Patina MCP Server

Patina

Anyone can make a new account. Nobody can make an old one.

Patina reads the history in accounts a person already owns and turns it into portable evidence that a real human has been there for years. Built on the Vana data portability protocol, where the data stays in the user's own Personal Server and is read once, under a grant they can revoke.

Live at patinadata.xyz.

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The problem

Sybil resistance is unsolved and expensive. An airdrop, a quadratic funding round, a DAO vote or a free trial all need to know whether they are talking to a thousand people or to one person with a thousand wallets. The usual answers are poor: biometrics are invasive, KYC destroys privacy, and most behavioural signals the internet relies on today can simply be bought.

Somebody running an account farm can buy followers, bulk-upload posts and fill in a convincing profile. What they cannot buy is a decade.

The approach

Patina scores five things, weighted by how expensive each one is in time rather than in money.

Corroboration replaced an earlier Continuity signal that counted distinct months of post history. That was the better measure and it turned out to be unreachable: per-item timestamps only existed on scopes the desktop app collects, so on the web it scored zero for everybody and made a quarter of the total unwinnable. A score with points nobody can earn is not a strict score, it is a broken one.

Age and corroboration are earned outright. Everything else is gated behind them: an attacker can manufacture breadth, depth and followers in an afternoon, so those only count to the extent that real elapsed history backs them up. A floor of 15% stops a genuinely young person being flattened to zero for the crime of being nineteen.

Scored against representative profiles, under the weights above:

The gap between the first and last row is the whole product. The middle row is the one to keep an eye on: a real person with a short history scores low by design, and the further that sits above zero the better, because a low score is evidence of absence rather than an accusation.

Why this needs Vana

Delete the protocol and the product stops being expressible.

Reading someone's Instagram or GitHub history conventionally means OAuth, which hands the raw data to whoever asked and keeps it indefinitely. Users refuse, and platforms eventually shut it down. Vana inverts that: the data lives in the user's own Personal Server, an app pays a per-read fee to see only the scopes that were granted, the grant is revocable, and another app can verify the same proof without the user repeating any of it. That last property is what makes a portable score possible at all.

Honest limits

Stated on the site itself, not buried here:

• It cannot prove personhood. It reports how much real history it can see. That is evidence, not a certificate.
• A low score is not an accusation. Young, private or quiet accounts score low and are doing nothing wrong.
• Aged accounts can be bought. That turns a free attack into an expensive one whose price climbs with age. It does not make it impossible.

Running it

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # then fill in the values
npm run dev

You will need a Vana app identity. Create or register one at account.vana.org/developers, put the key in .env.local, then:

npm run register:moksha

Fund the app's escrow from the same page (faucet VANA on testnet, USDC.e on mainnet) and connect a source at app.vana.org/sources so there is something to read.

Commands

Notes for anyone reading the code

• src/lib/score.ts is the whole argument. Every weight carries a comment explaining why it is what it is.
• src/lib/normalize.ts exists because Vana's server-side collection returns a different shape from the JSON Schemas published for the desktop connectors: the payload arrives inside an items[] array with different field names. Both shapes are handled, and a real captured payload is pinned in the tests so an upstream change breaks a test rather than the live site.
• src/app/connect/useConnect.ts replaces the SDK's popup helper with a same-tab redirect. Popups get blocked on mobile and background tabs are suspended mid-poll, which strands people at the exact moment they have approved.
• Grants are keyed to the (user, app) pair, not to the scope. Approving a second source replaces the first one's scopes, so every read is persisted when it happens. There is exactly one chance to read each source.

Licence

MIT, see LICENSE.