Author & Protocol Designer
Three books. One provenance standard. Norcross, Georgia.
The Author
Kidd James is the pen name of Kevan Burns, a writer and technologist based in Norcross, Georgia — part of the Atlanta metro area. Burns writes literary fiction about the mechanics of financial belief: how systems designed around unverifiable documents sustain themselves, how chains of trust form and collapse, and what it means to claim ownership of something no one can physically verify.
The three books published under the XXXIII imprint — The 2,500 Donkeys, Private Placement Programs, and Crypto War Room — each map a different geography of financial theater. The PPP ecosystem, where a gold deal in a Geneva vault is always two weeks from closing. The crypto scam architecture, where unverifiable screenshots stand in for value. The WhatsApp chain, where a forwarded message becomes a global market.
Burns designed the LPS-1 (Literary Provenance Standard version 1) protocol to anchor his manuscripts cryptographically on Polygon Mainnet. What started as a personal integrity requirement became an open specification, formally documented, DOI-registered, and MIT-licensed for any author to use.
The Publisher
XXXIII (pronounced "thirty-three") is an independent literary imprint operating out of Norcross, Georgia. The imprint's founding principle is that literary provenance — the documented, verifiable record of who wrote what, when, and whether it has been altered — should be as rigorous for books as for financial instruments.
Traditional publishing has no provenance story. Manuscripts exist in Google Docs, email threads, and editor note margins. There is no cryptographically verifiable record of who wrote a sentence, when they wrote it, or whether the text presented as the first edition is actually the first edition. In an era when AI can generate a novel overnight, this absence of provenance is not a bureaucratic concern — it is an existential vulnerability for authors.
XXXIII fills that gap. Every word published under the XXXIII imprint is:
All three books are free to read online, free to listen to, and free to verify. The code, test suite, and smart contracts are MIT-licensed and publicly available on GitHub.
The Works
The Protocol
LPS-1 is the technical substrate underlying all XXXIII publications. It is the first formally documented open standard for cryptographic provenance in literary publishing.
The standard defines five compliance levels (L1–L5), corresponding to progressively rigorous provenance requirements. L1 requires only a SHA-256 hash of the manuscript root. L5 — the level at which The 2,500 Donkeys is published — requires paragraph-level hashing, Merkle tree construction per content type, multi-chain anchoring (Polygon + Bitcoin), IPFS pinning, and a comprehensive automated verification suite.
The LPS-1 paper has been formally published with a DOI through Zenodo and is citable as a scholarly reference. The reference implementation is MIT-licensed and available on GitHub with 293 passing tests.
Burns's stated goal is for LPS-1 to become the standard by which courts, academic institutions, and publishers verify authorship in an era of AI-generated content — not by requiring new infrastructure, but by expressing authorship through the infrastructure that already exists.
Find & Verify
ORCID Profile
orcid.org/0009-0008-8425-939X — verifiable researcher identity
GitHub — LPS-1 Reference Implementation
Full source code, test suite, smart contracts — MIT license
Zenodo — DOI Record
Deterministic Literary Publishing — citable, archived, permanent
Polygonscan — Smart Contract
Verified contract on Polygon Mainnet (Chain ID 137)
White Paper (PDF)
The full LPS-1 protocol specification — readable, downloadable
Connect
For press requests, interviews, speaking engagements, or questions about the LPS-1 protocol and XXXIII Publishing.
Media Kit [email protected]