What's Real Now

Strong today

Provenance and institutional memory. The deepest mature part of ICN is the chain that carries an outcome back through the rule that shaped it, the decision that authorized it, and the members who held standing. Proposals, votes, receipts, and the decision-to-outcome chain are the most mature path in the current system.

Auditable coordination. The paths that carry a decision into a recorded outcome are where the most implementation effort and the most hardening have gone. These are the capabilities we are most willing to stand behind today.

Cryptographic identity and membership primitives. Self-held identity for members and institutions is in place, and is the foundation the rest of the system builds on.

Structural discipline. The separation between the enforcement layer (which enforces constraints without understanding their domain meaning) and the application layer (which interprets institutional concepts) is enforced in the codebase architecture. This is how the system stays coherent as it grows.

Every ICN action leaves a trail. The trail is not a log file — it is the chain by which a decision becomes an institutional fact that can be walked back to the authority that produced it.

1. 01

   Proposal A member or scope proposes an action.
2. ↓
3. 02

   Decision The scope decides under its rules. The decision grants authorization.
4. ↓
5. 03

   Execution The authorized action becomes operational effect.
6. ↓
7. 04

   Effect The effect is recorded — obligations, allocations, state.
8. ↓
9. 05

   Receipt A durable receipt ties the effect back to the authority that produced it.

Proof flows forward The receipt at step 05 is not the end. It becomes part of the record that confers standing and authority for the next round of decisions. Institutional memory is how ICN ties one action to the next.

Advancing now

Execution coverage. The mechanism that carries accepted decisions into operational effect already exists. Expanding the range of decision types it handles — so that more of what an institution decides actually becomes operationally real — is where active development is concentrated.

Policy binding practice. The mechanisms that let shared rules bind what happens, rather than just describe what is supposed to happen, are advancing alongside execution coverage. This is one of the most consequential active fronts in the project.

Real but maturing

Federation. Inter-institutional coordination is a serious, active subsystem with real implementation behind it: formal agreements, attestations, typed inter-institutional channels, and cross-scope clearing. It is not yet at the level where its public-facing story is complete, and some integrations remain partial. We would rather say that directly than paper over it.

Commons and compute. Shared infrastructure participating in the same institutional loop as governance and accounting. Implementation includes trust-aware task placement, cross-participant clearing, checkpointing, and dispute resolution. This is one of the areas where the implementation is ahead of what the documentation and public surfaces currently convey.

Economic semantics. Obligations, treasury with budgets and approvals, patronage settlement, mutual-credit positions, progressive credit limits, and usage-rights accounting all have implementation behind them. The governed-social-accounting framing is real; the cross-scope integration story is still being completed.

Member-facing experience. Identity, participation, and institutional interaction are converging toward a coherent member surface, but that surface is not yet where the underlying system is. This is the gap a cooperative adopting ICN today will feel most directly.

Not yet, or not yet publicly surfaced

Some parts of the system are real but not yet worth highlighting to outsiders because their public-facing story is thin. Privacy primitives and zero-knowledge proof components exist as dedicated subsystems, and a steward network for trust distribution is implemented — but none of them are ready to be described in public without risking overclaim. We would rather wait than paint pictures we cannot yet stand behind.

Other parts of the system are scoped but not where active work is concentrated right now. When outsiders ask "does ICN do X," the honest answer is sometimes not yet, and we are not pretending otherwise.

What this page commits to

Every capability claim on this site is grounded in the maturity bands above. If something is described as "strong today," it is implemented and in use. If something is described as "advancing," it is under active development but not finished. If you find a claim elsewhere on this site that contradicts what is here, please let us know.

The scopes the bands above apply across

The maturity bands above describe capabilities. ICN runs those capabilities across five distinct contexts of action — five scopes. The substrate is at different levels of maturity inside each scope. Provenance and identity are strongest at the cooperative scope today; federation and commons are real but maturing; the member-facing surface trails the substrate underneath. The scopes diagram below is the map the bands apply across — not a claim that ICN is uniformly strong everywhere on it.

Scope is context of action, not hierarchy. Every ICN action belongs to one or more scopes at once.

1. Commons Shared resources governed by the institutions that use them.
2. Federation How distinct institutions coordinate without merging.
3. Community A group of members with shared rules, purpose, and standing.
4. Cooperative A scoped institution owned and governed by its members.
5. Self The individual member — the identity that holds standing in each scope above.

Read top to bottom: widest shared context down to the most personal. A single decision can touch several scopes at once — that is the point. The receipt it produces is tagged with every scope it passed through.

Where to look directly

• Architecture reference — the technical deep-dive synced from the repo
• Documentation — current developer and operator docs
• Source on GitHub — the ground truth