and implementers

Start from the spec, sandbox, resolver patterns, conformance fixtures, and reference tooling for real implementations.

Read the spec

Use cases

Applications of the same compact handshake.

Personal, hotel, clinic, agent, spatial, asset, and commerce examples are all concrete uses of the same manifest envelope. None of them is the whole definition.

Autonomous robots and vehicles exchanging credentials in a modern logistics hub.

Spatial Computing

You are wearing AR glasses walking through a city. Every ten steps you encounter a different spatial experience: a retail storefront, a transit hub, a concert venue, each operated by a different provider on a different spatial fabric. Your manifest sets your rules once. At each transition, the destination fabric receives your manifest, verifies your credentials, applies your consent rules, and grants presence. Seven scenarios show how identity, consent, and context travel with you through the spatial internet.

Read the scenario
Smart-glasses POV: silent consent on the street.

Smart Glasses and Wearables

Someone with smart glasses passes you on the street. Their glasses are recording. A silent handshake happens: your manifest tells their device you do not consent to facial recognition, do not consent to social-media-bound video, and do not share your name with strangers. The recording continues without your face. You never had to know it happened.

Read the scenario
A new device joining a household network.

Smart Home

You unbox a new smart speaker, plug it in, and the house greets it. The speaker reads your household's manifest, inherits the privacy rules, learns the automation preferences, and registers itself. No app. No vendor account. No twenty-minute setup wizard. When guests arrive, they get guest-level access and nothing more.

Read the scenario
EMT reading the manifest of someone unconscious.

Healthcare and Emergency

You collapse on the street. The EMT's phone reads the manifest on yours: allergies, medications, emergency contact, advance consent for first responders. By the time you reach the ER, the hospital already knows what is safe to give you. No clipboard. No next-of-kin questions while seconds matter.

Read the scenario
A receipt of what was checked, accepted, refused.

Auditable Handshakes

Every handshake leaves a structured receipt: what was checked, what was not, what was accepted, refused, or treated as opaque. Trust stops being faith-based.

Read the scenario
A door opening as you approach. No badge, no app.

Permissions and Handshaking

Set your rules once, in language that means something to you. When you cross paths with anyone or anything, your manifest and theirs trade permissions silently. No forms, no twentieth "accept all."

Read the scenario
A diploma, a license, and certifications fanning out across borders, each signed at the source.

Education/Career Credentials

Your degree, your certifications, the courses you took on your own, all verified at the source, in seconds. The hiring loop compresses from weeks to minutes, and the online class you took finally counts.

Read the scenario
One person, three profile cards: the professional, the artist, the parent.

Social Identity Portability

Your profile, your posts, your audience, your decade of work on a platform. Today the platform owns all of it. When it changes its rules or shuts down, you start from zero. With a manifest, each surface gets a different projection of the same underlying you. When a platform disappears, your audience does not.

Read the scenario
A driver, a seller, a host carrying signed star ratings between platforms.

Reputation Portability

Your five-star rating, your decade as a top seller, your verified-reviewer status. They travel with you when you switch platforms. Your livelihood stops being held hostage by a single app's algorithm.

Read the scenario
Two assistants meeting at a quiet seam, each carrying a signed delegation card.

Agent-to-Agent Transactions

Your AI agent needs to book a flight, negotiate a refund, transact with a stranger's agent. Today it is locked into one provider or has to learn each counterparty's API by hand. With a manifest, both agents handshake first: who they represent, what authority they carry, what consent applies, what the dispute path is. Then they transact.

Read the scenario
An agent flashing its provenance chain before it speaks for you.

Agent Provenance

An agent shows up in your inbox claiming to act for your bank. Another DMs you saying it's the airline's support bot. The chain has to verify back to a real, accountable party, or you don't take its word for it.

Read the scenario
Two phones agreeing on context before a payment crosses any rail.

Peer-to-Peer Payments

You owe your friend forty dollars for dinner. They're on a different app, a different bank, a different country. Paying a person becomes paying a person again. The rail underneath fades back to a detail.

Read the scenario
Proof of being one real person, without a name attached.

Proof of Personhood

One real person, anonymously verifiable. The open internet survives the bot apocalypse without anyone learning your name or your face.

Read the scenario
A bouncer reading exactly the answer to one question. Nothing else.

Verifying Someone

You're the one checking. The wallet hands you the answer to your one question (over 21? insured? cleared?) and nothing you didn't ask for.

Read the scenario
Apps that stop pretending they are each other's strangers.

Cross-Platform Interop

No more "we don't support that." No more re-entering the same details. The next service reads what's relevant, only what's relevant, and goes.

Read the scenario
A character, loadout and friends list crossing into a new world.

Platform Portaling

You spent a year building a character. Leveled up, earned the gear, built a reputation across communities. The next title drops and today you start over. Same name if you are lucky. New friends list. New loadout you have to repurchase. Your avatar (the one you spent months customizing or bought from your preferred provider) does not exist in the new world. Your payment method is locked to the old publisher. Your consent choices reset to whatever the new platform defaults to. The version of you that one experience sees is not the version another experience should see, but today that distinction does not exist: every platform gets everything or nothing. In spatial computing, every transition between experiences is a portal. Your manifest arrives first.

Read the scenario
Use cases

How it works

Two manifests meet. Both decide.

When two things meet, each side receives a compact context envelope before it acts. Signatures, freshness, issuer chains, policy terms, pointers, sealed entries, and unsupported claims are evaluated against the receiver's rules. Outcomes can be asymmetric: one side may accept a claim, refuse another, leave a private facet sealed, or record that a future format is unsupported. Every exchange produces a structured receipt, so governed systems can audit what was checked without pretending every packet carried everything.

For builders

An open spec, not a platform.

Universal Manifest is an open spec, not a platform. It composes with existing standards rather than replacing them. If you already work with verifiable credentials, decentralized identifiers, privacy-preserving encryption, asset formats, spatial systems, or agent protocols, UM carries and references that work inside a portable envelope with a defined evaluation contract.

The spec is the technical reference for implementers. The Standards Registry shows how UM composes with DID, VC, OID4VP, HPKE, mDL, resolver patterns, and conformance fixtures while leaving heavy files and future formats in their native systems.

AppsEverything you useBrowsers, wallets, agents, devices
ContextUniversal ManifestSigned context envelope, policy checks, receipts
NamesDNSResolves who is who
TrafficHTTPS / TLSSecures the conversation
PacketsTCP / IPMoves the bytes

What comes next

Universal Manifest has a roadmap from early adoption through production-candidate to standards-body publication.

Roadmap

Choose the path that matches your question.

Start with scenarios if you want concrete encounters, or go straight to the specification if you are mapping standards, resolver behavior, conformance, or implementation details.

Use cases Spec