SILT Core
Authority semantics for digital action.
Current digital systems are built on a hidden assumption: legitimacy flows from external validation.
A government issues your identity.
A credential authority attests your attributes.
A platform recognises your account.
A system grants your permissions.
You exist, digitally, to the extent that external systems confirm you.
SILT begins from the other direction.
What a person, collective, institution, or agent carries into a moment of digital action — standing, authority source, mandate, obligation, consent, reliance, and revocation — does not begin with system recognition. It precedes it.
Current infrastructure has no stable grammar for this. It can model who you are, what attributes you hold, and what permissions you have been granted. It cannot model what you bring into an action, in what capacity you are acting, by whose authority, under what mandate, and whether others may safely rely on the act.
SILT builds that grammar.
SILT Core v0.1 – Semantic Layer Definition
Initial public specification of SILT Core, defining capacity, authority, consent, and revocation as preconditions for legitimate digital action.
SILT Core is designed as an open, implementation-neutral semantic layer. It does not replace DID, VC, zCap, wallet, DAO, or AI-agent frameworks. It defines authority semantics that such systems may adopt, reference, or extend.
Systems can satisfy every authorisation check and still enable illegitimate action, because capacity and authority are not expressed at the point of execution.
Where SILT sits
Most digital systems follow this structure:
- Identification → who is this?
- Attestation → what can be proven?
- Policy → what is permitted?
- Execution → what happens?
SILT introduces the missing semantic layer between attestation, policy, and execution:
What does this person, collective, institution, or agent carry into this moment of action — under what authority, in what capacity, subject to what obligations, and under what conditions may others rely on it?
Without this layer, systems can satisfy every authorisation check and still enable illegitimate action.
Why this matters
Digital systems are becoming more autonomous. The internet is shifting from pages, accounts, and apps toward agents, workflows, protocols, and automated execution.
This creates a new legitimacy problem.
A system may be authenticated but acting in the wrong capacity.
A workflow may treat consent as permanent when it was conditional.
An agent may execute after authority has expired.
A delegated action may persist after revocation.
A signature may bind a party beyond the scope of their mandate.
These are not only technical failures. They are legitimacy failures.
SILT Core is relevant wherever digital systems need authority to be explicit before execution — across legal automation, AI-agent workflows, DAO governance, digital commerce, institutional approval flows, civic infrastructure, and consent-sensitive data systems.
What it is
SILT Core is a specification-first framework for modelling authority, capacity, consent, delegation, reliance, and revocation in digital systems.
Rather than delivering an application, wallet, or platform, SILT Core defines a semantic layer that many civic, governance, commercial, and agentic systems implicitly depend on but rarely specify: the conditions under which an actor is authorised to act, bind, delegate, rely, or revoke.
SILT Core draws on long-standing concepts from agency, mandate, private law, governance, and digital identity, but expresses them as technology-agnostic primitives suitable for modern systems.
The current work establishes specifications, threat models, misuse cases, and minimal validation schemas. Implementation is intentionally deferred so the core grammar can remain open, portable, and interoperable.
Interoperability
SILT Core is designed to complement existing identity and coordination frameworks rather than replace them.
DID and VC systems can express identifiers and attestations.
Capability systems can express delegated permissions.
Wallets can sign.
DAOs can coordinate.
Smart contracts can execute rules.
AI-agent frameworks can automate action.
SILT Core focuses on the missing semantic question beneath these systems:
In what capacity is this action being taken, under what authority, within what scope, with what consent, and with what revocation conditions?
This makes SILT Core relevant to DID/VC, ZK, capability systems, DAO governance, AI-agent systems, legal workflows, digital commerce, and institutional coordination without requiring any single implementation path.
Cryptographic and programmable systems
Cryptographic systems are powerful because they can verify control, signatures, execution, and state.
But control is not the same as authority.
A wallet signature proves that a key approved something.
A smart contract proves that execution followed code.
A multisig proves that a threshold was met.
A token vote proves that a voting rule was satisfied.
None of these necessarily proves that the action was taken in the right capacity, under the right mandate, within scope, or with authority still active.
This matters across Bitcoin, Ethereum, DAO governance, digital commerce, programmable settlement, and wallet-based workflows.
SILT Core does not change Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any other cryptographic system.
It provides an authority grammar that tools, wallets, protocols, and governance systems may adopt where authority needs to be explicit before action.
AI systems
Modern AI systems increasingly operate as delegated participants within digital environments.
They schedule actions, execute transactions, manage information flows, initiate workflows, interact with institutional systems, and may create downstream actions through other tools or agents.
As these systems become more agentic, the central question is no longer only what they can do.
The deeper question is:
Under what authority are they acting?
Most digital infrastructure can represent identities, accounts, credentials, or permissions. It rarely models the deeper structure of lawful action: capacity, mandate, consent, delegation, reliance, and revocation.
SILT Core explores how these authority relationships can be expressed as machine-readable primitives.
An agent with a wallet is not the same thing as an agent with standing.
What SILT Core is not
- Not a wallet, identity app, or credential issuer
- Not a blockchain protocol or chain-specific framework
- Not a token model, DAO toolkit, or governance platform
- Not a replacement for DID, VC, zCap, or other identity standards
- Not a legaltech-only product
- Not a replacement for legal advice
- Not a universal law code or claim that code is law
Status
- v0.1 has been released as the initial public specification and framing layer
- v0.1 establishes the initial semantic layer, core primitives, machine-readable schemas, threat model, misuse-case test vectors, and an experimental reference consent validator
- The reference consent validator is non-normative and does not constrain future v0.2 schema design
- v0.2 is being planned
- Candidate v0.2 areas include structured authority claims, expanded primitive definitions, revocation semantics, validation logic, AI-agent execution contexts, legal and governance workflow examples, digital commerce examples, DID/VC interoperability mapping, and plural authority-source modelling
Open infrastructure
SILT Core is developed as open semantic infrastructure.
Core specifications, schemas, threat models, and documentation are intended to remain publicly accessible so they can be adopted, tested, criticised, and extended across ecosystems.
Downstream implementations, assurance methods, certification layers, and validation services may evolve separately from the open core.
The public grammar is open. The full architecture may include additional models, implementation pathways, and assurance layers beyond this repository.
Links
SILT Core is currently being developed as an open specification-first framework. Further work is underway to refine the semantic layer, expand interoperability mappings, and explore downstream implementation pathways.