FAQ

FAQ

Is this a blockchain? No. It is a Merkle transparency log (the Certificate Transparency construction) with signatures and independent witnesses. No consensus, no tokens, no fees; microseconds per entry, local.

Do I have to run witnesses to use it? No. Without witnesses you get a signed, tamper-evident, offline-verifiable record (UNANCHORED). Witnesses add the guarantee that the operator cannot show different histories to different people (WITNESSED).

Why does WITNESSED need two operators? One operator cannot contradict itself; equivocation is only detectable once two parties who share no operator have both committed to the same head. Ten witnesses you run are one operator.

Where do the payloads go? Wherever you keep them. The log commits to a salted hash; you store or discard the content as your policy requires.

Can an entry be deleted? Its content can (erase the salt); its existence cannot (the hash and a redaction marker remain). That is the property GDPR erasure and audit integrity both need.

What happens when the agent restarts? A new session key, bound to the same identity by a signed statement; the dossier carries every binding; verification is unaffected. Crashes heal on resume.

How big is a dossier? ~600 bytes per leaf plus receipts. Use evidence_window to export a slice with per-leaf proofs.

Does it work with my framework? If it has a tool hook, yes: Framework guides. If it speaks MCP, with zero code: MCP integration.

TypeScript? Via MCP or the CLI today; native bindings are on the roadmap. Other languages.

Can an attacker who steals the identity key forge history? Going forward, yes, until you revoke it; the past is protected by witness cosignatures (a rewritten past would fail consistency at every witness). Disclose key custody; keep the seed in a secrets store.

Why Apache-2.0? So the client library can go into any agent process, including at organisations whose legal review does not admit copyleft in-process (releases through 0.3.4 were AGPL-3.0). Openness of the network comes from the protocol, not the license: the format is specified with a conformance corpus and the witness protocol is public C2SP, so anyone can run a witness or verifier. The name stays with the project.

Who runs the witnesses today? The registry starts empty; the project's own witnesses are labelled is_project_operated and count as one bucket. The first two independent operators are the network's first milestone. Run one: Running a witness.

How fast is it? ~80 µs per decorated call in memory, ~115 µs journaled; 40k-leaf sync 28 ms; checkpoint 0.4 ms at 40k leaves; witness cosign p50 ~100 ms under 128 concurrent agents on a two-core box.