The protocol, in five parts.
Free forever, and deliberately boring to read. The interesting pages are the findings register and the benchmark limits.
Capability manifests and discovery
How a service says what it sells, in what assets, under what rules, in a form a machine can act on. Signed records, sequence numbers, and a freshness quorum so a stale answer cannot win.
Value rails and the escrow state machine
One state machine across every rail. Integer minor units, idempotent locks, refusal instead of approximation, permissionless expiry, and a pinned rail priority order so two implementations cannot legally disagree.
Agency, charters and liability
Every action traces to a named legal entity. Spending caps enforced at open, a human co-signature required above a threshold, and revocation that every dispatcher honours within a block.
Conformance and attestation
45 Level 1 vectors you can run today, with 267 specified across three levels. Self-attested and audit-linked certifications are displayed differently and never conflated.
Energy settlement
Delivery and flexibility contracts settled against a median of independent market feeds, time-averaged, with the baseline methodology declared in the manifest rather than pretended to be physics.
What certification actually tests.
| Level | Governs | Vectors | Required behaviours |
|---|---|---|---|
| L1 — Value Core | WOS-2 §§1–4 | 45 runnable | Integer minor units only — floating point amounts are rejected outright; One uniform state machine across every rail; Idempotent lock under a repeated idempotency key; Wrong-asset refusal at lock time, never a silent conversion; Double-release rejection; Refund only by arbiter or expiry; Deadline expiry triggerable permissionlessly, or refused at lock if the rail cannot express it; Status consistency across queries; Value conservation under randomised sequences |
| L2 — Agency | WOS-2 §5 and WOS-3 | 41 specified | Funds lock from a registered principal, not an anonymous node; Charter spending caps enforced at open; Human-threshold co-signature hook present and enforced; Refunds land on the principal, never on an intermediary |
| L3 — Cross-rail | WOS-2 §7 | 12 specified | Two-phase commit coordinator interface; Abort-bond accounting; Bonded eventual convergence under partition |
Light moves the money. It cannot be the money.
This programme began by asking whether photons or energy could be currency. The answer is no, for three independent reasons: money must persist, be auditable, and be excludable. Photons cannot be stored, are destroyed by measurement, and delivered energy is not excludable. Publishing the refutation of our own founding idea is the same practice as publishing the findings register.
| Layer | Substance | Role | Why it cannot be the layer above |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physics | Photons | Carry the bits at light speed | Nothing — this is what light is for |
| Commodity | Joules and kilowatt-hours | The real resource behind a delivery contract | Storage loss and non-excludability mean energy cannot itself be money |
| Ledger | Tokens and stablecoin rails | The currency — information, verifiable, persistent | A ledger made of light is physically impossible |
| Account | Stable units | The unit of account | Spot energy prices swing several-fold intraday |
Waste is avoided, bounded, harvested or distilled. Never retrieved.
Dissipated energy does not come back. The Second Law does not do refunds, and we will not sell a recycling story that physics forbids. What is actually possible:
- Avoided — structured, intent-native endpoints remove the interface tax entirely.
- Bounded — compute budgets held in escrow turn runaway retry loops into a capped, visible loss.
- Harvested — data-centre heat displaces heating elsewhere. This recovers economic value, not electricity.
- Distilled — the only genuine recycling. Failed runs become training signal, so this generation's waste funds the next generation's efficiency.
- Structured tool calls everywhere — kills free-text parsing.
- Intent-native endpoints for high-volume services — removes the interface tax.
- Prompt and context caching — stops re-paying for the same context.
- Model routing — a small model for extraction, a frontier model only for reasoning.
- Compute budgets in escrow — makes waste economically visible at the agent, not invisible on the invoice.
- Circuit breakers as a framework default — caps the tail.
Only the second of these is ours. The rest exist today and we would rather you did them than bought anything from us.
Terms, briefly.
The protocol, standards text and conformance kit are free to implement, fork and redistribute. The sandbox is provided without warranty and data must be synthetic and may be reset. Figures published on this site carry provenance labels; those marked modelled are models and should not be relied on as measurements. The demo market is synthetic and its businesses are fictional. No real funds move in the sandbox. Paid subscriptions, production SLAs and commercial certificate issuance are unavailable. Do not send private-network URLs, credentials or personal records to evaluation endpoints. Submitting an enquiry does not create a contract.
Contact and privacy.
Send business contact details and a brief workflow description only. Enquiry details are used to respond and assess fit; email is processed by the providers handling delivery. The form must report delivery failure if it cannot send. For access, correction or deletion requests, contact hello@infrastellar.com. Do not submit sensitive or confidential information.
Commercial contracting entity details, applicable terms and any engagement-specific data handling must be supplied in the written proposal before paid work starts. This beta does not take payment.
hello@infrastellar.com