The verified work passport
Your résumé is a claim. Your LinkedIn is a brand. Your Manav passport is the cryptographic record of the work you actually did — portable across employers, recoverable from termination, useful for the entire next thirty years of your career.
What's on it
Three layers, each independently verifiable. Identity claims (who you are): name, jurisdiction of identity verification, hardware-bound DID, optional government ID anchor for regulated roles. Work attestations (what you did): a chronological list of artifacts you authored, supervised, or directed, each signed by an employer, customer, co-author, or witness. Reputation signals (how others rate you): your Trust Score, your peer-witnessed work magnitude, the consistency of your contributions over time.
Who controls it
You. The Manav DID is bound to your device, not your employer's tenant. When you leave a job, the attestations they signed for you remain valid; they cannot revoke "Vishal worked here over recent years" without invalidating their own signature on every other attestation, and the network is designed so that the cost to do so is much higher than the benefit. The selective-disclosure layer means you choose which attestations to show which audience: a hiring manager sees employer history; a marketplace sees client ratings; a regulator sees only the predicates they need.
Who pays
The relying party. Hiring companies, marketplaces, and regulators pay verification fees per query. The human is never charged to view, present, or carry their passport. This inverts the LinkedIn model — where the platform extracts value from the user by becoming a moat — and matches the email model, where the user pays nothing because the inbox is the value.
What's not on it
Three things, by design. Compensation history — gendered and racialized salary inheritance is among the most documented systemic harms in employment data; the protocol does not track it. Termination cause — employers may attest to dates of employment but not to circumstances of separation. Performance gradients — beyond the human's role declaration on each artifact, the protocol does not encode a "rank." Your Trust Score is a function of attested work, not of management opinion.
Recoverability and revocation
If you lose your device, you recover from a guardian set: 3-of-5 trusted contacts re-attest your identity and re-mint a device-bound DID. If a fraudster claims a copy of your passport, you revoke their access through the kill-switch channel; relying parties stop honoring the fraudulent presentation within 200 ms. If an employer signed a false attestation against you, an arbitration channel exists to challenge it; the protocol does not auto-resolve disputes.
How an employer issues an attestation
At offboarding, the employer's HRIS makes a single API call to the Manav signing service: attest(human_did, role, period, role_class, magnitude_summary). The signing service produces a signed attestation; the human accepts or refuses receipt; on acceptance, the attestation lives in the human's wallet. The whole flow is under 10 seconds. Most modern HRIS platforms ship integrations.
Why this stays portable
The attestations are signed and the signatures are verifiable without the issuer being online. An employer that closes, a marketplace that sunsets, a startup that pivots — all can leave the attestations they signed intact and verifiable for decades. The work survives the relationship.
Common objections
Two pushbacks we expect. Won't this slow workers down? First delegation prompt costs 90 seconds; allowlisted scopes vanish after that. Won't employers weaponize the audit trail? The protocol design — selective disclosure, user-owned wallet, explicit non-features around compensation and termination cause — addresses the most cited abuse paths.
Frequently asked questions
Does this change my employment contract? Yes, slowly. Expect a paragraph in salaried offers above $80k specifying role-declaration on AI-augmented work, audit-log retention, and IP attribution. The clauses look like the GDPR paragraphs every contract has carried for years — boring, ubiquitous, structurally important.
What about people who don't use AI? They keep working without changes. The protocol is opt-in at the action layer; an unsigned action is the default for any human who has not enrolled an agent. Adoption follows incentives, not mandates.
What happens to my work history when I change jobs? It stays with you. The attestations your employer signed are bound to your DID, not their tenant. The next employer can verify them in seconds; you can revoke their visibility at any time.
Where to start
From here, manav vs linkedin sets the broader work-history substrate and proof of human work addresses the hiring-side mechanics. Read those together and the policy questions get a lot more answerable.
Why the passport metaphor sticks
The passport metaphor sticks because the passport solves the same coordination problem the verifiable work history solves. A passport is issued by an authority you trust, carried by you, accepted by relying parties who verify the issuer rather than the bearer's claims, and remains valid across borders the issuer has no control over. Each property maps cleanly onto verifiable work history. The wallet is the passport. The issuer is the employer or institution. The relying party is the next employer. The border is the gap between platforms or jurisdictions. The metaphor is so apt that the legal frameworks emerging around digital identity in the EU, India, and the US are quietly using passport-grade language to describe the credentials they expect. The shape is not new; the medium is. The work-history wallet is the passport for a layer of life the original passport did not need to address. We are filling the layer with the same architectural conviction that produced the original.
The passport you carry is the only career record an employer cannot keep when you leave.