foundational primitives

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title: The Four Foundational Primitives created: 2026-07-30 updated: 2026-07-30 type: concept tags: [identity, metrics, compliance] confidence: high source_files:

• docs/design/primitive-set-coherence.md
• docs/design/three-foundational-primitives.md
• docs/design/thesis-extensions-formal.md
• contracts/src/oracle/StateAnchor.sol
• contracts/src/oracle/ReputationRegistry.sol
• contracts/src/health/SmartBAA.sol

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Naming, before anything else. This repo uses the word primitive in two unrelated senses, and conflating them is the main source of confusion:

• Foundational primitives (this page) — the four concepts the protocol rests on.
• Agent primitives (agent-primitives.md) — the seven contracts each agent owns (PrimitiveSet, AgentPrimitivesFactory).

They are not different views of one list. ReputationRegistry is one of the seven contracts and the storage for one of the four concepts; StateAnchor likewise. The seven are an implementation; the four are the argument.

Table of contents

• The four
  • 1. Persistent Memory
  • 2. Agent-Owned Contracts
  • 3. Authority
  • 4. Reputation
• AIS is not the fourth primitive
• Why these four, and not others
• Open, and deliberately so
• Status of this page

The four

Each answers one question a counterparty must resolve before delegating anything of value. The order is a progression: each presupposes the one above it.

#	Primitive	Question	Principle
1	Persistent Memory	Is this the same agent over time?	Continuity of the economic agent
2	Agent-Owned Contracts	Can it act, and can it lose?	Residual control, with consequence
3	Authority	May it act, and for whom?	Delegated permission, non-self-granted
4	Reputation	How has it acted?	Earned, non-forgeable standing

1. Persistent Memory

The agent controls a durable Trust Vault whose commitments are Merkle-anchored on its own StateAnchor. Registration requires a non-zero genesis root, agent-authorized. Without continuity there is no subject for anything else to attach to: an agent that cannot carry state across sessions is a stateless function invoked repeatedly, and any score describes a history it cannot itself produce.

Detail: Persistent Memory, Genesis Root & Lineage. Status: gate enforced; contract-level §7.2 restriction open.

2. Agent-Owned Contracts

The agent's own key deploys SovereignAgent and StateAnchor; five EIP-1167 clones take the SovereignAgent as admin. Bonded stake belongs here rather than standing alone — ownership and stake are one primitive seen from two sides. You can only stake what you own, and ownership only means something when losing it hurts. Ownership without stake is control that costs nothing to abuse; stake without ownership is a deposit someone else administers.

Detail: Agent Primitives. Status: ownership built; uniform minimum stake at registration [PARTIAL].

3. Authority

An agent acts under a signed delegation from a principal, within a scope it cannot widen:

D = (principal, agent_did, scope, not_before, not_after, revocation_ref, sig_P)

The defining property is A3 — non-authorship: the agent cannot mint its own delegation. Note this is structurally identical to what makes reputation meaningful — owns the contract, cannot author the content — which is why the two sit together in the progression without collapsing into each other.

Status: built in one vertical, not yet generalized. SmartBAA is already a delegation instrument (principal = covered entity, agent = business associate, sign(), revoke(), dispute/arbitration, posted collateral). Generalizing it is what turns covered_entity_address from a client claim into a resolution — see MAINNET_READINESS.md item 8.

Formal invariants A1–A5: thesis-extensions-formal.md.

4. Reputation

The non-forgeable behavioral record: signed commitments before acting (BCC) and re-derived evidence after (observability). A record of only intentions is a promise; a record of only outcomes has no counterfactual.

The agent owns ReputationRegistry while only ORACLE_ROLE may write to it. Ownership without authorship is the whole trick — reputation the agent could author would be worth nothing.

Detail: BCC, Telemetry Ingestion.

AIS is not the fourth primitive

Spec §2 says "AIS is downstream of primitives — not a replacement for them." That remains true, and the distinction has to stay explicit or the two readings contradict:

• Reputation is the primitive — the record.
• AIS is a score — a weighted composite over that record, computed in exactly one place (scoring-core), versioned and replaceable.

Change the formula tomorrow and the record stands. Delete the record and no formula means anything.

Why these four, and not others

The set is not a catalogue of what happens to be built. It is checked against spec §1's definition of an Economic Sovereign, which is the closure condition:

Thesis clause	Entailed by
① owns its smart contracts	Agent-Owned Contracts
② remembers via anchored memory	Persistent Memory
③ can bind future behavior	Reputation (before-acting)
④ holds material value at risk	Agent-Owned Contracts (stake)
⑤ produces checkable evidence	Reputation (after-acting)
⑥ cannot rewrite after finality	medium property (§3.1), not a primitive
⑦ acts under delegated authority	Authority (added in v0.4 §1)

Cryptographic self-sovereignty is not on this list, and its absence is deliberate. Keys are the substrate all four are expressed in — memory roots are anchored by a controller-signed transaction, contracts are owned because a key deployed them, delegations are signed by a principal, evidence is attributable because it is signed. A substrate present in all four belongs beside attribution as a property of the medium (§3.3), not repeated as a peer of the things it enables.

Two of the old six were likewise not independent and were absorbed rather than dropped: bonded stake into ownership, and BCC + observability into reputation. Full derivation: primitive-set-coherence.md.

Open, and deliberately so

Termination — how an agent's standing ends — is formalized (invariants T1–T5) but not adopted, because it requires registry mutability, which is the same question the upgradeability decision faces. Settling them separately would risk two incompatible answers to one question. Today an agent can be abandoned but not ended.

Counterparty symmetry is a generalization rather than a new primitive: BCC's covered_entity_address becomes counterparty_did, giving bilateral evidence for A2A.

Status of this page

The four-primitive framing is normative as of spec v0.4 (spec/integrity-protocol-v0.4.md §4), which supersedes the v0.3 PDF's six-item list. This page is the wiki-side statement of it; the spec is authoritative and the derivation lives in docs/design/.