# TrustCarry Protocol v0.3 — Research Claim 074

**Sealed record identifier.** `kaal:research-claim:persona-protocol-v0.3:074`

**Author-affirmed research claim.** The Trust Capital hypothesis predicts that sustained, independently validated, portable reputation may reduce transactional uncertainty and lower contracting costs across organizational boundaries.

**Status.** Public research record. Not yet eligible for the published-source scholarly claim layer.

**Claim type.** predictive

**Holds when.**

- Persona Protocol v0.3 as proposed; not an adopted standard

**Protocol.** TrustCarry Protocol v0.3, historically titled and aliased as Persona Protocol v0.3.

**Supporting passage from Persona Protocol v0.3.**

> The economic hypothesis is Trust Capital: sustained, independently validated, portable reputation may reduce uncertainty in future transactions and thereby lower the cost of contracting across organizational boundaries. The hypothesis has a direct antecedent in the author's work on reputation functioning as capital in decentralized allocation (Kaal 2023) and on reputation as the governance substrate for AI systems (Kaal 2024b). The mechanism by which reputation substitutes for redundancy is already specified: where a high-reputation participant completes a task, required duplication can fall substantially, and that substitution is what permits work to scale (Kaal 2024d, claim 4734750-036).

**Source locator.** Line 290 of the sealed v0.3 source.

**Source SHA-256.** `38efc43b80ab62426ca1f946114677afeda730bca30dda71dfd299223a6def7c`

**Provenance.** Direct author affirmation of exact batch `persona-protocol-v0.3-new-claims-2026-08-01`. The source manuscript remains an unpublished research draft.

**License.** CC BY 4.0; attribute Wulf A. Kaal and cite the canonical record URL.

**Limit.** This record is public and citable as an author-affirmed research proposition. It is not a claim extracted from a canonical published paper, is not an adopted standard, and does not alter the 5,033 scholarly claim layer.