Protocol Overview
last updated: 2026-03-01
Scintilla Locate is a decentralised settlement layer for presence-gated smart contracts on the Flare Network (EVM). It provides dispute-grade, deterministic mechanisms for establishing proofs of presence that can safely gate on-chain outcomes.
This handbook focuses on how we engineer the protocol: governance, determinism, conformance, and AI-augmented Spec-Driven Development (SDD).
Core design goals
- Determinism: consensus-critical and dispute-critical rules must be replayable years later.
- Auditability: every protocol decision must be explainable from versioned specs + artifacts.
- Economic safety: the protocol must not over-expose itself relative to staked security.
- Adversarial resilience: dishonest provers, challengers, and verifier collusion are expected.
- Governance clarity: protocol changes are controlled via ADRs/specs with explicit approval gates.
What “presence-gated settlement” means
A presence-gated contract releases value (or triggers a state transition) only if a claimant can demonstrate, under the protocol’s rules:
- presence within a defined region (space)
- during a defined interval (time)
- under verifiable, deterministic mappings and encodings
Where authority lives
In Scintilla Locate, authority does not live in code.
Authority lives in:
- accepted ADRs
- versioned normative specifications
- schema definitions and canonicalization rules
- conformance corpora and test vectors
Code is a compiled artifact of these sources.
Quick navigation
- Threat assumptions:
docs/foundations/threat-model.md - Economic security envelope:
docs/foundations/economic-security-model.md - Governance charter:
docs/governance/protocol-factory-governance-charter.md - How we build with AI safely:
docs/ai-software-factory/