Open-source · post-quantum · written in Rust
Proof of who did what, when.
Software now acts on its own — agents write code, move money, operate machines. When something goes wrong, the only evidence is the operator's own logs: private, mutable, written by the party under suspicion. Elara is the neutral record that question needs — every action signed and sealed against a timeline no one can rewrite, built for witnesses the operator does not control. Post-quantum from the first byte, because proof that must hold in twenty years cannot rest on signatures that won't.
Running proof: this project's maintainer is an AI agent acting under a public, revocable mandate — pick one of its proven actions and verify it in your browser. The verdict is computed locally, and every prefilled trust input is disclosed and replaceable with your own.
01 Why this, why now
The quantum clock is running
Everything signed with today's classical cryptography can be harvested now and forged later, once quantum computers arrive. Proof that must still be true in twenty years has to be post-quantum from the moment it is created. Elara signs every record with a NIST-standardised post-quantum signature — ML-DSA-65 (FIPS 204, "Dilithium3") — not as an add-on, but as the default and only mode.
AI agents need an accountability layer
Software agents now write code, move money, and operate machines. The question "which agent did what, and when?" stops being a log line and becomes infrastructure. Elara gives every actor — human or AI — a cryptographic identity whose work is sealed into a history that nobody, including the operator, can quietly rewrite.
02 How it works
Record
A device hashes the work, signs it with post-quantum keys, and stamps it with a causal clock. This happens locally and works fully offline — a record created on a plane is as valid as one created in a datacenter.
Witness
When connectivity exists, a peer-to-peer mesh gossips the record into its zone, where staked witnesses attest to it. MESH-BFT's design discounts correlated witnesses — same org, same subnet; today that weighting is reported but does not yet gate finality (known limitations).
Seal
Epochs seal history under Merkle roots, chained and checkpointed. A light client checks any record against the sealed history with a short proof — no full node, no genesis replay; the signatures and hashes on that path are post-quantum.
03 What it's for
AI-agent accountability
Every agent action signed under its own identity and sealed, with explicit revocable authorization. Liability becomes an evidence question — with evidence.
Read the case →Manufacturing provenance
Every station signs what it did to which unit, when. A defect months later traces back to the machine and the moment — without trusting the factory's own database.
Read the case →Proof of priority
Seal a work's fingerprint, then anchor the seal in Bitcoin with OpenTimestamps — an existed-by time that cannot be back-dated by more than Bitcoin's block-time tolerance (typically at most about an hour). Registration priority, precisely scoped — in most disputes, the ordering is the whole fight.
Read the case →Offline-first field operations
Records are created and signed with no connectivity, each fixed in causal order. The backlog syncs later and history lands in the order it happened.
Read the case →Sybil resistance as arithmetic — the design
In MESH-BFT's design, correlated witnesses — same operator, same subnet — collapse toward one vote. Today finality counts raw stake; the weighting is computed and reported, not yet enforced.
Read the case →The coming fleet of personal AI machines
Always-on local-AI boxes need exactly two things at scale: provable agent authorization, and something useful for idle cycles. Elara ships the first and is designed for the second.
Read the case →04 Exactly where it stands
Every public claim this project makes distinguishes designed-for from tested-at. This table is the honest version — it is the same one in the README.
| Tested at | small private testnets — historically up to 6 rented VPS nodes across Europe and North America (that fleet was retired 2026-06-09); the current fleet is 3 local machines (one desktop + two laptops), weeks of continuous soak; ~17K-record DAGs; first external-machine join over the public internet completed July 2026; the full CI test suite (7,000+ tests) green |
|---|---|
| Designed for | 1M zones × 10T records/day × 10K+ nodes — design targets that shaped the architecture, not demonstrated capacity |
| Hardening | explicit-panic phase done — 0 unwrap()/expect()/panic! across the node and published protocol crates (test code excluded), CI-gated. Bounds and arithmetic on bytes from peers have been reviewed across the network-facing code, with decoder fuzz tests in CI — the goal is that a Byzantine peer can never crash a node; no outside audit has checked this yet |
| Public network | none yet — this is a runtime you can build and run yourself today |
| Beats | the internal unit (the beat) is protocol plumbing (staking, sybil resistance, resource accounting). It is not a cryptocurrency offering: there is no token sale, no exchange listing, no airdrop — and none is planned. |
05 Papers & specification
Protocol Whitepaper
The Elara Protocol — a post-quantum universal validation layer for digital work. 131 pages, v0.7.40.
PDF →MESH-BFT
Diversity-weighted Byzantine fault tolerance: the consensus design, where independence counts. The 2026-09-25 edition proves safety for Byzantine stake below one third, under conditions it states, and marks where the shipped code differs: finality counts raw stake, and seal liveness has only a proof sketch the code does not meet yet (see Known limitations in the repository).
PDF →Design specification
The full working corpus: protocol, architecture, discovery, hardware tiers — open for review. Where it and the whitepaper differ, the whitepaper is canonical.
Browse →06 Run it yourself
git clone https://github.com/navigatorbuilds/elara-mesh.git
cd elara-mesh
cargo test --features node --lib # the library suite CI runs
cargo build --release --features node
./target/release/elara-node # your node. your history.Rust 1.87+ on Linux (WSL2 works; CI builds and tests the node on Linux only, the verifier also on macOS and Windows). Our authority node runs in under 400 MB of memory at today's load; light clients verify proofs in a browser tab. The node is AGPL-3.0-only; the SDKs and reusable crates are MIT/Apache-2.0. If the AGPL does not fit your deployment, a commercial licence for the node is available.
Building an AI agent? Give it receipts for what it does: a mandate, a signed receipt for each act, and an offline check, set up through MCP.