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Signed shards & your receipt

The Commons only works if contribution is attributable. So every shard is signed — and that signature becomes your permanent receipt for the compute you gave.

You sign the shard's physics payload with an Ed25519 key. The signature rides in the pack's manifest, never in the trajectory data — so the physics stays byte-identical and independently replayable, while your provenance travels alongside it.

What the signature binds

The signed message ties the payload digest to the target, the seed, and the walker count:

sign( payload_sha256  |  target_id  |  seed_base  |  n_walkers  |  your_public_key )

So a shard can't be lifted onto a different target, nor have its walker count inflated, without breaking the signature. Your private key never leaves your machine; the public key is your identity.

  • In the manifest, not the data

    Signing touches only the manifest. The arrays — and therefore the payload digest — are invariant across a write/read round-trip, so anyone can re-verify a shard against its signer's public key at any time.

  • Tamper-evident

    Verification catches three things: a payload changed since signing, a forged signature, and a shard re-pointed at another target. QA quarantines any of them.

  • Walkers, tracked

    Signed shards turn the seed ledger into a ledger of people: who contributed how many walkers to each target, tamper-evidently, across every machine that ever joined.

Credited, not authored

When a substrate is frozen, its contributors are listed with their verified walker counts — in the freeze manifest and in the citation metadata. You're credited as a contributor to the resource, not as an author of whatever science someone later does with it.

The receipt

A frozen substrate carries a DOI and a list of the people whose compute converged it. That's the point: a durable, verifiable record that you helped build a permanent thing — one that outlasts any single paper. Claim your key so the record carries your name.