PaperProof Protocol Yellow Paper: A Source-Derived Specification of the Sui-Native Artifact Protocol

PaperProof is a Sui-native protocol for durable, verifiable, and community-governed digital artifacts. This yellow paper specifies the current contract-level protocol as implemented by the PaperProof mainnet packages. It describes the trust roots, deployment manifest, object inventory, artifact type registry, artifact series model, typed version records, Walrus content references, comments tree, likes book, fee manager, governance vault, proposals, voting, claims, events, validation rules, error codes, indexing rules, upgrade boundaries, and SDK-facing contracts. This document is intentionally narrower than a whitepaper and stricter than an application guide. It does not claim that PaperProof proves truth, originality, academic quality, license compliance, or social value. It specifies what the protocol recognizes, what the contracts store, what events can be treated as canonical under the active deployment, and how third-party applications and indexers should avoid common integration errors.