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.

1 · RECORD 2 · GOSSIP 3 · WITNESS 4 · SEAL 5 · VERIFY ANY DEVICE sign() record ZONE COMMITTEE ⅔ INDEPENDENT STAKE EPOCH SEAL merkle: 0x4ad1… LIGHT CLIENT
FIG. 01 RECORD LIFECYCLE — SIGN / GOSSIP / ATTEST / SEAL / PROVE
Secondsoptimistic seal on a healthy zone
⅔ stakeindependence-weighted finality threshold
64-levelrecord-inclusion proofs verifiable on a phone
100%offline-capable record creation
1

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.

2

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.

3

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.

4

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.

5

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.

Verify a real record in your browser →

+ 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.

SAME ORG · SAME SUBNET raw stake 300 → effective ~115 BLOCKED THREE INDEPENDENT ORGS raw stake 300 → effective 300 SETTLED ✓
FIG. 02 MESH-BFT THEOREM 1 — CORRELATION-PENALIZED STAKE

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