Federation Bootstrap

Federation bootstrap is the first-recognition workflow between two sovereigns. It lets an operator review another sovereign’s public trust material, preview a direct-recognition treaty, and then explicitly decide whether to issue it.

This workflow uses existing protocol surfaces. It does not create automatic trust, transitive trust, or a global registry.

Roles

Role	Meaning
Acceptor	The sovereign that will sign the recognition treaty.
Issuer	The sovereign being recognized by the acceptor.

The acceptor operator must control an operator signing key trusted by the acceptor Network Authority. The issuer only needs to expose public trust material during bootstrap.

Review Only

Use --dry-run to fetch and validate public material without issuing a treaty:

genesis-mesh federation bootstrap \
  --acceptor https://acceptor.example.org \
  --issuer https://issuer.example.org \
  --dry-run

The command checks:

• /healthz

• /readyz

• /genesis

• /sovereign.json

• /recognition-policy when configured

• /connectome.json

It also confirms that /genesis and /sovereign.json agree on the sovereign ID and Network Authority public key.

Issue a Treaty

To issue the treaty, pass the acceptor config and confirm the prompt:

genesis-mesh federation bootstrap \
  --acceptor https://acceptor.example.org \
  --issuer https://issuer.example.org \
  --acceptor-config ./acceptor.toml \
  --role service:maintainer \
  --claim proof=federation-bootstrap \
  --validity-hours 24

For automation, add --yes:

genesis-mesh federation bootstrap \
  --acceptor https://acceptor.example.org \
  --issuer https://issuer.example.org \
  --acceptor-config ./acceptor.toml \
  --role service:maintainer \
  --claim proof=federation-bootstrap \
  --validity-hours 24 \
  --yes

After issue, the command verifies the trust path through /connectome/trust-path. If the trust path is not active, the command fails instead of reporting a successful bootstrap.

Evidence Output

Use --evidence to write a redacted review and issue summary:

genesis-mesh federation bootstrap \
  --acceptor https://acceptor.example.org \
  --issuer https://issuer.example.org \
  --acceptor-config ./acceptor.toml \
  --role service:maintainer \
  --claim proof=federation-bootstrap \
  --evidence ./federation-bootstrap-evidence.json \
  --yes

The evidence file contains endpoint, sovereign ID, public key prefixes, preflight status, treaty preview, treaty ID, and trust-path result. It must not contain private keys, invite tokens, local DB files, or operator secrets.

What This Does Not Prove

Federation bootstrap proves that the workflow can review and connect two sovereigns. It does not by itself prove external adoption.

For v0.18.0 adoption evidence, the issuer must be controlled by a named non-maintainer operator using their own keys, policy, database, endpoint, and infrastructure.