Public-goods protocol team
Trustworthy records without trusted third parties.
Levarac Foundation builds open public goods for turning human actions
and facts into verifiable information that can travel across
organizations.
Mission
Make human actions and facts into trustworthy information without
relying on trusted third parties.
Vision
Create a state where verifiable records of human actions and facts are
used as decision material across organizations.
Why this matters
Many valuable opportunities depend on claims about what people did:
who attended, who contributed, who was present, who completed a task,
and who earned the right to receive something scarce.
Today, those claims are usually trapped inside private platforms,
trusted operators, QR-code checkpoints, manual review, or records that
cannot be verified later. As incentives become more valuable, the cost
of excluding fraud rises. Smaller communities, local organizers, and
independent projects often cannot afford that cost.
Levarac starts from a simple premise: human action should be able to
become trustworthy information without handing authority to a single
gatekeeper.
What we are building
Attendance proof
Our current focus is attendance proof: a way to turn real-world
participation, co-presence, and contribution into verifiable
records.
The initial use case is fair distribution of high-value benefits.
When rewards, access, or recognition are valuable enough to attract
fraud, organizers need evidence stronger than a shared QR code and
lighter than full identity checks.
Barnard
Barnard is an open-source proximity-sensing library developed for
this work. It uses privacy-preserving, rotating identifiers and
mutual observation between devices to make real-world presence more
costly to forge.
Public goods
We build for public use: open protocols, auditable implementations,
and reusable components that other organizers, communities, and
developers can inspect, adopt, and extend.
Approach
-
Observe locally. Participants' devices generate
signed observations from real-world proximity and context.
-
Verify across witnesses. A single report is weak;
mutually consistent reports from independent devices make forgery
more expensive.
-
Anchor minimally. The system preserves auditability
without publishing unnecessary personal data.
-
Let people carry records. Verified records should
belong to the person who earned them, not only to the service that
issued them.
-
Disclose selectively. A person should be able to
prove a condition without exposing every underlying encounter,
location, or relationship.
Principles
- Minimize trust in any single operator.
- Make claims verifiable after the event.
- Keep raw personal history private by default.
- Separate data generation from later interpretation.
- Build for portability across organizations and communities.
- Prefer open protocols and auditable implementations.
Origin
Levarac is "caravel" in reverse. The name points to a reversal in how
trust is created: not from a central authority downward, but from
human actions, mutual observations, and verifiable records upward.
There is also a small historical trace in the name. The original 2018
code name for this line of work was Galleon. When the team looked for
a lighter flag for a public-goods foundation, the image moved from a
galleon to a caravel: a smaller vessel for finding a route through
uncertain waters. Reversing caravel gave us Levarac.
Team
Kenichi Naoe
Founder and technical lead. Kenichi is a product builder with deep
experience taking consumer internet services from prototype to
long-term operation. He founded zukan.com Inc. in 2013 and has led
the launch and maintenance of dozens of user-facing products.
He was selected for Japan's government-backed Mitou IT program in
2012 and certified as a Super Creator. At Levarac Foundation, he
leads product direction, protocol implementation, field pilots, and
the translation of trust infrastructure into usable experiences.
Yoshinobu Shijo
Protocol design lead. Yoshinobu has worked across the blockchain
and Web3 ecosystem since 2016, contributing as both a business
developer and engineer to more than 30 projects.
His work spans protocol design, smart contracts, ecosystem
development, and academic research. In 2021, he received a Best
Paper Award at an international conference for work on a
public-blockchain supply-chain system. At Levarac Foundation, he
leads protocol architecture, verifiable credential design,
blockchain integration, and technical communication.
Koya Onodera
Product UX lead and mobile developer. Koya works at the intersection
of engineering, interface design, and early-stage product
development. He has helped launch multiple companies and contributed
to more than 12 consumer-facing products.
Since 2019, he has served as executive officer and CTO at bajji,
leading products including work in the Web3 field. His work has
received multiple awards in Japan and abroad, including a Good
Design Award. At Levarac Foundation, he leads product UX, mobile
development, demo quality, SDK interfaces, and adoption support.
Status
We are preparing early implementations, protocol experiments, and
field pilots for attendance proof and fair benefit distribution.