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The artifact
The LEXI credential: verify a legal opinion on-chain
A LEXI credential is a dated, scope-bound record on Base that commits to a co-signed legal opinion by hash and names who may rely on it. This page is the technical anatomy: what goes where, and how a relier checks it.
What lives where
The credential is not the opinion. It is metadata plus hash commitments to a versioned opinion held off-chain. That split keeps the chain as the integrity and reliance layer while the underlying documents can honour deletion and erasure requests under India's DPDP Act and the GDPR.
| Layer | Contents | Who can read it |
|---|---|---|
| On-chain (Base) | Firm ID, signatory, jurisdiction, as-of date, expiry, status (Live / Expired / Revoked), reliance mode (Open / Selective), governing law, scope hash, opinion hash | Anyone |
| Off-chain, public | Scope text (the precise question covered and what is excluded), assumptions and reservations, permitted-use terms | Anyone |
| Off-chain, gated | The opinion body: the professional's reasoning and conclusion, stored encrypted | Named reliers only |
There is no on-chain risk score and no numeric verdict, deliberately. The AI's risk read is internal work product; publishing a "compliance score" for a legal opinion would itself be a liability. The verdict, if you want one, is a licensed human's signature.
How a relier verifies, in one call
Verification is a read against the credential record: confirm the status is Live, confirm the scope hash and opinion hash match the documents you were given, and confirm you are a named relier. The interface below is the V0 design, running on Base Sepolia (testnet); the values shown are illustrative.
// V0 runs on Base Sepolia (testnet); the mainnet address follows the audit. // First credential id: 0x8df79fa9a9b35d31d8f324ad7399740c3233fefffb6803a6dc8697f28f7f7747 read credential(0x8df7…7747) on base-sepolia → status: Live → jurisdiction: AE-VARA → scopeHash: 0x0000…0000 → reliers: [named]
Reliance is explicit, and recorded
A relier is an entity that can assess and act on the opinion. Reliance attaches only after the relier accepts the reliance terms, and each reliance is recorded on-chain. In Selective mode (the default) the professional whitelists who may rely; Open mode, where anyone may rely after accepting terms and paying the USDC reliance fee, requires a defined liability cap in its terms before it is offered.
What the credential is not
- Not a licence, registration, or regulator approval. It records a professional's scoped opinion, nothing more.
- Not transferable. A credential is bound to its engagement. The exact token standard is an open engineering decision, so we do not name one here.
- Not a compliance score. No number, no rating, no verdict beyond the opinion itself and its live status.
- Not the opinion body. The reasoning stays off-chain, encrypted, readable by named reliers.
For what the opinion itself is and why counterparties ask for one, see crypto legal opinions. For the flow that produces a credential, see how LEXI works.