Glossary

Canonical Protocol Terms

The public vocabulary for ZK-AI — each term has its own page. When a definition says “not X”, that exclusion is normative. Also linked from Legal and Trademarks.

3DVC
Independent certification program for operators who pass conformance testing. Shown only when certified — not automatic, not required to use receipts or Sigils.
dePoD
Proof of demand produced near execution — useful, receipt-backed machine work, not clicks or idle presence.
DoT
Depth of Trust — how deep a proof goes, from structured claim through offline validity to on-log recognition and hybrid crypto.
DoT-4
Offline-valid receipt state. Mathematics and declared profiles check out without a network call.
DoT-5
Recognized on-log state. Governed chain evidence records when a receipt batch was witnessed.
EG
Evidence Graph — discovery and forensics for proof trails. It finds receipts; it does not decide validity.
PATL
Privacy-adjacent trust — public accountability beside private activity without making private data public.
Receipt
Signed ZK-SNAP record of a verifiable machine activity — portable proof that survives outside the original platform.
Sigil
Deterministic trust mark (S0–S6) computed by verification — never awarded manually. S4 = proven offline; S5 = recorded on-log.
TCK
Conformance testing against shared goldens. Baseline interop is open; the 3DVC program suite is certification-gated.
VMA
Verifiable Machine Activity — the accountable action a receipt represents.
ZK-SNAP
The canonical receipt format for verifiable machine activity — signed, portable, verifiable from bytes alone.
ZK-AI Chain
Governed witness layer for on-log recognition — ordering and inclusion, not a receipt database or file store.