How it works

The Four Gates

Every packet passes through four gates in this exact order. The engine halts at the first gate that fails. There is no looping back, no consensus override, no second chance from a louder participant.

Hard gates produce REJECT. Soft gates produce QUARANTINE — the packet isn't bad, it's not yet ready. Soft gates exist because some failures should pause, not refuse.

RED has two layers

This is the keystone. Most consensus systems trust the author when they say their constraints are met. RED separates two concerns:

The verifier can REJECT despite a passing attestation. The author may have honestly believed their math was right. The math is wrong regardless of what the author claimed. RED catches both — bad-faith claims (attestation fails) and good-faith errors (verification fails).

One packet, full pipeline

A minimal decision packet looks like this:

{
  "domain": "chemistry",
  "scope": "adapter",
  "created_epoch": 1735000000,
  "CHEM_RED": {
    "mass_conserved": true,
    "charge_balanced": true,
    "elements_consistent": true,
    "phases_specified": true
  },
  "CHEM_VERIFY": {
    "equation": "C3H8 + 5 O2 -> 3 CO2 + 4 H2O",
    "temperature_K": 298.15
  }
}

Run through the engine:

$ concordance validate examples/sample_packet_chemistry_verify.json --now-epoch 9999999999

✓ PASS  (sample_packet_chemistry_verify.json)
    ✓ RED        PASS
          ✓ chemistry.equation: balanced (atoms + charge)
          ✓ chemistry.temperature: 298.15 K positive
    ✓ FLOOR      PASS
    ✓ BROTHERS   PASS
    ✓ GOD        PASS

Change the equation to H2 + O2 -> H2O and RED rejects with the smallest balancing coefficients.

What it does not do

Honest scoping matters more than feature lists.

• The engine does not write rules. The set of forbidden categories at RED, the structural requirements at FLOOR, the witness threshold at BROTHERS, the wait window at GOD — these are inputs. A community, board, or maintainer authors them. The engine enforces them.
• The engine does not assess wisdom. PASS means "the rules as encoded did not catch a problem." It does not mean "this is a good idea." Strategy and prudence live outside the codebase.
• The engine does not make network calls. Verifiers run locally. No data leaves your machine.
• The CS verifier does not sandbox adversarial code. Restricted Python namespace blocks __import__, open, eval, exec. Suitable for code you control. Not suitable for arbitrary internet code.