Manifest-Bound Evidence for On-Chain Financial Protocols
Summary
The paper presents an evidence architecture for assessing workflows in hybrid on-chain financial systems. A sealed manifest records system identities, roles, schemas, and release information; seven evidence layers are retained with registered derivations and a shared correlation identifier. Claims advance only when provenance, relevant root conditions, negative controls, reproducible packaging, historical replay, and independent review all meet the stated requirements. Matching hashes alone are insufficient to establish that evidence was independently derived.
A registered case study follows twelve financial assertions through retained evidence, repeated materialization, archive verification, and an ordered replay tied to the resulting package. One assertion includes both a stale-state case before admission and a book-epoch change during processing. The paper also describes how commitments expose specified forms of tampering and how to document exactly-once financial effects. Its conclusions concern the reviewability of this evidence chain; they do not establish that every protocol is secure or that the observed assertions predict future behavior. It distinguishes original historical identities from later attestations that a result can be reproduced.
Key ideas
- A sealed manifest binds declared system identities and release details to the evidence record.
- Seven evidence layers need registered derivations and a shared correlation identity.
- Hash agreement by itself does not demonstrate independent evidence generation.
- Claim promotion combines provenance, root conditions, negative controls, replay, reproducibility, and independent review.
- Historical identities and later reproducibility attestations represent distinct kinds of evidence.
Tags
Full text
# 2610.02838 # Axient: Manifest-Bound Evidence for On-Chain Financial Protocols: Seven-Layer Derivation, Correlation, Tamper Rejection, and Reproducible Claim Promotion Hybrid on-chain financial protocols are frequently evaluated with evidence that is individually useful but collectively insufficient: a unit test, transaction receipt, screenshot, service response, or several matching hashes may be presented as proof of a complete workflow even when the layers share one generated source or omit the financial authority that matters. This paper develops a manifest-bound evidence architecture for such systems. A sealed execution manifest binds declared system identities, roles, schemas, and release identity. Seven evidence layers are retained with registered derivations and linked by a common correlation identity. A conjunctive claim-promotion rule requires provenance, predicate-specific root conditions, negative controls, reproducible packaging, historical replay, and independent review in addition to hash equality. We formalize the evidence graph, prove that copied hashes cannot establish independent derivation, show how collision-resistant commitments make specified tampering detectable, define exactly-once financial-effect evidence, and distinguish original historical identities from later reproducibility attestations. The registered local case study records twelve parent Financial Interaction Assertions in one accepted cohort: 84 retained ACTUAL_EVIDENCE positions, two clean materializations with one byte-identical file index, a deterministic strict archive accepted by a separate verifier, and a selected ordered replay bound to that archive. FIA-011 is conjunctive and retains both stale-before-admission and book-epoch-change-mid-position subcases. The result demonstrates a reviewable chain of custody from financial assertion to replay-bound package while preserving the difference between observed evidence, interpretation, and future hypotheses.
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