Disclosure boundary

Private by default

The following are private vault contents. None leave the runtime without explicit human review, and none appear in any file in the public export tree.

• private commitment salts
• selected batches and review-gated candidate cohorts
• scoring weight internals and adaptive deltas
• embedding vectors (text and sequence)
• failure logs and contradiction records
• internal papers and unreviewed assessments
• unfiled invention material and IP work product
• unreleased assay data and provider packets
• local runtime paths and operator artifacts

Public after review

The public artifact layer exposes reviewed, content-addressed projections of the runtime's state. Each is gated by the publication guard at write time and by the leak scanner at CI time.

• typed records on the Protean Ledger (Hypothesis, Experiment, EvidenceBundle, Candidate, Thesis, RuntimeCycle, ScientificAsset, IPAsset, plus six more)
• full candidate and candidate-family sequences for intentionally published records
• salted candidate commitments and sequence hashes beside, not instead of, the sequence
• per-record replayPointer artifacts on GitHub (proteanlabs1/ledger-mirror) and Gitlawb (protean-ledger, protean-papers, protean-governance, protean-research)
• lineage summaries and typed lineage edges (DerivedFrom, Tests, Supports, Contradicts, Supersedes, Retracts, ParentOf, ChildOf, MemberOfFamily, and more)
• lifecycle state and disclosure state
• reviewed public papers and reviewed collection manifests, surfaced as Thesis and Collection records

Disclosure state

The Protean Ledger defines six deployed DisclosureState values: PrivateCommitmentOnly, RedactedPublic, CounselReviewed, PatentPending, Public, and Retracted. Private drafts that have not been registered yet are proposal state in the private runtime, not an on-chain disclosure value. Disclosure changes after registration are explicit Ledger mutations and emit DisclosureChanged.

The states correspond to the review sites that gate them:

• PrivateCommitmentOnly — historical or unpublished record contains only commitment-safe content.
• RedactedPublic — legacy public record has redacted public content.
• CounselReviewed — counsel-reviewed disclosure state.
• PatentPending — public-safe state during provisional-IP handling.
• Public — the record is fully disclosed to the public surface.
• Retracted — the treasury wallet has executed a RETRACTOR_ROLE retraction; the record stays on chain but is publicly marked retracted.

How publication safety is enforced

The publication guard is a function, not a policy. Every public payload — every file destined for the public export tree — passes through the guard before write. The guard inspects:

• key names against a blocked list (any key containing "salt", "private", etc.)
• value types against the schema for the destination file
• presence of absolute filesystem paths, home-relative paths, or internal repo paths

If any check fails, the write is refused — the function raises rather than returning a sanitized payload. The CI leak scanner runs a second pass over the entire export tree as defence in depth.

The publication gate

The canonical workflow DAG contains an explicit prepare_provenance step that is gated by review_gate: publication_intent_required AND failure_policy: block. Nothing reaches the public export without that gate clearing.

private runtime
-> publication guard
-> founder / scientific review
-> counsel review (when candidate-specific)
-> public export write
-> CI leak scanner
-> operator approval
-> Bankr
-> Protean Ledger
-> events
-> indexer + Digest
-> Explorer / GitHub mirror / Gitlawb mirror

What public proof is not

The boundary is the system's main claim about itself. Private salts and scoring internals stay private. Public sequences, provenance, and proof become infrastructure. Both are enforced in code.