Entity Core Protocol

The Entity Core Protocol is a working specification for distributed information systems. Its surface is small:

• Content-addressed typed data as the basic unit. Every value is {type, data}; the unit's identity is the hash of its canonical encoding.
• A mutable named tree over an immutable content store. The content store maps hash → entity; the tree maps path → hash. Paths are mutable; content is not.
• Universal addressing. Every entity has a name, a location, and an address: peer/path resolves to a content hash in some peer's tree. The namespace is peer-isolated by construction, so trees from different peers compose without conflict; identical content shared across peers deduplicates automatically. Whether a given entity is reachable from where you sit is a separate question --- capability-gated, network-dependent --- but addressability itself is unconditional.
• Two message types. EXECUTE carries a typed operation against a path; EXECUTE_RESPONSE returns the result. There is no separate query, subscribe, or update message --- they are all EXECUTE against handlers registered in the tree.
• Four-dimensional capability grants (handlers, operations, resources, peers) with cryptographic attenuation. Capabilities are themselves entities, content-addressed and verifiable independently of session.
• Peer-to-peer communication. Each peer has content-derived identity, hosts its own tree, and exchanges entities with other peers under capability constraints.

The core protocol has been re-derived across more than forty languages (OCaml, Swift, Haskell, Lean, Rust, Go, TypeScript, Elixir, Dart, Forth, Smalltalk, APL, SQL, … ), generated from the spec — one peer per language — alongside three independently-written reference implementations (Go, Rust, Python). The claim is spec-forced convergence — the same specification re-derived across languages — not that many separate codebases independently agree; the generated peers share a generation lineage.

Conformance is tracked, not claimed once. Every verdict is pinned to a specific oracle commit, and re-measurement against a newer oracle supersedes it rather than preserving it — so a peer's status is a current reading, not a badge it keeps. Peers that do not pass are published with a named defect rather than omitted. The current tally and the per-peer detail behind it (spec version, oracle commit, codec, crypto floor, known gaps) live in the conformance matrix, which is the authoritative number and is re-measured rather than restated.

Read the specification

• The Specification — the complete normative spec and its companions: the protocol, the wire format, the type system, the core tree operations, and the machine boundary.
• Keystone — the generator that derives a conforming peer from this spec in any language, and the published gate that says which peers pass.
• Formalization — the machine-checked models behind the design.

The reference implementations and applications live with the Entity Church Foundation.