What you did, wherever you did it.
A record of a player’s history across every game on the network — assembled from what each game signed, not from anything the player typed in. It travels with them to the next game, and it cannot be written into existence.
Things a game will vouch for.
A leaderboard answers who came where, which needs ranking and a prize pot. Most of what is worth recording is simpler than that: something happened, to one player, once. A first clear. A campaign finished. A session on launch day.
The game signs it
Nobody outside a game can tell a real achievement from an invented one, so each record is signed by the game’s own server. A record a player could sign for themselves would record nothing at all.
Published, then claimable
Records are gathered into a batch and published so anyone can rebuild them. After a period in which a wrong batch can be withdrawn, a player claims their own record — permissionlessly, because the proof is the permission.
Checked, not trusted
The audit rebuilds the published batch, re-checks every signature, and re-derives each record from its name. Renaming an achievement after the fact is caught even though the published root still matches.
A reading of records, not a profile.
Every score entry and every attestation already carries the game that signed it. A passport is what those add up to — which means it is not a new thing to maintain and trust, it is a view of records already kept.
What it holds
- Which games a player has actually played
- How much, and over what stretch of time
- Placings in seasons that have settled
- Everything any game has vouched for
What it refuses to hold
There is no score, no rating, no level and no reputation figure. Every one of those would be ArcadeUnion’s opinion about a player, and the whole value here is that not one line is ours — each was signed by somebody else.
A number we invented would be the least trustworthy thing on the page, and it would be the thing everyone looked at.
The one thing money cannot buy.
A wallet address is free and takes a second to make. Most things built on top of one inherit that problem. A passport does not, and the reason is dull rather than clever.
Every line costs something to obtain
A record has to be signed by a game that has no reason to sign it falsely, which means passing whatever that game asks of a player. Faking a history across three games means doing that three times over, for as many accounts as you want histories.
And time will not compress
A two-year history takes two years. That is the part no budget shortens, and it is why a passport works as a gate where a payment would not: it costs an ordinary player nothing at all, while costing anyone running accounts in bulk the one input that cannot be bought.
Stated plainly: this makes a passport expensive to fake, not impossible. Somebody patient enough, running enough accounts for long enough, ends up with real histories — because at that point they have genuinely done the thing. That is the intended outcome rather than a hole in it.
An audience that arrives with a history.
Recognise players who have been around
A game launching on the network can offer something to players with a proven record elsewhere on it — a starting item, early access, a place in a season. Not a list of wallet addresses, but people whose history other studios put their name to.
And keep competitions honest
A prize season can ask for history rather than for money. It is the rare gate that turns away automated accounts without turning away a new player who simply has not got there yet — because the cost of clearing it is paid in time. How prize boards work →
Records are what a memory is minted from.
A placing or an attestation, once published and settled, is what a player proves against to claim a collectible record of it.