The Semparo patent pledge

Last reviewed July 10, 2026 · v1.0

Semparo asks you to trust it because everything is published: the security architecture, a formal cryptography paper we are publishing for open review, and, at general availability, the source of the client crypto core. On July 10, 2026, we also filed two U.S. patent applications (U.S. Provisional Patent Application Nos. 64/108,852 and 64/108,856). Those two facts look like they contradict each other. This page resolves it, in writing, in public.

Why the patents exist

Semparo is bootstrapped, and a legacy vault is a decades-long promise: your vault has to outlive you, which means the company has to outlast funding cycles and copycats. The mechanisms we invented (the cryptographically enforced release of escrowed encrypted data once the owner stops responding and a sworn quorum confirms it, and enclave-validated delivery of key material to recipients who never enrolled a key) are the product. Publishing them invites scrutiny, and scrutiny is the only honest basis for trust in a security product. It also hands any well-funded competitor the full blueprint.

The two filings, applications 64/108,852 and 64/108,856, are what make that openness affordable. They are not a plan to tax an industry. They are the reason we can publish the architecture, the paper, and the code without financing our own replacement.

The four promises

1. We will only ever use these patents defensively. We will never assert them, or any patents descending from them (continuations, divisionals, or patents that issue from these applications), offensively. We will assert them in exactly two situations: against a party that asserts patents against Semparo first, or against a product that commercially clones the patented mechanisms.

2. We will never assert them against security researchers, auditors, or academics. Studying the mechanisms, testing them, breaking them, and publishing what you find is the reason we publish them. That work is safe from these patents, unconditionally.

3. We will never assert them against non-commercial or open-source implementations. Build a reference implementation, teach with it, release it under an open-source license. The pledge covers you.

4. This pledge is irrevocable for anyone who has relied on it, and it binds our successors and acquirers to the fullest extent the law allows. Here is the honest limit: no company can fully promise what a future owner will do. That is exactly why this pledge is written down, dated, and public, so that reliance on it starts accruing now, while the decision is still ours. If someone buys Semparo hoping to weaponize these patents, this page is the evidence against them.

What this means in practice

If you research, audit, or teach: you do not need our permission, a license, or a lawyer to work on these mechanisms, and you never will. If you build in the open, non-commercially: the same. Report what you break to contacts@semparo.com and we will thank you, not sue you.

The patents point at one audience only: a funded company that would take the mechanisms without doing the work and without the accountability. Everyone else holds our word, in public, with a date on it.