Project Overview & Proposed Design

Status: design proposal, June 2026. Variant A (transparent stake lottery) is the primary mechanism; Variant B (ZK/anonymous) is a compatible upgrade, sketched in an appendix.

• Citations: [S#] research/spec documents, [C#] codebase files; resolved in the bibliography (§5). Line-level grounding for every code claim is in the design draft [S7]. All code @ 69b1410.
• Final deliverable will be re-rendered as a Notion Technical Spec with Python pseudocode, per house norm.

1. Problem statement

1.1 Channels today, and the cost of accredited keys

A channel is Bedrock’s ordered-log primitive: every CHANNEL_INSCRIBE carries a parent hash pointing at the previous message, threading a virtual chain across Bedrock blocks. Zones publish state updates through channels (and use them as a coordination bus between sequencers); bridges, clients, and other Zones read them. The parent-hash design enables reorg-resilience; honest messages re-thread correctly on whichever fork wins, so sequencers never wait for finality (which is often slow) to keep posting. [S1][S2]

Writing is gated by one comparison [C1]:

1. parent == channel.tip_message                                   (hash-chain integrity)
2. signer == accredited_keys[round_robin(block_slot)]              ← THE GATE
3. Ed25519_verify(signer, tx_hash, sig)

What round-robin earns [S1][C2]:

• Exactly one candidate message per position; no ambiguity, ever.
• No spam surface: unauthorized writes rejected outright.
• Deterministic turns; posting_timeout gives passive no-show recovery.
• Reorg-robust: reorged messages return to the mempool; the scheduled sequencer re-posts.

What it costs:

• accredited_keys (≤ 65,535; first claimer seeds the list) changes only via CHANNEL_CONFIG signed by configuration_threshold incumbents: a closed club gating its own admission [S1].
• Censorship and stalling are bounded only by committee honesty; a shut-out user has no protocol recourse.
• Permissioned-by-incumbents fails the brief by definition [S8].

Terminology: the Zone SDK guide [S9] uses “decentralized sequencing” for this committee rotation; decentralized operation among a fixed set already ships. This project targets permissionless admission: a complement to that guide, not a competitor.