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Sovereign — A Union No King Can Stamp and No One Can Forge

Here's a question the founders actually had to answer: what makes a thing legitimate when there's no king to stamp it? Their answer was consent, not authority. I wanted to build that as something you can't hand-wave — real cryptography.

Sovereign: a vertical chain of 13 colony seals, all glowing green with checkmarks, linked by gold lines up to a Declaration node; the HUD reads 13 of 13, UNION INTACT.

What it is

SOVEREIGN is a live union of the thirteen colonies. Each one generates its own key in your browser — no server, no account, no central authority — and signs its ratification. This is genuine public-key cryptography (ECDSA P-256, the Web Crypto standard), not a mockup. Each signature is chained to the one before it, so the thirteen form a single tamper-evident record. The one trick it all rests on: each colony has two keys — a secret private key only it holds, and a public key it shares with everyone. It signs its exact words with the private key, and anyone can use the public key to check that signature — proving both that the real colony signed it and that not a single character has changed. No password, no server, no authority does the checking; the math does.

How it’s built

  • Real Web Crypto (SubtleCrypto): per-colony ECDSA P-256 keygen, sign, and verify — no library, no backend.
  • A SHA-256 hash chain: each colony signs a block bound to the previous block's hash, so tampering anywhere breaks the link there and everywhere downstream.
  • Forge a colony's signed words and that seal — and every seal after it — is rejected, by the math, with no authority to appeal to.
  • A built-in harness (window.__sov) runs the real crypto: sign/verify roundtrip, tamper-reject, wrong-key-reject, and the full 13-block chain. No fakery.
The same chain after tampering with colony 6 (Pennsylvania): the top five seals stay green, but PA and every seal below it turn red with X marks and dashed red links; the HUD reads 6 of 13, FORGERY DETECTED.
Forge one colony’s signed words and the math catches it — that seal and everything downstream reject the forgery, with no central authority.

On the theme

Independence as self-sovereignty. Public-key crypto is, almost literally, "independence is not a symbol, it's a mechanic" — the math that lets you be your own authority and need no one's permission to be believed. Become a sovereign yourself: generate a key, sign your declaration, and watch the proof die the instant you change a character.

Try it →Code →All the builds →

Shout-out

Part of the competition is cross-referencing other builders. So: shout-out to Eric Rhea — who set the theme and shipped LLM and 3D builds all week; this is my deliberate left turn into the one dimension nobody else touched.

Built for Summer Into AI 2026 (Competition #2), hosted by Eric Rhea. More in the build log.