Provenance Layer

Protean provenance is built around a simple operating principle: private science, public proof.

Raw sequences, unpublished hypotheses, selected batches, scoring internals, and unfiled invention material stay in the private scientific vault. Public records expose cryptographic commitments, redacted lineage, artifact hashes, disclosure state, and future anchoring references.

Three Layers

Private Scientific Vault

The private layer keeps raw sequences, salts, internal papers, assay details, private experiment planning, and unfiled invention material local. This is the scientific work product layer, not a public publication surface.

Public Artifact Layer

Public-safe manifests, reviewed papers, lineage graphs, and verification bundles can later be content-addressed on approved artifact storage. The artifact is independently hashable before any anchoring commitment is made.

Base Provenance Registry

Base is the prepared anchoring layer for compact proof data only: object IDs, hashes, commitments, URI digests, lineage references, timestamps, disclosure status, and lifecycle status. It does not store raw peptide sequences, assay files, papers, or large JSON payloads.

Scientific Object Graph

The current public graph treats scientific work as linked objects:

• Candidate
• Hypothesis
• Experiment
• Paper
• Runtime cycle
• Evidence bundle

Candidate families, assay requests, assay results, lineage branches, and collection membership are reserved or planned graph extensions. Collections currently exist as separate public-safe collection manifests rather than graph node types. Runtime cycles and evidence bundles connect into the graph so a verifier can inspect integrity without accessing proprietary details.

Candidate Commitments

Candidate public proofs use salted commitments:

keccak256("PROTEAN_CANDIDATE_COMMITMENT_V1|{candidate_id}|{sequence.upper()}|{private_salt}")

The private salt stays local. This prevents public hashes from becoming a brute-force target for short peptide sequences.

Future Network-Aligned Participation Structures

Provenance may support future protocol research by making selected collection state, artifact integrity, lineage references, lifecycle state, and disclosure state independently verifiable.

That support is infrastructural. Provenance does not commercialize the science; it makes selected public-safe state verifiable while raw science remains private. Any future participation mechanism would be separate from the provenance registry, separately documented, and subject to legal, regulatory, jurisdictional, compliance, scientific, tax, and operational review.

Review Boundary

Public proof does not equal publication. Redaction guard checks, founder review, IP review, and wet-lab review gates sit between private work product and public artifacts.

Candidate assessment Markdown, PDFs, full manifests, and top-ten indexes are private work product by default. Public research surfaces must use reviewed public exports, not raw local paper batches.

Wet-lab integrations remain draft-first. Provider submission, quote acceptance, and result ingestion require explicit review.

What Provenance Proves

It can prove that a specific artifact state existed, was hashed, was linked to a lineage, and was prepared for anchoring.

It does not prove biological activity, therapeutic effect, safety, efficacy, patentability, or experimental validation.