avm-mesh

Settlement receipts for the Algorand and Voi mesh — a small, self-contained proof that a transaction really settled, which anyone can check offline without trusting the platform that issued it.

When two parties settle a payment across chains or platforms, each one may later need to answer a simple question: what actually happened, and can you prove it without my trusting your systems or you trusting mine? avm-mesh answers it with a settlement receipt — a tiny digest-and-pointer that resolves to cryptographic evidence anchored in the chain's own consensus. A third party who was not present, and who trusts neither counterparty, can verify that receipt offline against a genesis hash they pinned themselves.

For the fuller rationale — and the gaps that still sit between a receipt format and fully decentralised agentic commerce — see docs/WHY.md. For what is and is not proven yet, see Honest limits at the end.

How this differs from a bridge

Most cross-chain systems are a separate layer bolted onto two chains: their own validators, token, contracts and hosting — and therefore their own attack surface. Ask one "who says this happened?" and the answer is "us": Wormhole's Guardians, Axelar's validator set, LayerZero's DVNs. You have to trust a federation that did not exist before, and you have to be online to check anything, because verification is a query against someone else's indexer.

avm-mesh takes a different line: the chain's own node set is the interoperability layer. A node on the source chain can produce evidence essentially for free, because it already holds the full block. A node on the destination chain can verify that evidence precisely because it cannot see those blocks itself. Nothing new has to be trusted — the proof rests on the source chain's consensus.

That proof is a Falcon-1024 state proof. Algorand and Voi sign their consensus state with Falcon-1024, a post-quantum signature scheme selected by NIST, and such a state proof verifies offline against the chain's genesis hash. No indexer, no RPC, no new federation — and post-quantum security by construction rather than as a future promise. The proof format itself lives in a companion library, avm-proofpack; avm-mesh wraps it into receipts you can exchange and check.

Install

pip install avm-mesh            # pulls avm-proofpack and avm-effectproof

Python 3.10+. There are no runtime dependencies beyond the AVM proofpack stack, and nothing to connect to: verification is entirely offline.

>>> from avm_mesh import verify_receipt
>>> verify_receipt(receipt, resolve=storage.read, trusted_voters=anchor,
...                expected_genesis_hash_b64=ALGORAND_MAINNET)["trust_root"]
'stake_attested'

The package installs one command-line tool, avm-mesh, with four subcommands:

Command	What it does
avm-mesh verify	verify a single receipt offline, reporting each trust level separately
avm-mesh serve	run a witness that serves receipts and evidence over a content-addressed store
avm-mesh anchor	derive a trust anchor by walking state proofs forward from a checkpoint you pin
avm-mesh corroborate	ask several witnesses for one receipt and check that they agree

A witness and an anchor are both explained below. For now: a witness is simply something that serves evidence, and an anchor is the trusted starting point you supply yourself.

What a receipt looks like

A settlement receipt is what moves between parties. It is deliberately tiny — it does not carry the evidence itself, only a commitment to it and a pointer to where it lives:

{
  "version": 1,
  "chain": "mainnet-v1.0",
  "txid": "J6FPFF4CKP4XUWUEDLEENV7EV5YDKFZHZJC6UYYWBDVBJLAT7IIA",
  "round": 66457600,
  "trust_root": "stake_attested",
  "pointer": {
    "uri": "ipfs://.../proofpack.json",
    "digest": "9f2c...",
    "first_attested_round": 66457345,
    "last_attested_round": 66457600
  },
  "corroboration": []
}

The evidence it points at — the "proofpack" — is 428–834 KB, so it is stored once per attested interval, not once per transaction. The receipt commits to that proofpack by its digest and points at it, so many receipts can share a single stored proof.

Three things the format enforces

These are checked in code on every verification, not left to convention:

1. You cannot swap the evidence. The receipt commits to the proofpack by SHA-256 over its canonical JSON. Change the proofpack behind the pointer and the digest no longer matches, so the receipt is refused.
2. You cannot lie about the trust level. The receipt names the tier the evidence earned. The verifier re-derives that tier from the evidence and rejects any mismatch in either direction — weak evidence cannot be dressed up as stake_attested, and a verifier cannot quietly accept a weaker claim than the evidence actually supports.
3. You cannot reuse evidence for another transaction. Chain, txid and round come from verifying the evidence, not from whatever the caller wrote into the receipt. A perfectly valid proof for a different transaction is not a proof for this one.

Pin the chain itself by passing its genesis hash:

verify_receipt(receipt, resolve=storage.read, trusted_voters=anchor,
               expected_genesis_hash_b64="wGHE2Pwdvd7S12BL5FaOP20EGYesN73ktiC1qzkkit8=")

Without it, receipt.chain is only compared to the bundle's genesis id — just a string a fork can copy. With it, the hash is checked against the authenticated block header, which no evidence author can choose. The receipt's claimed attested interval must also match the interval the evidence actually covers; otherwise a receipt could point at a genuine proof for a different interval and still read as verified.

from avm_mesh import create_receipt, verify_receipt

receipt = create_receipt(bundle, "ipfs://.../proofpack.json")
report = verify_receipt(receipt, resolve=my_storage.read, expected_chain="mainnet-v1.0")
assert report.trust_root == "stake_attested"

resolve is a function you supply, so storage is entirely up to you: a local file, an HTTP endpoint, or a chain read.

A note on the post-quantum dependency

Falcon-1024 is verified by avm_proofpack.consensus.falcon, which is pure standard-library Python. Note that pqcrypto 1.0.0 removed Falcon when it moved off the now-archived PQClean, so pip install pqcrypto no longer provides a Falcon verifier. The reasoning, what replaces it, and what remains unproven are all in docs/PQC-FALCON.md.

The pieces, end to end

Component	Role
produce	settler side: store the evidence, then seal a receipt
service	the witness: serves receipts and content-addressed proofpacks
receipt	the digest-and-pointer, with its three enforced bindings
attestation	the Level 3 consensus attestation, which requires an anchor
sealed	the wire format the payment rails already speak
trust	one auditable policy document holding every pin
bond	witness bonds and the independence rules around them
a2a	the settlement-evidence extension for agent-to-agent transport
cli	the offline verifier and tools (avm-mesh verify / serve / anchor / corroborate)

A safe deployment needs just two things you provide yourself: an anchor you obtained independently, and a policy — a single document that pins the chain, genesis hash, anchor and witness set. Everything else in the library is mechanism around those two decisions.

# a witness publishes evidence
avm-mesh serve --root ./store --port 8080 --witness-id w1 --operator-id op-a --escrow-txid ESC

# a merchant verifies a receipt against its own policy
avm-mesh verify receipt.json --evidence ./proofpacks \
    --genesis wGHE2Pwdvd7S12BL5FaOP20EGYesN73ktiC1qzkkit8= \
    --voters-commitment <b64> --ln-proven-weight <n>

The three trust levels

The AlgoVoi Payment Rails receipt already has two levels of assurance:

Level	What it checks
1	the content hash matches the bytes: sha256(canonical_bytes) == content_hash
2	the operator's Falcon-1024 signature over that hash

Level 2 proves "AlgoVoi issued this receipt". What it cannot prove is that the settlement happened as described, because the issuer could sign anything. Level 3 closes that gap: it carries evidence that the transaction was final according to chain consensus, with no operator key in the trust base at all.

from avm_mesh import attest, verify_attestation

# `anchor` is YOUR trust anchor: a TrustedVoters value the caller supplies.
receipt["consensus_attestation"] = attest(bundle, "ipfs://.../proofpack.json",
                                          trusted_voters=anchor).to_dict()

verify_attestation(receipt["consensus_attestation"], resolve=my_storage.read,
                   trusted_voters=anchor,                       # must match the recorded anchor
                   expected_genesis_hash_b64=ALGORAND_GENESIS_B64)

Why the anchor must come from you

Level 3's strength rests on one input you have to supply yourself: the anchor. Here is why it cannot be optional.

The set of validators that signs a state proof is committed by a "voters commitment" published one interval earlier. A single bundle cannot authenticate that commitment on its own — it carries it only as an unverified previous_state_proof_message, a field the bundle's own author chose. If you trusted that field, a bundle could name itself as its own signer and mint a convincing-looking stake_attested tier out of nothing.

So the anchor has to come from you, never from the bundle you are checking: a pinned genesis bootstrap, a chain walk (avm_proofpack.consensus.chain), or a node you already trust at a known round. trusted_voters is required by both attest() and verify_attestation(), and verify_attestation() also checks your anchor against the one the attestation recorded — handing an attestation its own anchor would prove nothing.

A few more rules keep Level 3 honest:

• The scheme is versioned, and v1 is refused by name. The current scheme string is avm-stateproof-falcon1024-v2; v1 attestations had forgeable semantics and are rejected rather than silently accepted as equivalent.
• The attestation cannot be swapped or stripped. It lives inside the receipt's canonical bytes, so Levels 1 and 2 already cover it.
• attest() refuses rather than downgrades. If the evidence does not reach stake_attested, no attestation is produced at all — shipping a weaker block would let a receipt look consensus-backed while really carrying only an operator's word.
• Pin the genesis hash. Without expected_genesis_hash_b64, the attestation only agrees with its own self-declared anchor, which is no stronger than Level 2.
• Only Algorand and Voi. ConsensusAttestation rejects any other chain at construction, because only these two have Falcon state proofs. Hedera, Stellar, Base, Solana and Tempo stay honestly at Level 2.

Verifying from the command line

avm-mesh verify receipt.json --evidence ./proofpacks \
    --genesis wGHE2Pwdvd7S12BL5FaOP20EGYesN73ktiC1qzkkit8= \
    --voters-commitment <trusted-voters-commitment-b64> \
    --ln-proven-weight <proven-weight>

integrity:   PASS
signature:   None
consensus:   stake_attested
trust root:  stake_attested
attested:    J6FPFF4CKP4XUWUEDLEENV7EV5YDKFZHZJC6UYYWBDVBJLAT7IIA @ round 66457600

Whenever a receipt carries a consensus attestation, the anchor flags are required: you supply the TrustedVoters commitment and proven weight that you independently trust. The receipt verifies against that anchor and fails closed without it — never from the bundle's own word. The genesis pin is likewise checked against the authenticated state-proof header, not the attestation's self-declared field.

Exit codes: 0 verified, 2 failed, 3 usage error. Add --json for machine-readable output. For a sense of scale, a real receipt is 945 bytes against an 854 KB proofpack, and the proof is stored once per attested interval, not per payment.

Running a witness

A witness serves receipts and evidence over a content-addressed store you control:

avm-mesh serve --root ./store --port 8080 \
    --witness-id w1 --operator-id op-a --chain mainnet-v1.0 --escrow-txid ESCROW \
    --anchor-voters-commitment-b64 <trusted-voters-commitment-b64> \
    --anchor-ln-proven-weight <proven-weight>

The service is bounded by sensible defaults, so it cannot be turned into a free amplifier or held open by slow clients:

• a proofpack over 8 MiB is refused, both when stored and when served;
• a request path over 2048 characters gets 414;
• more than 120 requests per client per 10 s gets 429 with Retry-After;
• a connection that stalls mid-request is dropped after 10 s;
• at most 64 connections are handled at once — beyond that the witness answers 503 rather than accepting everything and spawning a thread per connection.

Operators can tune these with --max-proofpack-bytes, --rate-limit and --rate-window.

One deployment caveat worth calling out: behind a reverse proxy, these limits key on the socket peer address — which is the proxy, not the real client. Every user then shares one quota, and forwarded-client headers are deliberately ignored (trusting them would let anyone spoof a fresh quota per request). If you deploy behind a proxy, either raise --rate-limit for the shared quota or rate-limit per client at the proxy itself; that part is your responsibility rather than the library's.

A witness's identity card is optional, but all-or-nothing: supply some identity flags and not others and it refuses to start (exit 3) rather than publish a card that does not match what you configured. A witness with no card still serves the store, but it can never be counted toward corroboration — an endpoint that will not say who operates it is not an independent voice.

Sealing a receipt

Sealing binds the attestation into the hashed bytes:

from avm_mesh import seal
receipt = seal({"settlement": {...}, "issuer": "..."}, bundle, "file://proofpack.json")

A worked example: a real mainnet receipt

examples/ ships a receipt and the proofpack it points at, both from genuine Algorand mainnet evidence (payment J6FPFF4CKP4XUWUEDLEENV7EV5YDKFZHZJC6UYYWBDVBJLAT7IIA, round 66457600):

avm-mesh verify examples/receipt-66457600.json --evidence examples \
  --genesis wGHE2Pwdvd7S12BL5FaOP20EGYesN73ktiC1qzkkit8= \
  --voters-commitment 71Oh0YaxEA59JIgWUjMmnpz0KG8lWJ2jwXQiTYxp15FulxCMNfHfBMHT/8hyTNv2tMdWZl+YOz8go5DczFfuLw== \
  --ln-proven-weight 2230418

integrity:   PASS
signature:   None
consensus:   stake_attested
trust root:  stake_attested
attested:    J6FPFF4CKP4XUWUEDLEENV7EV5YDKFZHZJC6UYYWBDVBJLAT7IIA @ round 66457600

What this proves, exactly. The Falcon signatures, reveal membership, signed weight and coin selection over that bundle are all verified, and you can re-verify them yourself. One caveat: the anchor in the command above is taken from the bundle's own previous state-proof message. That is enough to exercise the full verification path, but it is not an independent anchor, because whoever assembled the bundle chose it.

To get an independent anchor, derive one. avm-mesh anchor walks state proofs forward from a checkpoint you pin, verifying every interval along the way, and prints the flags verify needs:

avm-mesh anchor --genesis wGHE2Pwdvd7S12BL5FaOP20EGYesN73ktiC1qzkkit8= \
  --anchor-round 66457344 \
  --anchor-voters-commitment <the checkpoint interval's commitment> \
  --anchor-ln-proven-weight <its proven weight> \
  --target-round 66457600 --bundles ./captures

authenticated 1 interval(s) from the checkpoint
target round:        66457600
--voters-commitment  71Oh0YaxEA59JIgWUjMmnpz0KG8lWJ2jwXQiTYxp15FulxCMNfHfBMHT/8hyTNv2tMdWZl+YOz8go5DczFfuLw==
--ln-proven-weight   2230418
trust basis:         pinned checkpoint; every interval verified forward from it

What a walk proves, and what it does not. Every interval from your checkpoint to the target is verified: Falcon signatures, reveal membership against the voters commitment, signed weight and coin selection. A checkpoint whose proven weight is off by one, or whose voters commitment is wrong at all, fails at the first link (both cases are tested, and both are refused).

What a walk does not do is prove the checkpoint itself. The checkpoint is your trust decision; one that happened to match an adversary's chosen signing set would be walked successfully all the same. Nor does it authenticate the genesis hash — the proofpack library documents ChainAnchor.genesis_hash as caller bookkeeping, and a state proof carries no genesis field, so that label is just a consistency check against your own records. The voters commitment is what the proofs are actually checked against. Choose the checkpoint from a source you would trust independently; the walk makes the distance between that decision and the evidence auditable, not the decision itself.

Drop both anchor flags from verify and it fails closed, by design — the tier is never reached from the bundle's own word.

Sharing evidence between agents (A2A)

A2A is the transport that agents already speak, so it is the natural route for one agent to hand settlement evidence to another without either side adopting a new SDK.

from avm_mesh import a2a
card = a2a.advertise(my_agent_card)          # declare the extension
artifact = a2a.as_artifact(sealed_receipt)   # evidence as an ordinary Artifact
result = a2a.verify_artifact(artifact, resolve=my_storage.read,
                             expected_genesis_hash_b64=GENESIS)

The extension is optional (required: false): peers that do not support it still interoperate and simply fall back to whatever they trusted before. The extension's URI is its versioning boundary — the meaning behind a published URI never changes; a breaking change ships as a new v2 URI instead.

And missing evidence is treated as an error, not a silent pass. An artifact that lacks the extension payload raises, rather than returning a vacuous success — because "verified nothing and reported OK" is exactly how a receiver ends up believing it checked something it did not.

Witnesses and bonding

A state proof says what the chain did. A witness is simply whoever hands you that proof — and that role carries its own risk. Without some cost attached, a witness can withhold, delay, or selectively serve evidence for free, and "decentralised because node operators run it" quietly becomes an ordinary centralised service.

A bond attaches that cost:

from avm_mesh.bond import witnesses

ws = witnesses(w("w1", "op-a"), w("w2", "op-b"), w("w3", "op-c"))
quorum = ws.require_corroboration("mainnet-v1.0", threshold=2)
ws.slashable_stake("mainnet-v1.0")   # what one lie could actually cost

Two claims are kept strictly apart:

Claim	Meaning
bond_microalgo + escrow_txid	economic stake that can be slashed — verifiable on-chain
operator_id	who runs the witness — not a source of trust, only an input to independence

Uniqueness is enforced; genuine independence cannot be proven here. independent_corroborators() counts at most one witness per operator and one per escrow. That blocks the two cheapest fakes:

• several endpoints run by one operator are one witness wearing several hats — presenting them as a quorum is an old trick;
• two witnesses pointing at the same escrow are one bond counted twice.

What the count cannot do is prove that two genuinely different operator_id values belong to two genuinely independent parties. Those identity strings are supplied by the witnesses themselves, so colluding operators could claim distinct ids and still satisfy the count. So treat corroboration as a consistency check whose independence rests on how carefully you chose the witnesses — which is exactly why the bond exists, and why a witness directory is a lead rather than a trust root.

require_corroboration() refuses rather than quietly returning a short list: a caller that cannot reach the threshold must not be handed fewer corroborators and left to read that as success.

You can have a receipt's corroboration field checked against bonds whenever you want that:

verify_receipt(receipt, resolve=storage.read, witness_set=ws, corroboration_threshold=2)

It refuses on four distinct failures — unknown (no bond record), unbonded (absent, inactive or too small), duplicated (same operator or same escrow), and insufficient (fewer independent witnesses than the threshold). Leave these arguments out and the older behaviour stands: the claim is simply recorded, and you should describe it as recorded rather than established.

Finally, an unverifiable bond is not a bond: a witness record with no escrow_txid, or no operator_id, is rejected when it is constructed.

Trust tiers are per chain, on purpose

Only Algorand and Voi have Falcon state proofs; Hedera, Stellar, Base, Solana and Tempo do not. Rather than claim equal assurance across all seven chains — which would be its own kind of dishonesty — avm-mesh reports a tier per chain:

Tier	Means
stake_attested	offline-verified against a Falcon-signed state proof
corroborated	several independent observers agree, but no consensus proof
structural	internally consistent, but no external anchor
unattested	no proof material present

Telling a merchant "here are the two chains where you get cryptographic proof, and the five where you get someone's word" is a stronger, more honest offer than claiming all seven are equal — because the merchant can check it.

Corroborating across witnesses

A single witness is still just one operator's word. avm-mesh corroborate asks several and decides whether the mesh actually agrees:

avm-mesh corroborate --txid TH2WRFV... \
  --witness https://w1.example.org \
  --witness https://w2.example.net \
  --min-operators 2

  https://w1.example.org                   COUNTED     tier=stake_attested round=66457600
  https://w2.example.net                   COUNTED     tier=stake_attested round=66457600
operators: op-a, op-b (need 2)
AGREED on proofpack 8f14e45fceea167a5a36dedd4bea2543...

Exit codes: 0 agreed, 2 not agreed, 3 bad arguments. --json emits the full report.

Instead of listing URLs by hand, you can point it at a published directory:

avm-mesh corroborate --txid TH2WRFV... --directory ./mesh-directory.json --min-operators 2

{
  "version": 1,
  "witnesses": [
    {"url": "https://w1.example.org", "operator_id": "op-a", "chain": "mainnet-v1.0"},
    {"url": "https://w2.example.net", "operator_id": "op-b", "chain": "mainnet-v1.0"}
  ]
}

A directory is fetched over the network, which brings its own risks, so the client is careful with it:

• Outbound fetches refuse non-public addresses. Because a directory supplies the witness URLs, a hostile one could otherwise point the client at loopback, a private (RFC1918) host, or the cloud link-local metadata service. Both the directory fetch and every witness fetch resolve the host and refuse anything that is not a public address, re-checking on each redirect hop (a public host can still redirect inward). Running a local witness therefore needs --allow-private, which is off by default precisely because inheriting it from a fetched document would be the attack.
• A directory is a lead, not a trust root. Each entry is checked against the witness's own card when it is collected; if the directory and the card disagree, that witness does not count and the disagreement is reported. Unknown fields, duplicate URLs, a wrong document version or a non-HTTP URL are all refused outright.

What counts toward agreement, and what deliberately does not:

• A witness counts only if it publishes an operator_id. Two URLs on one operator are one voice; independence is counted over operators, never over endpoints.
• The pointer is verified, not trusted. For each witness the client fetches the proofpack and checks that its bytes hash to the digest the receipt names. A witness that points at good evidence but serves something else is not counted.
• Disagreement is reported, never averaged. Different proofpack digests, rounds or trust tiers each make agreement fail, with a named reason.
• An unreachable or broken witness is a reported view, not a crash. One silent witness does not abort the run, and it does not silently lower the threshold either.

One last distinction: the corroboration list on a receipt simply names the witnesses that returned it at capture time. It records what was seen; on its own it says nothing about whether those operators are independent. That is what the check above is for.

Status

Version 0.9.1 — pip install avm-mesh.

The portable test gate runs 391 tests with 0 skipped on both Python 3.12 and Python 3.10.22 (an isolated clean-room run: offline install from wheels only, plus the trust-boundary audit and the red-team suite), so Requires-Python: >=3.10 is demonstrated rather than asserted. Three test-only Falcon signer checks are marked signer and run separately in a signer-enabled environment; they pass with pqcrypto 0.1.0, which is deliberately not a runtime dependency. CI runs the portable suite with the test fixture provisioned, and a missing fixture is treated as a failure, not a skip.

Licence: Apache-2.0, with LICENSE and NOTICE present in the repository, the wheel and the sdist, plus PEP 639 License-Expression metadata and no contradicting classifier — all checked inside the built artefacts by tools/check_artifacts.py and in CI. (Version 0.5.0 once shipped without either licence file, which is why this gate exists.)

Security surface: tests/test_validation.py attacks every input path added in 0.6.0 — directory size, nesting, field types, argument types, service configuration and CLI failure modes. Each guard was mutation-checked (removed to confirm a test goes red, then restored), and one was found to be silently unpinned until the check exposed it. These checks run in a fresh clean-room container that installs from the built wheels offline and runs against site-packages.

Piece	State
Receipts, three enforced properties, genesis pin	shipped
Witness service (serve), content-addressed store, append-only receipts	shipped
Level 3 consensus attestation, anchor-required	shipped
Corroboration across witnesses (corroborate)	shipped 0.5.0
Anchor derivation (anchor): checkpoint walk over verified intervals	shipped 0.7.0
Witness discovery (--directory, /.well-known/mesh-directory.json)	shipped 0.6.0
Worked mainnet example (examples/)	shipped 0.6.0
Service resource bounds (size cap, rate limit, slowloris timeout)	shipped 0.6.0
A2A settlement-evidence extension (v1.0 wire format)	shipped; parsed by a2a-sdk 1.3.0; TCK must/jsonrpc is a required CI gate (80 passed, 0 failed)
Rails adoption kit (avm_mesh.rails)	shipped; not yet round-tripped against a real rails receipt
Witness bonding (bond.py)	model only — no on-chain escrow, see Honest limits

Dependency note: avm-proofpack>=0.4.1, the version in which stake_attested became anchor-required. Level 3 never authenticates from a bundle's own previous_message in any version after 0.1.0.

A2A conformance, precisely. The project's own system-under-test runs the TCK at --level must --transport jsonrpc as a required CI job — 80 passed, 0 failed — after that job surfaced one real defect that was then fixed (a text/plain body returned ParseError -32700 instead of ContentTypeNotSupportedError -32005; it now answers HTTP 415 before the parser). That is protocol conformance for the transport the project claims. It is not extension validation: the TCK's extension-related requirements (CARD-EXT-001, CARD-EXT-002, EXTENSION_SUPPORT_REQUIRED) cover extended agent-card retrieval and the refusal of an unsupported required extension, and none of them constructs, carries or inspects a third-party extension payload. A green run therefore cannot validate the extension's own semantics — only that carrying it breaks nothing. See docs/A2A-CONFORMANCE.md.

The extension's own contract is checked separately. tests/vectors/a2a/settlement-evidence-v1.json holds fourteen cases (two must pass, twelve must refuse) and both verifiers — the library and tools/verify_settlement_artifact.py, which imports nothing from this project — are required to reach the same verdict on every one. See docs/EXTENSION-VECTORS.md.

Honest limits

• A receipt is not a proof of delivery. It proves a transaction was final, and what it did. Whether the goods actually shipped is not an on-chain fact.
• Corroboration is a capture-time property. It cannot be established after the fact, and two endpoints run by one operator are not independent witnesses. It is recorded, not counted.
• Capture is time-sensitive. Nodes retain roughly two state-proof intervals (~512 rounds, about 20 minutes). Miss that window and the bundle falls back to unattested.
• Falcon verification is only as good as the genesis hash you pin. Ship that hash inside your application, rather than fetching it over the wire.
• Bonding is a model, not a market. bond.py enforces independence and threshold arithmetic over witness records you supply; it does not read an escrow, and nothing is slashed by this library. On-chain bonding would need four decisions this library does not make for you: the asset, the slash fraction, the dispute window and the arbiter.
• The rails adapter has never seen a real rails receipt. Its format and signing convention are pinned by tests against the shipped verifier's source, but no receipt produced by that verifier has been checked here. Treat "drop-in" as unproven end to end until one has.
• Level 2 needs an operator-side signer. No signer is a runtime dependency, and pqcrypto 0.1.0 ships no prebuilt Linux wheel, so it is built from sdist wherever the acceptance test runs. With that signer installed, the operator-signature path is exercised end to end (tests/test_level2_real_signer.py, three tests, marked signer); without it, those tests are deselected rather than counted as passing. The primitive itself is pinned by real Falcon-1024 KAT vectors.

Licensed under Apache-2.0.