Executive Summary — Mission: "Root of Trust" for the AI Era

Generative AI has made it trivial to produce text, images, audio, and video indistinguishable from human-created content. Meanwhile, automated bots now account for a significant share of web traffic. As a result, demand to verify "whether this data (or action, or view) is genuinely human" is rising rapidly across both the AI training-data market and the advertising market.

The DEP Protocol is a proof-of-humanhood layer (attestation layer) designed to meet this demand.

The DEP Protocol generates human verification as a PII-stripped score—without identifying the individual—and issues it in a form that third parties can independently verify. It is a Layer 1 for human-activity verification, built on Avalanche.

The essence of the DEP Protocol is captured in three design principles:

1. No PII (Personally Identifiable Information). DEP never asks "who you are"; it only addresses "whether you are human." Device and behavioral signals are processed on-device and immediately discarded or hashed. Only the "human score (attestation result)" is persisted and circulated.
2. Independently verifiable by third parties. The authenticity and tamper-resistance of recorded scores, together with the signature of an authorized generating entity, can be verified by third parties without relying on trust in the issuing operator. Existing bot-detection solutions produce allow/deny verdicts whose rationale can only be confirmed internally. DEP is structurally different.
3. Separation of infrastructure (protocol) and application (dApps). The DEP Protocol stays focused on supplying verifiable human scores; continuity checks, accumulation, and use-case-specific judgments are handled by dApps built on top. DEA itself also ships the first application modules (Ad-Fraud Countermeasure SDK / AI Training-Data Supply SDK), balancing the neutrality of the infrastructure with commercial viability.

Ad-fraud countermeasures are merely the first application of this infrastructure. The same proof-of-human mechanism can expand stepwise into AI training-data human verification, AI-vs-human distinction, SNS bot countermeasures, and robotics. The umbrella concept behind all of this is the "Root of Trust for the AI Era."

DEP (DEAPcoin), the native token of the DEP Protocol, begins full operation with the mainnet launch scheduled for July 14, 2026. The DEP Protocol does not launch as a fully decentralized network from day one; it currently operates as a consortium chain run by multiple entities and will progressively go public in stages, keyed to DEA's stock listing. Distinguishing honestly between the current reality and the future vision is a consistent policy of this document.