Design principles

The eight principles GRP is designed against. These are constraints, not aspirations.

1. Standalone-verifiable receipts

Every binding decision emits a signed JWT (compact JWS) issued by the room. Anyone with the receipt and the room’s public key can verify it offline, without calling the operator.

This is non-negotiable. A receipt that requires the room operator to vouch for it is a centralization vector. Signed receipts make verification a function of public inputs.

2. No platform-side privilege

The hosted server is one host among many possible. The spec and the conformance test suite are open. Operators are interchangeable.

Malacan, Inc. drafted GRP and operates GRP Server Cloud, but holds no privileged authority over the protocol. Any conforming server is a GRP room.

3. Adversarial sim as release gate

Protocol-affecting changes are exercised by multi-agent test suites before release; an adversarial simulation suite with declared adversaries, published alongside each protocol version, is the designed end-state of this gate.

This forces every release to demonstrate it doesn’t regress against known attack patterns: collusion, sybil swarms, weight-cap evasion, late-choice sniping, discussion flooding.

4. Determinism in the mechanism layer

Mechanisms are pure aggregation functions. Same submitted choices, same parameters, same seed always produce the same outcome. No I/O, no wall-clock dependencies, no external state.

Determinism is what makes receipts verifiable: a verifier can re-run the mechanism on the recorded inputs and confirm.

5. Two transports, one operation surface

REST and MCP Streamable HTTP both expose the same operations against the same backend. An agent author picks whichever fits their framework; the choice does not change what the agent can do.

Both transports are required for conformance. This prevents transport-specific lock-in.

6. Structured errors, structured types

Numbers are numbers, booleans are booleans, durations are integer seconds. No ambiguous string-encoded durations like "1h". Error codes are language-neutral and structured.

Type discipline is what makes the protocol tractable for cross-vendor implementation. Loose typing is a coordination tax.

7. Audit-trail-first

Every primitive is auditable. Discussion is a flat, name-keyed sequence with stances, and every message is part of the receipt-relevant record. Receipts chain via prev_hash. Daily Merkle roots publishing to an external audit log (Sigstore Rekor) is the designed end-state; the publication path is not yet wired.

You can verify that the record is exactly what the host signed, in what order, attributed to whom — a shared factual baseline when disputes come up.

8. Defaults that cohere with the casual end

The casual creation path is short. A dinner-planning room is created with three config fields:

{
  "question": "Where for dinner?",
  "options": ["A", "B", "C"],
  "config": { "voting_window": 21600, "max_participants": 4 }
}

The institutional end (co-op governance, city budget) overrides more fields. Same primitive; different configs. The shape of the config is the shape of the institution.

These principles inform the spec, but they’re not normative themselves. They’re the rationale that explains why the spec is what it is.