Cachet Protocol

Picture a digital artist who spends days on a piece, publishes it, and days later finds an identical (or barely modified) copy circulating under someone else's name, sometimes even resold. There's no way to prove who made it first, and the only recourse is a takedown request that can take weeks to get a reply, if it gets one at all, and it never compensates for what was actually lost. This is a real, everyday problem for creators, and increasingly for the AI agents now trading and generating digital work on their behalf.

Cachet solves this with a collateralized First-Seen registry for digital work, built for the agent economy: it protects creators by rejecting duplicate registrations at the point of minting, and protects whoever holds a certificate afterward through a permissionless challenge market that pays out real collateral when fraud is proven.

An AI agent or creator calls Cachet over x402 (pay-per-call, no signup required) to verify a work against Cachet's on-chain registry, then mint a First-Seen Certificate (an ERC-721 backed by a real fraud bond and premium locked in an on-chain vault). The certificate is transferable: if the work is later proven to be a copy, the vault pays out to whoever currently holds the certificate, not the creator who minted it, so protection follows the asset through a sale rather than staying fixed to the original minter.

Four services are exposed both as REST/x402 endpoints and as MCP tools: Originality Verification (checks a work against the registry: a deterministic perceptual-hash ensemble catches near-duplicates as a hard claim, plus an advisory distinctiveness signal; a CLIP-based embedding model is designed into this tier and will be enabled once dedicated infrastructure is available, so the current shared-host deployment runs it as a placeholder signal, not a trained model), First-Seen Certificate Mint (issues the collateralized certificate on-chain), Commit-Reveal Timestamp Lock (lets a creator prove precedence before a work goes public), and Registry Copy Monitoring (a subscription that re-scans the registry on a schedule and drafts a challenge when a near-duplicate of a watched work appears).

Disputes go through a permissionless challenge mechanism: anyone can challenge a certificate with evidence and a bond; a resolver rules after a public liveness window, and a successful challenge revokes the certificate and pays the current holder. Live on X Layer mainnet (chain 196, real USD₮0 settlement) and X Layer Testnet (chain 1952). Every claim is a public on-chain transaction, and the certificate page reads the chain directly with no backend, so proof of the claim survives even if Cachet's own servers go offline.