Protocol Identity and Pseudonymity

Each participant in the protocol has a persistent pseudonymous identity used for routing, reputation, settlement, and delivery entitlements, but it is not a required real-world identity. Protocol identities allow continuity for longitudinal studies and allow performance to accumulate over time without exposing personal information. These can be configured to support:

• single-campaign participation with limited linkability;
• multi-campaign participation with reputation continuity; and
• cohort continuity for recontact workflows.

The protocol treats linkability as a privacy risk. Campaigns should avoid collecting unnecessary correlating signals. Distribution and storage layers must support isolating campaign data so that a participant's activity cannot be trivially linked across unrelated campaigns.

Implementations may use overlap and cluster-confidence signals to manage operational risk. Those signals can justify routing or readiness restrictions, but they are not the same thing as canonical proof of a shared real-world identity or confirmed fraud.