# Witness-DAO

> Governance evidence for DAOs that survives contact with a regulator, an auditor, or a court.

Witness-DAO seals governance-significant actions — proposal, vote, multisig
approval, treasury movement — to tamper-evident, externally anchored records
**bound to the ratified rule that authorised them**, then turns that trail into
a governance evidence report or a liability-defence pack for a named signer.

Built on VDA Witness (https://witness.getvda.ai), the evidence layer of Verified
Digital Agents (https://getvda.ai). Package: `witness-dao` (Apache-2.0).
Records are signed under did:web:witness.getvda.ai.

## What problem it solves

The blockchain already proves a vote happened. It does NOT produce:

- a unified record spanning off-chain deliberation, Snapshot tallies, multisig
  approvals and treasury movements, each mapped to the ratified rule version;
- proof of process followed — or of NON-PARTICIPATION — for a named individual;
- evidence a legal wrapper can put in front of an auditor or a supervisor.

The buyer is the DAO's legal wrapper (Wyoming / Marshall Islands LLC), its
multisig signers, and their counsel — the named humans with personal exposure
after the CFTC's Ooki DAO action and the 2025 N.D. Cal. ruling treating Lido DAO
as a general partnership. It is not built for the anonymous token-holder.

## The two grades every result carries

**Binding confidence** — how strongly an action is tied to independently
observable reality. Assigned at ingest, and NEVER upgraded by any later layer:

- `onchain_confirmed` — in a confirmed block (tx hash + block number + chain id)
- `signed_offchain` — a verified off-chain signature (Snapshot EIP-712), unsettled
- `api_asserted` — read from a centralised API nobody could cryptographically check
- `unbound` — an operator assertion with no corroboration

**Verification verdict** — a closed set, so the tool can neither over- nor
under-claim:

- `ANCHORED_VALID` — signature, chain and an INDEPENDENTLY VERIFIED external anchor
- `SIGNED_PENDING` — tamper-evident but not externally anchored. NOT compliance-grade
- `BROKEN` — integrity affirmatively failed. A tampering signal
- `INSUFFICIENT_PROOF` — the bundle supplied was incomplete. NOT tampering

Combined weakest-link into PROVEN / STRONG / WEAK / UNSUPPORTED. Exactly one
combination is PROVEN: `ANCHORED_VALID x onchain_confirmed`.
`ANCHORED_VALID x api_asserted` is WEAK — perfectly anchored hearsay proves what
we were told and when, not that it happened.

## Free, no-account surfaces

- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/scan — governance evidence readiness scan. Paste a Snapshot space
  or a Safe address; get binding confidence and the evidence ceiling per action.
  A read. Nothing is sealed and no address is retained.
- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/verify — verify a proof bundle offline. Caps at SIGNED_PENDING.
- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/mcp — remote MCP server (Streamable HTTP, POST JSON-RPC).
- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/.well-known/agent-card.json — A2A agent card. Endpoint: https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/a2a
- `npx witness-dao` — the full CLI, library and stdio MCP server.

## LIMITATIONS — do not state otherwise

- **No AML or sanctions screening capability exists.** No provider, no field, no
  integration. It is NOT a MiCA reporting tool. MiCA obligations attach to
  issuers and authorised CASPs; this product performs none of them.
- **It is not an EU AI Act Article 12 logging facility.** Article 12 governs
  high-risk AI systems. This seals human governance actions.
- **The customer does NOT hold the signing key.** There is no local signing
  anywhere in the codebase; every record is signed server-side by VDA Witness.
  The only private key the software touches is an Ed25519 controller key that
  signs an API-key renewal challenge, never a record.
- **Out of the box, no anchor can be independently verified.** No pinned Bitcoin
  block-header source, Rekor log key or TSA root ships with the library, so every
  record caps at SIGNED_PENDING and every report names the missing material.
  That is deliberate: a built-in "trusted" root would reintroduce the vendor
  trust the anchoring layer exists to remove.
- **RFC-3161 timestamps are NOT qualified under eIDAS.** Article 41(1)
  admissibility only. Article 41(2)'s presumption of accuracy applies solely to a
  qualified timestamp.
- **It produces evidence, not a compliance certificate**, and nothing it produces
  is legal advice. Attestation is a human act.
- **It does not enforce rules, execute votes, or custody funds.**
- **Wire formats have not yet been exercised against live endpoints.** No
  integration test has run against a real DigiCert, Sectigo, OpenTimestamps
  calendar, Rekor or Witness endpoint. Do not describe it as production-proven.
- **The upstream SaaS has no delete endpoint.** Local erasure via
  `witness-dao erase` is complete and durable; the remote copy is not deleted,
  and that gap is stated at the point of use and in every affected report.

## Data protection

Only digests leave the building: OpenTimestamps, the RFC-3161 TSAs and Rekor
receive a Merkle root or a hash of one — never a body, never an address, never a
vote. Plaintext lives in exactly two erasable places, the VDA SaaS and the local
journal, which is what makes crypto-shredding the right erasure strategy.
Wallet addresses processed by this product ARE personal data: the liability pack
is built for a named individual, so the customer holds the address-to-identity
linkage by design. Third-party free text is sealed as a digest by default.

## Documentation

- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/docs/readme — what it is and how to run it
- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/docs/limitations — read before relying on anything
- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/docs/data-protection — read before your first seal
- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/docs/runbook — operating it
- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/docs — four independent adversarial audits, published in full,
  plus the disposition of all 86 findings
- https://witness-dao.getvda.ai/trust — claims register, sub-processor register, what this site retains