vela

What Vela demonstrates

A short research note for an unaffiliated researcher who has landed at the substrate cold and wants to know what's actually been built.

The claim

Vela is a content-addressed, signed, replay-verified protocol for reviewed scientific state. Findings are first-class objects with stable ids derived from their content; reviewer verdicts are signed canonical events under named keypairs; state is reconstructed by replaying the event log against a deterministic reducer, and the resulting digest is published in a proof packet that any reader can recompute locally.

The substrate is meant to be the "Git for science" layer: beneath the journal, beneath the dataset, beneath the modeling code. A bounded scientific question lives as a *frontier*; reviewers maintain its state through signed events; peer hubs federate the same frontier so two institutions can hold opposing verdicts without one overwriting the other.

What's running right now

Three frontiers, each with reviewer-graded accepted-core findings backed by signed canonical events:

  1. anti-amyloid translation

    2. (vfr_5076e7b3ff8e6b0f). 141 findings spanning the anti-amyloid trial readouts (CLARITY-AD lecanemab, TRAILBLAZER-ALZ donanemab, gantenerumab phase 3), biomarker stratification, and translational gaps.

  2. alzheimers-bbb-dysfunction-delivery. 262 findings

    3. covering pericyte deficiency, BBB permeability, vascular contributions to AD, and delivery mechanisms across the blood-brain barrier.

  3. early-AD biomarker calibration

    4. (vfr_a22c9022674a2304). A young second frontier seeded with foundational sources (Centiloid scale, MCID for CDR-SB, donanemab tau-stratified iADRS) and reviewed verdicts across 9 findings.

    Cross-frontier dependency links bind the three. Bridges are declared explicitly as vbr_* content-addressed objects; peer hubs propagate verdicts as canonical events.

    What you can verify yourself

    The substrate's claim is "any reader can recompute the proof." That's not metaphor. Three concrete checks:

    1. Integrity per frontier. Each frontier's

      2. proof/latest.json carries the snapshot hash, event log hash, reducer digest, and Carina kernel digest at materialization time. Run vela integrity projects/<frontier> locally; the substrate re-derives the digests from the canonical event store and reports match or drift. The public site renders the same digests via the ProofBadge component on /frontiers/<slug>.

      1. Replay. Each frontier's .vela/events/ directory

        2. carries the full canonical event log. Running vela replay replays the log against the reducer and produces the same materialized state, byte for byte. Cross-implementation: the Python reducer at clients/python/vela_reducer.py produces the same finding-state digest for the same event log, proving the protocol is implementation-portable rather than tied to any one codebase.

        1. Federation round-trip. Two hubs federate the same

          2. frontier; conflicts are detected as frontier.conflict_detected events; resolutions are paired frontier.conflict_resolved events. The scripts/two-hub-conflict-drill.sh smoke proves the round-trip end-to-end without standing up a second live hub instance.

          What's deliberately not here

          The substrate has hard boundaries. None of these are oversights.

          • Auto-acceptance of truth-changing proposals. Every

            • finding promotion to accepted-core lands as a signed canonical event under a named reviewer id. Agents draft; reviewers adjudicate. The substrate refuses to record an agent's confidence as a reviewer's verdict.

          • Silent edits. Once a finding is asserted, its

            • content-addressed id is immutable. A change of wording is a new finding that supersedes the old one through an explicit finding.superseded event. The audit trail is the protocol.

          • Public write surfaces. The localhost Workbench

            • (vela workbench) is the curation write path. The public site at vela-site.fly.dev is read-only by design; the build-time scan refuses to ship /review/* routes or POST forms to production.

          • Blocking review-debt hidden behind aggregate metrics.

            • Each frontier's review-debt count is published openly. The BBB child frontier carries 42 reviewer-judgment blockers right now, named on the public page. The substrate makes the debt visible rather than amortizing it into a single health number.

          What this enables

          Three concrete patterns the substrate supports today:

          1. Two-institution disagreement preserved as live state.

            2. When peer hubs sync against the same frontier and disagree on a finding's verdict, the substrate records both views as canonical events. A reviewer adjudicates later; the resolution is paired by event id; both views live forever in the log. No silent overwrites.

            1. Cross-frontier composition. A finding on the

              2. early-AD frontier can declare a typed dependency link (depends, extends, replicates) to a finding on the anti-amyloid or BBB child frontier. The substrate resolves the cross-frontier reference via declared vfr_* dependencies in the manifest; an impact report walks the dependency graph and surfaces downstream propagation when an upstream finding's state changes.

              1. Reproducible decision-grade artifacts. The substrate

                2. produces decision-brief projections from accepted-core findings, scoped to clinician-readable composites. Drafts and needs_revision findings are excluded by filter; the substrate refuses to let unfiltered agent confidence reach a clinician-grade surface.

                How to start

                The 5-minute walkthrough at https://vela-site.fly.dev/onboarding walks the substrate path through five concrete substrate moves: sign a finding, load the inbox, promote, audit trail, federation. Each step cites real artifacts from the live repo so the page is grounded in actual state rather than mocked.

                The reviewer quickstart at docs/REVIEWER_QUICKSTART.md takes a fresh shell from clone to "first signed event in under 10 minutes."

                The protocol spec lives at docs/PROTOCOL.md. The Carina kernel spec lives at docs/CARINA.md.

                What this doesn't claim

                Vela does not claim to give medical advice, replace peer review, settle scientific disputes, or convert agent confidence into truth. It claims to be a substrate where those activities can happen with cryptographic integrity, named reviewers, and a public audit trail.

                If that substrate is useful to you, the install path is one command (cargo install vela once the publish lands) and the contribution path is one keypair plus a Workbench session.