Stated Protocol Overview

• Stated Protocol is a decentralized coordination framework that enables organizations to publish verifiable, standardized statements on their own web domains.
• It leverages DNS and TLS for authenticity and supports various statement types—such as Sign PDF, Poll, and Verification—to facilitate real-time consensus.
• The protocol promotes efficient international negotiations and local coalition building by reducing reliance on centralized platforms.

Searching arXiv for the specified paper and closely related protocol/comparison material. The Stated Protocol is a decentralized framework in which organizations coordinate by publishing standardized, structured text statements on their own official web domains, at https://<domain>/.well-known/statements.txt. It is designed as a thin layer on top of the existing web: statements are human-readable, machine-readable, publicly verifiable through DNS and TLS, and aggregatable via SHA‑256 hashes. The proposal is framed primarily around international relations, where it is intended to reduce the friction created by slow, episodic coordination, fragmented communication channels, centralized social-media dependence, scalability issues, and opaque treaty drafting (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

1. Rationale and conceptual scope

The protocol is proposed as a response to several constraints in contemporary international coordination. Diplomatic coordination is described as centered on summits, bilateral visits, and periodic meetings, with no standard, low-friction way for 50–200 governments to converge on a text or decision in hours or days between summits. Positions are also dispersed across bilateral calls, national press releases in different formats and languages, and social-media posts on private platforms, with no canonical, machine-readable way to determine who agrees with exactly which wording or how many governments support a specific clause (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

A further problem is dependence on centralized social-media platforms. In the formulation of the protocol, ministries often rely on X/Twitter, Facebook, and similar systems for rapid public signaling, which introduces platform control over verification and reach, the risk of account removal, impersonation, or manipulation, and no mechanism for others to sign onto a statement after the fact in a verifiable way. The proposal therefore relocates signaling and coordination to official domains under the control of the publishing organizations themselves (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

In this context, “decentralized” has a precise meaning. There is no Stated server or central platform operator that all participants must trust. Each organization publishes on its own domain, discovery and aggregation are federated, and trust is rooted in DNS and TLS and can be reinforced by a web-of-trust through published verification statements. The protocol is therefore not a replacement for the web, but a standardization layer that turns websites into interoperable coordination endpoints. This suggests a shift from scattered publication toward structured, hash-addressable institutional positions (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The proposal is not limited to states. Although the principal emphasis is on ministries and intergovernmental coordination, the same mechanism is described for local governments, non-governmental organizations, professional associations, universities, and other organizations. The common denominator is the publication of publicly attributable statements on official domains (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

2. Publication model, statement syntax, and retrieval

Each participating organization publishes a plain-text file at /.well-known/statements.txt. The specified encoding is UTF‑8 without BOM, and the HTTP header is Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8. Multiple statements are concatenated in the file and separated by double newlines. Each statement also has a SHA‑256 hash, URL-safe base64-encoded, and the same statement may be fetched individually at /.well-known/statements/<hash>.txt (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The protocol requires a fixed key–value ordering so that hashing is reproducible. The standard statement structure is:

Publishing domain: <domain> Author: <organization> Authorized signing representative: <representative> (optional) Time: <UTC timestamp> Tags: <comma-separated tags> (optional) Superseded statement: <base64-encoded-SHA256-hash> (optional) Format version: 4 Statement content: <content or typed statement>

The design choices are explicit. The fields are written in natural-language style rather than JSON keys or URIs, but field order is fixed because the hash is taken over the exact character sequence. This is what allows stable, cross-organizational reference by hash (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

Typed statements are nested inside Statement content: as indented key–value lines. A canonical example is the Sign PDF statement:

Publishing domain: example.gov Author: Ministry of Foreign Affairs Time: 2027-01-01T10:30:00Z Format version: 4 Statement content: Type: Sign PDF Description: We hereby digitally sign the referenced PDF file. PDF file hash: qg51IiW3RKIXSxiaF_hVQdZdtHzKsU4YePxFuZ2YVtQ

The protocol groups statement types into identity establishment, coordination and decision-making, and content moderation and quality control. The following types are described explicitly (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025):

Statement type	Core fields	Function
Organisation verification	Name, Country, Legal form, Owner of the domain, Confidence	Identity verification in the web-of-trust
Poll	Voting deadline, Poll, Option 1, Option 2, Who can vote	Asynchronous decision-making
Sign PDF	Description, PDF file hash	Digital commitment to a hashed document
Dispute Authenticity / Dispute Content / Rating	statement hash or 1–5 stars	Moderation and quality control

A reference implementation is also described for P2P aggregation nodes. These nodes run on Node.js with PostgreSQL and synchronize via pull gossip: each node assigns incremental IDs to statements as they are ingested, periodically queries a random subset of peers for statements with larger IDs, and deduplicates by SHA‑256 hash. No consensus protocol is used; eventual consistency is achieved through repeated gossip (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

3. Coordination primitives, aggregation, and trust computation

The protocol’s central coordination primitive is the stable hash. Because statements have standardized form and stable hashes, aggregators can crawl many organizations’ /.well-known/statements.txt, parse structured statement types, and compare hashes of statement content or referenced documents. The paper’s illustrative case is that if 30 foreign ministries issue a Sign PDF statement with the same PDF file hash, an aggregator can infer that these 30 have co-signed exactly the same document (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

This underlies the proposed move from per-country discovery to per-position discovery. The paper contrasts

$$T_{\text{old}} \approx n_{\text{countries}} \times t_{\text{per-country}}$$

with

$$T_{\text{Stated}} \approx n_{\text{unique positions}} \times t_{\text{per-position}},$$

where $$n_{\text{unique positions}} \ll n_{\text{countries}}$$ in most negotiations. A plausible implication is that coordination effort shifts from bilateral enumeration toward position clustering (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The protocol gives special emphasis to “micro-agreements”: small, narrowly scoped commitments represented as PDFs published at paths such as /files/<hash>.pdf, where <hash> is the SHA‑256 hash of the file. Organizations sign by issuing Sign PDF statements that reference the file hash. If the text changes, a new PDF and a new hash are created, and organizations may supersede prior statements using the Superseded statement: field. This yields an incremental public drafting model rather than a single omnibus text (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

For asynchronous decision-making, the protocol defines Poll, Vote, and Response statements. The printed Poll structure is:

Type: Poll Voting deadline: <UTC timestamp> Poll: <question> Option 1: <choice> Option 2: <choice> Who can vote: Description: <eligibility criteria>

Votes reference the poll by hash and indicate the chosen option. Responses similarly reference prior statement hashes, allowing threaded discussion tied to specific statements or clauses. No single chair or secretariat controls the agenda; any participant can start a poll, others can join or ignore it, and aggregators can compute outcomes at any time (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

Identity assurance is extended by a quantitative web-of-trust. Organizations publish Organisation verification statements with a Confidence value between 0 and 1, described as a claimed lower bound on the probability that the verification is correct. If there are multiple independent verifications with confidences $c_1, c_2, \ldots, c_n$, the suggested aggregation is

$$C_{\text{aggregate}} = 1 - \prod_{i=1}^{n} (1 - c_i).$$

The example given is three independent verifications each at 0.8 confidence, which yields

$C_{\text{aggregate}} = 1 - (1-0.8)^3 = 0.992.$

The model assumes independence. This suggests a probabilistic notion of institutional identity assurance rather than a single binary certification step (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

4. Diplomatic and organizational applications

The paper identifies four principal application areas. The first is faster treaty negotiation through micro-agreements. One ministry can publish Draft 0 of a clause as a PDF plus its own Sign PDF statement; other states can publish Response statements that reference the draft’s hash; updated PDFs then produce Draft 1, Draft 2, and further signatures. Once enough parties have signed the same PDF hash, the micro-agreement is effectively in force among them, with enforcement conditions specified in the text. The process is public, timestamped, and traceable (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The second application is continuous, transparent operation of international institutions. A secretariat or member can publish a Poll, member states can vote asynchronously via Vote statements, and quorum, majority, or veto rules can be codified in a foundational PDF charter and signed through the protocol. The stated transparency benefits are that every position is publicly visible, attributable to a domain, and timestamped, and that constituents can inspect who supported which measure and when (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The third application is coordinated signaling from local governments to national authorities. Municipalities, cities, provinces, or regions can publish identical or closely related statements on official domains, all referencing the same hash or text. Aggregators can then display a map of alignment, such as “80 municipalities across 5 regions have issued this statement.” The proposal explicitly frames this as quantifiable evidence of local consensus and as a way to bypass hierarchical chokepoints (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The fourth application is coalition formation among non-governmental organizations and related institutions. NGOs, professional associations, and universities can publish positions as plain content, polls, or Sign PDF statements, discover who else has taken the same position, and form ad hoc coalitions around specific clauses or demands. Aggregators can display all organizations that have signed a given statement, confidence-weighted identity verification, and ratings concerning trustworthiness or alignment (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The paper also contrasts this model with opaque treaty drafting and specifically with the EU Lisbon Treaty’s editing process. It argues that clause-level separation, public versioning, and explicit supersession could help avoid accidental inclusion of provisions nobody intended. This is presented as an argument rather than a reported deployment outcome; the paper does not present a concrete real-world case study with data (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

5. Security model, moderation, and implementation constraints

The primary trust anchor is control of domains plus TLS certificates. If an observer can reach https://mfa.example.gov/.well-known/statements.txt over HTTPS and the certificate matches the domain, the statements can be attributed to the domain’s owner. The protocol also supports optional publication of statement hashes in DNS TXT records as an additional verification channel. Under this model, forging a statement requires compromising the organization’s DNS, TLS certificate, or web server or publishing pipeline (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The paper identifies four main threat classes. The first is domain compromise, mitigated by Dispute authenticity statements, the Superseded statement: field for later correction, and a possible future extra layer using hardware-held signing keys. The second is impersonation through lookalike domains, mitigated by Organisation verification statements and analysis of verification-network structure. The third is coordination attacks with fake organizations in non-diplomatic settings, mitigated by network topology analysis and cross-referencing with existing databases and SSL OV certificates. The fourth is censorship, mitigated by the inherently decentralized architecture and mirroring through many independent P2P nodes (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

Content moderation is deliberately decentralized. Three statement types are singled out for this purpose: Dispute Authenticity, used to challenge whether a statement truly comes from the claimed organization; Dispute Content, used to challenge factual claims in a statement and referencing the statement hash; and Rating, which provides 1–5 star ratings for organizations on qualities such as trustworthiness. Together with the web-of-trust, these form the protocol’s moderation and reputation layer (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The implementation model is intentionally minimal, but it is not limitless. For approximately 200 states and fewer than 1,000 aggregator nodes, the paper describes the protocol as easily scalable. It also states that if tens of thousands of local governments and NGOs join, naive polling of all sites by all aggregators becomes wasteful, and suggests specialization of P2P nodes by sector or region. It also emphasizes that there is no blockchain or consensus layer and therefore no canonical “one true history” beyond what can be reconstructed from timestamps and domain logs (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

These design choices are paired with an explicit limitation: the protocol is not intended for sensitive negotiations involving intelligence, trade secrets, or security strategy. It complements confidential channels rather than replacing them. This directly addresses a likely misconception that public standardization of positions is meant to subsume private diplomacy; the paper says the opposite (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

6. Comparison, governance, adoption, and limitations

The proposal is positioned against several existing coordination media. Compared with summits and in-person meetings, it is lower-bandwidth but continuous and standardized. Compared with bilateral consultations, it avoids a structure that scales quadratically with the number of states. Compared with press releases, it provides fixed format and canonical identifiers. Compared with email lists and encrypted group chats, it is public-by-design and designed for structured voting, signing, and aggregation. Compared with centralized social media, identity is anchored in official domains rather than platform accounts, and statements are machine-parseable and hash-addressable (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The paper also gives an explicit comparison with ActivityPub. Both are decentralized, but ActivityPub uses JSON-LD and ActivityStreams vocabulary, ignores key–value order, is push-based, and is focused on social networking. Stated uses plain-text, English-like fields, enforces strict field order to make hashes stable, is pull-based through static files at predictable URLs, and is focused on institutional coordination through types such as Sign PDF, Organisation verification, and Poll. Interoperability is described as possible in principle but not specified (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

Protocol maintenance is only lightly specified. A reference specification is hosted at stated.network, and the Format version: 4 field is the mechanism for evolution while remaining backward compatible. Possible governance models mentioned are a technical working group under an international standards body or a consortium of early-adopting foreign ministries or NGOs, but these are presented as possibilities rather than established facts (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The incentives for adoption are framed differently by actor class. For states and foreign ministries, the cited incentives are faster discovery of allies’ positions, better coalition formation, reduced dependence on foreign social-media companies, and improved transparency and accountability to domestic constituents. For local governments, the main advantages are collective signaling and low technical requirements. For NGOs and other organizations, the emphasis is on rapid discovery of aligned organizations and a public, auditable basis for coalition formation. In all cases, the minimal deployment claim is that no new software is strictly required beyond the ability to serve static text from a domain (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).

The paper closes with open questions rather than deployment results. It calls for pilot evaluations measuring time to consensus compared with traditional methods, the number and nature of micro-agreements formed, and effects on smaller states’ bargaining power. It also proposes plugins for common CMSs, stronger interfaces for visualizing coalitions and treaty networks, more formalized semantics for voting rules and quorums, optional PKI layers using hardware tokens held by top officials, and more sophisticated network analysis against sybil-like coordination attacks. This suggests that the protocol is presented as an implementable framework whose institutional effects remain an empirical research agenda (Rieckmann, 17 Jul 2025).