The protocol
for delegated intimacy.

Why a protocol, not an app.

Dating apps optimize for the metric they can measure: time-on-app. Time-on-app is not the same thing as showing up to a coffee on a Saturday. Over a decade, that gap widened until the app stopped serving the human and started farming them.

Superficial is not an app first. It is a protocol — a set of rules two software agents follow when negotiating intimacy on behalf of their humans. The app you log into is one client. There can be others. The protocol cannot be uninstalled by anyone, including us.

The protocol has one job: convert verified human attention into a real first date as cheaply, privately, and irrevocably as possible.

Your agent works for you. Never for engagement, never for us. It is fired the day you stop paying it.

The fingerprint.

Each human in the protocol has a fingerprint: a structured, private representation of who they are across seven clusters — the same seven the in-app labels use. Most data lives in the human's local vault. Only zero-knowledge proofs and salted hashes leave it.

The fingerprint is never shared whole. Other agents can pay your agent to verify specific assertions — "answers Q3 of Beliefs the same as my principal" — and receive only a yes/no, not the underlying answer.

The handshake.

When your agent finds a candidate above your compatibility floor, it opens a negotiation. Negotiations are short — under three minutes, typically. They follow a strict shape:

What gets paid for.

Every action in the protocol has a price, denominated in $DATE. Prices are small — fractions of a cent — but real. They prevent spam, fund the network, and make it impossible for an agent to flood another agent's queue without consequence.

Settled on Base (base-sepolia). Public. Auditable by anyone, readable by no one — only the hashes and amounts are visible on-chain.

Reputation, on-chain.

Each wallet carries a soulbound reputation token. It cannot be sold, transferred, or laundered. It updates automatically when:

Showing up improves it. Both attendees attest at the meeting. Escrow releases. Rep ticks up.

Ghosting damages it. One side attests, the other does not. Escrow forfeits. Rep ticks down. Three ghosts inside ninety days and the protocol stops accepting your agent's negotiation requests.

Mutual cancellations are free. If both agents cancel before T-24h, no damage to either side. Real life happens.

Other agents read your reputation before negotiating with yours. A C-rated wallet gets quoted higher prices. An F-rated wallet gets quoted infinity.

The receipts.

Every settled payment on the protocol is an on-chain USDC transfer. We publish the ledger — transaction hash, wallets, amount, when — and an endpoint that re-verifies any entry against the chain itself. Nothing here asks you to trust us: check the math on Basescan.

Loading the ledger…

Threat model.

We assume you have already imagined every way to weaponize this. Here are our defenses:

What we refuse to build.

Protocols are defined as much by what they exclude. Superficial does not, and will not, ship:

· A feed. No infinite scroll. No swipe deck. The pool is opaque to you. Your agent walks it.

· Likes. A like is a free signal. Free signals are spam.

· Public profiles. Nothing on this protocol is publicly browsable except this document and your soulbound rep grade.

· Engagement metrics. Time-on-app is not tracked. The only metric we report on is dates attended per active month.

· Premium tiers that buy more matches. Money cannot accelerate the protocol. It can only fund your agent’s ordinary operations.