# One envelope for everything we publish

**Status:** Proposed · **Opened:** 2026-07-10

Our open-data idea (#5) sketches dataset announcements: source, vintage, license, hash, mirrors. Designing an agent-navigable search layer taught us the problem isn't dataset-shaped — it's everything-shaped. A document, a UI component, and a search-corpus entry raise the identical questions: who published this, from what source, which version, under what license, and how do I verify the bytes? Today each artifact class answers differently or not at all, and an agent acting on retrieved content inherits whichever answer is missing.

## The gap

NIP-94 describes a file; idea #5 extends it to datasets. Nothing extends it to the general case. Without one envelope shape, every consumer writes per-type verification or skips it — and "verifiable" quietly narrows to "verifiable if it happens to be a dataset."

## What we're sketching

One provenance envelope, NIP-94-family, with an artifact-type tag: source authority, vintage, license, content hash, mirror list (BUD-04 makes mirrors real), signing key — the same fields whether the artifact is a dataset, a document, a component manifest, or a search-corpus entry. Consumers verify hashes opportunistically; retrieval surfaces display what was and wasn't verified instead of laundering the difference. We've adopted this as internal architecture law (decision record 0009, ratified 2026-07-10 — internal), and our publishing pipeline already emits a per-file sha256 index for every page on this site; the envelope is the standard shape missing around practice we already run. Per idea #3's lesson: conformance fixtures alongside the prose, or it doesn't graduate.

## Why us

We build civic surfaces where "what is this dashboard built on" must have a checkable answer, and we're building search whose results agents act on. Unverifiable retrieval is how confident errors scale.

## Receipts

- [NIP-94: File Metadata](https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/blob/master/94.md) — the base shape to generalize
- [BUD-04: Mirroring Blobs](https://github.com/hzrd149/blossom/blob/master/buds/04.md) — mirror lists become real
- [Idea #5 — Public datasets on open rails](/NIPs/md/05-open-data-provenance.en.md) — the dataset-shaped ancestor
- [Wei & Tyson](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.05709v2) — replication exists (34.6 relays/event); provenance doesn't
- This site's own `index.json` faces — per-file sha256, the practice the envelope standardizes