Neutral accountability protocol · ARKY-TIM-v1
A public protocol for action and verification across agents, money, chains, and machines.
Every action records who acted, on what evidence, under which policy, and what happened — as a signed, content-addressed receipt any system can replay.
What Arky is
A minimal record of who acted, on what evidence, under which policy, and what actually happened.
Five artifacts form one chain. Each is a signed, content-addressed document that references the one before it — so the whole sequence, from raw evidence to final receipt, can be replayed and verified independently. The right column is the exact algorithm each step is pinned to.
The artifact
The signed evidence @arky/mcp emits when an agent pays through a policy-gated tool — a real artifact (examples/agents/), not an illustration.
Every action an agent takes reduces to documents like this one: small, canonical, content-addressed, signed. It carries everything needed to check itself — no API, no issuer, no network. Replay it in your browser right now.
The content address. Recompute multihash(sha2-256, JCS(body)) and it must match, byte for byte — any edit breaks it.
A detached Ed25519 signature (RFC 7797) over the same canonical bytes the cid covers.
The agent’s did:key, which resolves to the signing key itself — verification needs nothing beyond the document.
The raw tool arguments, recorded verbatim — ask why the agent paid and the answer is signed.
Conformance
Conformance is pass/fail, not marketing. The verifier recomputes content IDs, signatures, witnesses, Merkle roots, finality, and Settler transitions from inputs — then compares to each vector's expected output.
Adoption path
Technical adoption, not a signup. Validate artifacts locally, compare behavior against the vectors, then implement the loop in your stack against four executable reference anchors.
1 / SPEC
The normative core documents for TIM, Notary, Kernel, Settlers, and Policy Packs.
2 / VERIFY
Recompute every artifact locally and replay the published vectors against any of the reference stacks.
cd packages/core-rs && cargo test3 / IMPLEMENT
Use the four reference packages as executable anchors for conformant behavior — they agree byte-for-byte, so any of them settles a question.
Reference implementations
Each one is written clean-room from the specs, then held to the same line in CI: canonical bytes → content IDs → Ed25519 signatures → Kernel decisions → execution receipts must match byte-for-byte across every stack. A disagreement anywhere fails the build.
Primary reference. Hand-rolled RFC 8785 canonicalization including the ECMAScript number formatter, so nothing depends on a JS engine's rounding.
Zero dependencies — Ed25519 implemented from RFC 8032 on hashlib and checked against the RFC's own vectors. Built for agent and data tooling.
Standard library only. A hand-written JSON parser keeps key order and number precision that encoding/json would discard before signing.
Browser-safe and dependency-light. It is the stack behind /verify, so the in-page verifier runs the same code path as the published vectors.
Adopters
Rail-agnostic and policy-aware — the same surface, adopted wherever an action needs proof.
Every tool call and payment an agent makes, policy-gated and receipted.
Receipts that connect decisions to rails and outcomes.
Neutral verification without capture by any one chain.
Trust under latency, offline verification, and delayed settlement.
Ready to adopt? Read the spec, replay the vectors, and ship conformance.