Patent advisory

EdSSA is patent-pending. This page exists so operators and contributors know where the patent claims land, what the Community Edition license grant covers, and how to find the public docket.

Scope

The EdSSA patent application covers the credential-construction

• verification methodology — the use of:

• a per-fleet seed expanded into per-slot expected bytes;
• random-byte chaff slots whose positions are part of the verifier state;
• a threshold-based byte-match acceptance shape (not strict byte-for-byte equality);
• per-request sub-identifier claims that bind the verification to a sub-fleet / sub-tenant;
• the cellular ratchet driving expected bytes forward on a clock-derived cadence with a median-of-3 drift corrector.

(Patent figures FIG. 1–FIG. 4 are referenced from the Architecture page; they will be embedded here once the A1 publication ships.)

License grant (BSL 1.1 + Additional Use Grant)

The Community Edition ships under the Business Source License 1.1 with these specific terms (per ADR-001 / D-5 in the roadmap):

Practically: you can use, modify, and redistribute the Community Edition for personal projects, OSS dependencies, internal tooling, and commercial production deployments as long as your annual revenue from products incorporating EdSSA stays under $1M. The patent grant explicitly covers the permitted use — using EdSSA at those scales does not infringe the patent.

Above $1M ARR you need a commercial license — contact legal@edssa.io.

What’s NOT in the CE patent grant

• Use of the Enterprise-only patent claims (F-03 swarm, F-07 ML-KEM onboarding, F-16 drift corrector, F-19 response-ID chain, F-21 Tier-4 Merkle audit, F-24/F-25 cooperative recovery, F-26..28 payload channel) — these ship under separate Enterprise terms.
• Use of the trademarks “EdSSA” or “Parity Express” beyond describing your use of the product. Standard nominative-use is fine; using the marks in your own product name is not.
• Redistribution of the Community Edition as a managed service (“EdSSA-as-a-Service”) above the $1M ARR threshold.

Public docket

The patent application is in prosecution at the time of the v1.0.0-ce release. After A1 publication (≈18 months from filing priority date) the full specification is publicly searchable. The EdSSA project maintains a redacted public copy at:

📌 Link pending publication. The public-docket URL lands here as part of the Phase-8 public-migration step, alongside the Caddy block for docs.edssa.io.

Frequently asked

Can I fork the Community Edition?

Yes, with these conditions: the fork must retain the BSL 1.1 license text + the patent grant; the Change Date and Change License apply per-file as committed; and the Additional Use Grant threshold ($1M ARR) applies to the fork’s commercial use of the patent claims, not the fork’s existence.

Can I write an SDK for the Community Edition?

Yes. SDKs that wrap the wire format / engine surface fall under the same Additional Use Grant. The Rust / Go / Python SDKs ship from EdSSA-controlled repos; community SDKs are welcome — open an issue at github.com/edssa-io/edssa so we can link to it from the SDK reference.

Is there a “non-asserted” patent clause?

The Additional Use Grant is the binding text. There is no separate non-assertion pledge — but the patent grant is non-revocable for permitted use, which is the practically identical outcome.

Who do I contact for legal questions?

legal@edssa.io. The team replies within 2 business days for license-clarification questions; commercial license negotiations take longer.