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, witnessed by independent parties, and sealed against a timeline no one can rewrite. 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 receipted 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 NIST-standardised post-quantum signatures — Dilithium3 and SPHINCS+ — 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 witnessed by independent third parties and 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 a diversity-weighted committee of independent witnesses attests to it. Correlated witnesses — same org, same subnet — count less. Sybil farms don't settle.
Seal
Epochs seal attested history under Merkle roots, chained and checkpointed. A light client on a phone verifies any record against the sealed history — no full node, no genesis replay, post-quantum all the way down.
03 What it's for
AI-agent accountability
Every agent action signed under its own identity, witnessed by independent parties, 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 into a Bitcoin-anchored timeline that cannot be back-dated. 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
Correlated witnesses — same operator, same subnet — collapse toward one vote in consensus. A thousand clones weigh about as much as one honest voice.
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 built 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; full test suite (5,700+ 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. Active lane: hot-path bounds/arithmetic hardening — a Byzantine peer must never crash a node |
| 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. 121 pages, v0.7.30.
PDF →MESH-BFT
Diversity-weighted Byzantine fault tolerance: consensus where independence counts, with liveness theorem.
PDF →Design specification
The full working corpus: protocol, architecture, discovery, hardware tiers — published verbatim for review.
Browse →06 Run it yourself
git clone https://github.com/navigatorbuilds/elara-mesh.git
cd elara-mesh
cargo test # the suite is the spec
cargo build --release --features node
./target/release/elara-node # your node. your history.Rust 1.87+, Linux/macOS (WSL2 works). The node runs on any 2 GB machine; light clients verify proofs on phone-class hardware. The node is AGPL-3.0-only; the SDKs and reusable crates are MIT/Apache-2.0.