Research
Forward-looking research notes, applied roadmaps, and substrate
blueprints. Active research, preserved as first-class. These inform
what the engineering work in herald-protocol/ and services/ is
heading toward; they are not historical artefacts.
What's here
HERALD_RESEARCH_ROADMAP.md— the live research roadmap.
Eleven topic areas (ZK provenance, Patina scoring, agent middleware,
Sybil resistance, audit-log gossip, model-identity hashing, human
approval flow, vendor strategy, bestiary, trace UX, time/receipts).
This is where engineering questions go to be sharpened before becoming
protocol or product work.
ROADMAP_TO_THE_VOID.md— applied engineering roadmap. Four
named workstreams: @herald/core reference library, MCP middleware
for signed tool calls, the Patina Engine, the Sarah Injector. Closer
to "what gets built next" than HERALD_RESEARCH_ROADMAP.md.
THE_UNIVERSAL_SUBSTRATE_BLUEPRINT.md— the longest-horizon
substrate sketch. Stellar-scale compute, time-dilation traces, the
Singular Sigil. Speculative; useful as an upper bound on what the
trust substrate might mean.
How this relates to the rest of the repo
narrative/— provides the framing language ("Patina", "the Bestiary",
"Entropy Seeds") that this research uses without re-defining.
herald-protocol/SPEC.md,EXT.md,THREATS.md,CHARTER.md— the
current protocol shape; research items here propose extensions to it.
manthan-platform/gates/G-001..G-013.md— the Phase-0 gate specs;
some research items inform their next iteration.
MANTHAN_PLATFORM_TRACKER.md— when a research item graduates into
scheduled engineering work, it shows up there as a T- or D- ticket.
manthan/state/findings/T-NNN/— completed research findings, indexed
by ticket. These often originate as questions raised here.
Promotion path
Research item → engineering work goes through three steps:
1. Idea lives here; the doc captures the question and the candidate
shapes of the answer.
2. The operator (or an agent under the operator's authority) decides to
pursue it; a T-NNN finding is opened.
3. When findings converge, the work moves into the platform as a D-NNN
tracker entry under MANTHAN_PLATFORM_TRACKER.md.
If you have a new research item, add it here as a new .md file with a
header summarising the question, the constraints, and the open
sub-questions. Don't try to answer it in the same pass.