How it works
From a signature to sealed history.
One record's journey through the mesh — five stages, seconds to an optimistic seal (finality in minutes), post-quantum at every step.
Record — on any device, online or not
The work is hashed (SHA3-256), signed with post-quantum keys (Dilithium3, with SPHINCS+ available for high-assurance profiles), and stamped with an interval tree clock — causal time that needs no synchronized clocks and no connection.
Gossip — the mesh moves it
Records travel a peer-to-peer mesh over ElaraPQ, a post-quantum transport (ML-KEM-768 key exchange, Dilithium3 authentication). Content-routed DHT delivery keeps it efficient as the network grows; flood-gossip covers small networks.
Witness — independence is what counts
Each zone draws a witness committee by verifiable random sortition, weighted by stake and discounted by correlation: witnesses sharing an organization or subnet count less. A thousand clones of one operator cannot settle a record — that is MESH-BFT's diversity theorem, enforced in the hot path.
Seal — history becomes immutable
Epochs close over attested records with Merkle roots, chained seal-to-seal and periodically consolidated into super-seals and checkpoints. Rewriting one record means rewriting every seal after it, across independent witnesses — there is no quiet edit.
Verify — on a phone, against math
A light client downloads headers, not history: checkpoint skip-sync means no genesis replay. Any record's existence and position is verified with a Merkle proof against a sealed root — milliseconds of work, phone-class hardware, post-quantum end to end.
+ Why clone armies fail here
Classical BFT counts weight. Elara counts independent weight. Witnesses that share an organization, a subnet, or a geography are correlation-penalized before their stake is summed — the committee on the left has 100% of the raw stake and still cannot settle, while the diverse committee settles with the same total.
Sybil resistance isn't a CAPTCHA here. It's arithmetic.
The math is in the papers.
Committee selection, seal chains, light-client proofs, the diversity theorem — written down, reviewable, reproducible.
Protocol whitepaper MESH-BFT paper