Accredited Work — A Decentralized Accreditation Framework for Creative and Intellectual Labor

Accredited Work is a decentralized accreditation framework designed to provide verifiable authorship and recognition for creative and intellectual work produced outside traditional institutional systems. The protocol allows creators to register works through blockchain-anchored NFT certificates containing structured metadata describing authorship, licensing, and contextual information. The system was conceptually initiated in 2011 and technically implemented in July 2025 through a smart contract deployed on the Polygon blockchain. This paper documents the architecture, purpose, and development of the Accredited Work Protocol v1 as an experimental infrastructure for decentralized creative accreditation.