The FR2515238 patent of the Protocol sometimes seems to come out of nowhere. It does not. It is the fifth or sixth iteration of a patented research begun a quarter-century ago, and of three earlier technical inventions all driven by the same obsession: to restore sovereignty to the digital representation of the subject — and now to its transmission.
Twenty-five years between two patents is a long stretch. From far away, it can look like an isolated lightning bolt. From close up, it is a straight line.
The first patent — FR2828572 (2001)
On 13 August 2001, I filed at the INPI, in my own name, patent FR2828572 — "method for creating a three-dimensional character." It was published on 14 February 2003. The filing was made in the context of a collaboration with Laetitia Casta — the CastaOrganisation project serving as the industrial field of application.
The invention covers an industrial method for building hyperrealistic 3D avatars: geometry, textures, skeletal structure, muscle parameters, and behaviors meant for real-time animation in cinema, television, the internet, and video games. But what interested me was not visual performance.
What interested me was the sovereignty of the subject. The real subject — an actor, a person — becomes a structured datum that belongs to them, independent of any platform, transposable from one system to another. First act of a long program.
MENDEL — the bone generates the polygon
Three years earlier, in 1998, I co-founded Duran Interactive within the Duran-Duboi group. With André Villard and Hervé Lange, we co-initiated a real-time 3D technology called MENDEL. The principle is a paradigmatic inversion: contrary to traditional 3D, where you draw the skin first (the polygon) and then animate it, in Mendel it is the bone that generates the polygon, which in turn generates the texture. The internal structure precedes the envelope.
The practical effect of this inversion is immense. Mendel Storyboarder, a derivative of this technology, would be used by Enki Bilal to prepare La Femme Piège. The Mendel World engine would be reused at Nadeo, where it would become the technical foundation of TrackMania.
But the conceptual effect matters more: with Mendel, tools no longer impose a representation on the subject — instead, the subject's internal structure generates its own representation. First version of the program.
The Internet Chatting Puppet — the Intel demonstration
That same year, 1998, we designed the Internet Chatting Puppet: a 3D puppet animated through real-time network interaction, on consumer-grade machines. The project caught the eye of Intel Corporation USA, which selected it as the official demonstration for the launch of the Pentium III.
The point of the demonstration was not silicon performance. It was the idea that a digital identity can be manipulated at a distance, that an avatar can exist as a living object accessible through the network. A direct conceptual precursor to the sovereign avatar — filed three years later as FR2828572.
Shotbox — capturing the real subject to produce the image
Still in 1998, at Haiku Studio, we designed a system called Shotbox: a real-time 3D storyboarding device for film and television series, built on the Ascension Fast Track magnetic motion capture. Measured promise: a 60% reduction in pre-production costs through 3D simulation of shots before filming.
But Shotbox is not just a productivity tool. Its deeper logic is the inversion of the production flow: instead of imposing a representation on an actor, you capture real bodies to produce the image. The subject precedes its representation and dictates its form. A variation of the same obsession.
Twenty-five years later — FR2515238
Mendel, Internet Chatting Puppet, Shotbox, the FR2828572 patent: four artifacts, one program. All revolve around a real subject made sovereign in its digital representation — autonomous, transposable, independent of the platforms that would seek to own it.
Patent FR2515238 — the Protocol — filed by YTY SAS, extends this straight line. But it shifts the stakes by one notch: it no longer concerns just the sovereignty of the representation of the subject, but now the sovereignty of the transmission of its digital assets. Peer-to-peer, offline, no server, no intermediary, through phygital objects such as the RELICKEEPER cards.
The 3D avatar of 2001 said: you own your digital form. The Protocol of 2026 says: you own the transmission of everything you do with it.
A family of sovereign objects
Seen from this angle, Sovereign Reality is not a conceptual posture — it is the culmination of a family of technical objects I have been building since 1998: Mendel, Puppet, Shotbox, FR2828572, and now FR2515238 and RELICKEEPER. Each object answers a fragment of the program. Each patent sets a legal landmark. The continuity is in the parts, not in the speech.
A single straight line. Two patents. A family of sovereign objects. .//.