acdl/.ciagent/nova-blockchain-exchange/PROJECT.md

Nova Pilot Consumer — Blockchain Stock Exchange

Milestone: v1.26 — Live Pilot Estate Activation Git: https://git.cloudinit.dev/continuous-intelligence/nova-blockchain-exchange Local clone: /root/nova-blockchain-exchange Role: The first real consumer estate. A stock exchange built on a homegrown blockchain, offering equities trading (pilot scope). The consumer repo owns the app code + contract.yaml; the Nova platform (acdl repo) provides the deploy workflow, policy engine, and attestation gates.

---

Vision / Core Value

A self-contained securities-trading exchange where every order, match, and settlement is recorded as an immutable transaction on a homegrown Proof-of-Authority (PoA) blockchain. The pilot demonstrates that Nova's autonomous infrastructure can take a real consumer estate from contract to production — apply, attest, record — without an operator in the loop of normal operations.

North Star Alignment

• Strategic Objective #1 (production-grade zero-touch operations): this estate is the first real consumer; the pilot activates the autonomy claim beyond internal demos.
• Strategic Objective #2 (provable trust): every apply decision + attestation lands in the Decision Ledger; the settlement-finality kyverno-json policy (IDEATE) makes trust a policy artifact.
• Strategic Objective #3 (compounding ROI): unblocks the three Post-Pilot targets (Touchless Resolution ≥99%, Human Escalation <0.1%, AI Decision Accuracy ≥99.5%) — the denominators activate when this estate runs.

Domain Boundaries

• This repo owns: the blockchain (consensus, blocks, transactions), the order-matching engine, the settlement service, the contract.yaml that declares the infrastructure, and the consumer-side deploy workflow invocation (uses: acdl/.github/workflows/deploy.yml@v1.25).
• The platform (acdl) repo owns: the deploy workflow, the policy engine (kyverno-json), the contract resolver, the adapter, the confidence signal, the HITL gates, and the Decision Ledger.

Scope: v1.26 Pilot

• Equities only (bonds, derivatives, options deferred to future milestones — different settlement models).
• Minimal PoA ledger — append-only blocks, single validator (pilot), T+1 settlement finality = block commit. No multi-validator BFT.
• Homegrown chain — authored as part of this repo, not deployed on Ethereum/Solana/Hyperledger.

Anti-Goals (v1.26)

1. Not a general-purpose blockchain platform — purpose-built for securities settlement in the pilot.
2. Not multi-validator consensus — single validator for the pilot.
3. Not bonds/derivatives/options — equities only this milestone.
4. Not a replacement for the Nova platform — this is a consumer of Nova, not a fork.

Key Decisions (v1.26 — established in SPECIFY, refined in CLARIFY)

ID	Decision	Rationale	Affects
D-200	Pilot scope = equities only	Bonds/derivatives/options have very different settlement models; equities (T+1) is the simplest to demonstrate the Nova platform's policy gates over a real estate.	Phase count; requirement scope.
D-201	Homegrown PoA ledger (single validator)	Minimal viable chain for a pilot; settlement finality = block commit. Multi-validator BFT is a future milestone.	Blockchain core design.
D-202	Consumer repo = nova-blockchain-exchange (Gitea)	New repo under continuous-intelligence org; tracked as 2nd CIAgent project.	Multi-project config.
D-203	AWS account = 581513795199 (existing)	Reuse the bootstrapped account; state bucket + outbox table created in pre-run Workstream A3.	Env JSON binding.
D-204	D-083 (S3 Object Lock/JWS) stays deferred	The SQLite hash-chain + DynamoDB outbox is the pilot's audit record. Tamper-evidence is a future milestone.	Audit ledger scope.
D-205	Cold-only metrics sufficient (D-126)	No hot ops dashboard in the pilot; cold SQLite store + PowerBI export.	Metrics pipeline.

Constraints

• The consumer repo's deploy MUST go through deploy.yml@v1.25 (the reusable workflow) — no direct terraform apply bypassing the platform's policy + attestation gates.
• The contract.yaml MUST validate against schemas/contract.schema.json.
• The homegrown blockchain MUST be deterministic (same inputs → same block) — it is automation, not AI (NORTH_STAR Objective #2 tenet).

Context

• The Nova platform (acdl repo) completed v1.25 (kyverno-json Unified Policy Engine). The swappable PolicyEngine adapter is in place.
• The AWS bootstrap (S3 state bucket + DynamoDB outbox) was re-run in the pre-run (Workstream A3) — the platform components exist.
• The consumer repo was created on Gitea (Workstream A4) and cloned to /root/nova-blockchain-exchange.