NEXUS Protocol Open Standard Active Development

The SSL certificate
for AI decisions.

Every AI call, every agent decision, every model output gets a signed receipt. It holds up in court and anyone can check it offline. Think of it like HTTP, but for AI audits. Patent Pending.

FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65 Offline-verifiable Cross-model Patent Pending
The Problem

AI doesn't give you a receipt.

Every AI system running today spits out answers with nothing behind them. No signature, no audit trail. You can't prove in court which model gave which answer, when, or why.

PROBLEM 01

No AI company can hand you a receipt that holds up in court.

Not OpenAI. Not Anthropic. Not Google. None of them can produce a receipt for an AI decision that would stand up in a lawsuit. If someone challenges an AI's output in court, there's nothing to point to. The whole industry is running without receipts.

PROBLEM 02

126 MCP packages got compromised. Agents trust tools blindly.

Over 126 MCP packages have already been caught running actions nobody approved. Autonomous agents call outside tools with no signed record of what they called, what came back, or which model decided to make the call. Nobody checks the supply chain.

PROBLEM 03

The EU AI Act requires audit trails, or you pay 35M EUR.

EU AI Act Article 13 says high-risk AI systems must keep audit trails and stay transparent about how they work. Writing logs to a database that can be edited later doesn't meet that bar. A signed record does. Maximum fine: 35M EUR or 7% global turnover.

The Protocol

How NEXUS works.

It's a drop-in wrapper for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. You don't change your model or rebuild your infrastructure. Add one import and every call gets signed. Patent Pending.

⚙️ Step 01

Model fires inference

Any model works: GPT-4o, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Llama, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint. It gets the request through the standard API surface, and the model itself never changes.

🛡️ Step 02

NEXUS intercepts at the boundary

Before the answer goes back to whoever asked, NEXUS wraps the raw output in a SHOD envelope, short for Signed Hash Output Descriptor. That envelope captures which model answered, its version, how long it took, and a hash of the output.

🔐 Step 03

ML-DSA-65 + Ed25519 dual-sign

The SHOD envelope gets signed twice: once with FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65 (the government's post-quantum signature standard) and once with Ed25519 (the older, classical kind). The model, version, latency, and output hash all get locked into the receipt. Patent Pending.

Step 04

Receipt anchored to Base L2

The receipt gets anchored to Base L2, so nobody can tamper with it without it showing. Any auditor with the public key can check it themselves, offline, no network call needed. Checking it takes under 10ms.

Python · Drop-in for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint hive-vcr-1
# Drop-in for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint
from hive.nexus import NexusClient

client = NexusClient(base_url="https://api.openai.com/v1")

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="gpt-4o",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "..."}]
)

receipt = response.nexus_receipt   # ML-DSA-65 signed, offline-verifiable
print(receipt.verify())            # True

# Inspect the SHOD envelope
print(receipt.model)               # "gpt-4o-2024-08-06"
print(receipt.latency_ms)          # 312
print(receipt.output_hash)         # "sha3-256:e3b0c44298fc..."
print(receipt.signature_algo)      # "ML-DSA-65+Ed25519"
print(receipt.anchor_tx)           # "0x7fa3...base-l2"
Compatibility Matrix

Works with every major model.

NEXUS wraps the API boundary, not the model. Any system that speaks OpenAI's API format gets NEXUS receipts with zero model-side changes.

Model / Provider Status Receipt Format Notes
GPT-4o / GPT-5
OpenAI
Compatible hive-vcr-1 Native OpenAI endpoint, full SHOD envelope
Claude 3.5 / 4
Anthropic
Compatible hive-vcr-1 Via OpenAI-compatible proxy adapter
Gemini 1.5 / 2
Google DeepMind
Compatible hive-vcr-1 Via OpenAI-compatible proxy adapter
Grok 3
xAI
Compatible hive-vcr-1 xAI API is OpenAI-compatible natively
Llama 3.x
Meta / self-hosted
Compatible hive-vcr-1 Local inference via Ollama, vLLM, llama.cpp
Any OpenAI-compatible
Any provider
Compatible hive-vcr-1 Pass any base_url to NexusClient
Why It Matters

AI without receipts can cost you everything.

Here are three industries where AI decisions are already creating legal risk. In each one, NEXUS is the only way to give regulators, courts, and buyers a receipt they'll accept.

🏛️ Enterprise AI Procurement

"No NEXUS receipt, no procurement approval."

EU AI Act Article 13 requires high-risk AI deployments to maintain machine-readable audit trails showing what model version produced what output, when, under what configuration. NEXUS receipts satisfy this requirement out of the box. Procurement officers at regulated enterprises now have a binary gate: receipted or not receipted.

EU AI Act Article 13
🚗 Autonomous Vehicles / FSD

Every FSD decision that leads to litigation needs provenance.

A full self-driving system makes thousands of AI-driven decisions per trip. When an incident leads to an NHTSA investigation or civil litigation, the question is always the same: what model made that decision, with what inputs, at what timestamp? Without a signed receipt, there is no answer. With NEXUS, every decision is a court-ready record.

NHTSA Investigation Standard
🛡️ DoD / Autonomous Weapons

DoD Directive 3000.09 requires auditable AI decisions.

Department of Defense Directive 3000.09 on autonomous weapons systems requires that humans remain "in the loop" for lethal decisions and that all AI-assisted decisions be auditable. NEXUS is the receipt layer that makes autonomous decision provenance checkable by any DoD auditor with the public key. It works offline, with no network needed.

DoD Directive 3000.09
How We Compare

Log files don't hold up in court.

Mutable logs, blockchain timestamps, and ad-hoc database writes each fail at least one critical requirement. NEXUS is the first standard to satisfy all six.

Capability Log files Blockchain timestamp NEXUS Protocol
Court-admissible
Tamper-evident, signed, non-repudiable
✗ No ~ Partial ✓ Yes
Offline-verifiable
Verify with public key, no network call
✗ No ✗ No ✓ Yes
Post-quantum secure
FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65
✗ No ✗ No ✓ Yes
Cross-model
Same receipt format across all providers
✗ No ✗ No ✓ Yes
Sub-10ms verification
Local verify, no chain query
~ Varies ✗ No ✓ Yes
Open standard
MIT licensed, freely implementable
✗ No ~ Partial ✓ Yes
Whitepaper

NEXUS: The Universal AI Decision Receipt Standard

Download the full technical specification. You can add NEXUS with one import. It's MIT licensed, so it's free to use, change, and build on. Every benchmark can be reproduced. Patent Pending.

Patent Pending · MIT License · FIPS 204 ML-DSA-65

Get Started

Start issuing NEXUS receipts today.

One import. Any model. Court-admissible receipts on every inference call. No infrastructure changes required. MIT licensed.