Confidential by Design. Accountable by Architecture.
Decentralized record infrastructure for child welfare, foster care, and adoption — built natively on COTI V2 Garbled Circuits.
The United States child welfare system serves 328,947 children in foster care annually (AFCARS FY2024). In the same year, 46,935 children were adopted from foster care — the lowest adoption figure since 1999, and a 26% decline since 2019. Another 70,418 children remain in care with an adoption permanency plan, waiting. 15,379 youth aged out of foster care entirely, many without access to their own records. Behind all of it: courts, DCFS agencies, health providers, and educational institutions all operating incompatible legacy systems with no shared record infrastructure. Children have literally been lost in interstate placements due to documentation failures.
KinShield provides the cryptographic foundation that makes a unified, privacy-preserving, multi-agency child welfare and adoption record possible:
- GC-encrypted ERC-721 record token per child — one canonical source of truth across all agencies, with no single administrator holding a master key
- Role-gated access control — courts, DCFS caseworkers, foster parents, medical providers, adoptive families, and oversight bodies each hold cryptographic keys scoped to their permitted data slice
- Immutable on-chain audit logs — every read, write, and transfer is cryptographically logged, timestamped, and legally defensible
- Interstate record portability via Axelar — ICPC (Interstate Compact on the Placement of Children) document exchange replaced with cross-chain permissioned access across 70+ networks
- Adoption finalization module — TPR orders, court decrees, and ICPC approvals stored on-chain; post-adoption families retain access to curated medical and developmental history after the state case closes
- Self-sovereign key handoff at age 18 — youth who age out gain permanent, state-independent control of their own records
| Metric | Figure (AFCARS FY2024) |
|---|---|
| Children in US foster care | 328,947 |
| Children entering care annually | 170,943 |
| Children adopted from foster care | 46,935 — lowest since 1999 |
| Children awaiting adoption (permanency plan) | 70,418 |
| Youth aging out annually without permanency | 15,379 |
| States without full CCWIS compliance | 32 of 44 surveyed (73%) |
| ACF annual budget authority | $94.4 billion |
Child welfare and adoption records require multi-party computation across adversarial parties — courts, agencies, health providers, and adoptive families all have conflicting interests and legitimate access claims. ZK proofs are limited to 1-to-1 verification and cannot support this. FHE is too computationally expensive for field access on mobile devices. COTI's GC implementation runs 3,000x faster than FHE and is the only live, EVM-compatible, multi-party computation privacy infrastructure practical for social services workflows at scale.
| Contract | Function |
|---|---|
KinShieldRegistry.sol |
ERC-721 record minting, sibling links, global role registry |
KinShieldAccessControl.sol |
AES key lifecycle, role grant/revoke/expiry, age-18 handoff |
KinShieldHealthRecord.sol |
Health sub-record with role-scoped reads (utString) |
KinShieldAuditLog.sol |
Immutable AuditEvent log, facility-indexed maltreatment events |
KinShieldICPC.sol |
Interstate placement transfer via Axelar cross-chain messaging |
🔴 Pre-Devnet — contract skeleton in progress. COTI Builders Program grant application in progress.
COTI V2 gcEVM · Garbled Circuits · Nightfall_4 (EY) · Axelar · Hardhat · OpenZeppelin ERC-721 · COTI TypeScript SDK
MIT — all contracts will be open-sourced at Milestone 4 of the grant roadmap.