ks · studio / jinnahnook
academia · live
Jinnahnook.
Schools, universities, research labs.
Verifiable scholarship — credentials, grants, and research agents the institution can audit end-to-end.
the framing question
What does sovereignty mean for a research institution?
It means the transcript travels with the student, not the registrar. It means the grant traces every disbursement to the milestone that earned it. It means the agent that drafts a literature review can be replayed at defense time, with every citation chain-linked. Sovereignty isn't a feature; it's the audit trail being the source of truth.
the three artifacts, tailored for academia
Verifiable degrees, course records, peer reviews, and authorships — each issued by an attested institution, held in the student's wallet, presentable with selective-disclosure ZK proofs. Recovery defaults to a 3-of-5 advisor quorum so a stolen laptop doesn't cost a career.
ESCROW for research grants (funder locks; PI receives on signed milestones); MILESTONE for thesis progression (chapter sign-off triggers stipend). Two-tier governance: department + finance for the fast path, ethics committee for the slow backstop. Gas is sponsored — students never pay to deploy a trade.
An agent kernel restricted to academic corpora (OpenAlex, PubMed, arXiv, JSTOR — no general web). Seven skills: literature search, citation verification, plagiarism scan, thesis outline, conference review, plus two restricted-scope actions (peer-review submission, grant submission) that refuse to dispatch without an advisor-signed envelope.
lexicons · the records this program adds
Domain-specific record shapes registered with @kashscript/lexicons at host boot. Each anchors to one of the three artifacts.
| NSID | Anchor | Version | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
kash.academia.thesis | trade | 1.0.0 | PhD / MSc thesis record — chapters, milestones, advisor sign-off chain. Anchored to Trade because thesis progression drives MILESTONE payouts. |
kash.academia.peer-review | identity | 1.0.0 | Peer-review attestation — the holder reviewed a manuscript for a named venue. Anchored to Identity because it's a verifiable credential of professional service. |
kash.academia.publication | identity | 1.0.0 | Authorship record for a published work. Anchored to Identity because authorship is part of the holder's verifiable scholarly history. |
kash.academia.course-record | identity | 1.0.0 | Transcript-grade course completion record. Issued by registered institution attestors; can be selectively disclosed (e.g., prove course completion without exposing grade). |
kash.academia.grant | trade | 1.0.0 | Research-grant escrow record — funder, principal investigator, milestones, disbursement schedule. Anchored to Trade because grants are ESCROW + MILESTONE trades. |
reference solutions
Concrete products built within this program. Status flags are honest — `concept` means documented; `prototype` means code exists but isn't production; `reference` means it is; `in-the-wild` means a real deployment is running.
PhD Thesis Advisor
prototypeAn agentic kernel that helps a PhD candidate outline, draft, and verify their thesis end-to-end — within an advisor-defined skill manifest.
The advisor declares an `AgenticSpec` enumerating the candidate's research domain + permitted tools (literature search, citation verification, plagiarism scan, outline drafting). The candidate's `did:kash` is the invoker; the advisor's is the attestor.
Every action the agent takes — a search, a citation lookup, a draft revision — is a chain-linked, Ed25519-signed Kash-Event. The thesis ledger is the source of truth: the committee can replay the entire research process at defense time.
Restricted-scope actions (submitting to a journal, formally attesting an interim chapter) require an advisor-signed envelope. The kernel refuses to dispatch them without one.
Departmental Grant Escrow
conceptA two-tier governance flow for distributing research grants: funder locks principal in an ESCROW, principal investigator receives MILESTONE payouts as the department + ethics committee sign off.
The funder (foundation, institutional sponsor, government agency) hydrates a `kash.academia.grant` manifest and deploys the trade. The principal investigator's `did:kash` is the recipient; milestone payouts flow as the department head + ethics committee co-sign each completion.
Two-tier governance means either the validator quorum (department + finance office, fast oracle vote) OR the guardian multi-sig (ethics committee chair + provost, slow human backstop) can release funds. The first to reach quorum settles.
Sponsored gas means the PI never pays a deploy or settle fee — the program's paymaster covers the suite's gas budget within the host's monthly cap.
In the wild
Honest framing: no production deployment yet. The PhD-thesis-advisor solution is a prototype — code exists, not yet inside a working department. The grant-escrow solution is at concept stage. First deployment targeted for a Pakistan university partnership in Q3 2026; track the journal for milestone updates.
engage
Bring Jinnahnook to your campus.
Studio engagements run as fixed-scope phases — a department, a fellowship cohort, or a single research office. We'd rather ship one production deployment for an institution that wants to own its scholarship than ten pilot meetings.