_kernel.yaml

# The Filecoin Kernel inventory: the canonical taxonomy ProPGF prioritizes against.
# Evolves via reviewed PR. Validated against _kernel_schema.json. Fields: id, tier, category,
# sub_category, function, value. Irreplaceable + Essential are the in-scope tiers.
#
# `id` is the stable join key: every manifest SLA points at one via `kernel_id`, coverage joins
# on it, and it is IMMUTABLE once merged. A rename is a new id plus a migration, never an edit
# in place -- tests/test_kernel.py::test_kernel_ids_are_frozen enforces that. Ids are also kept
# disjoint from SLA function_ids and team names, so a bare slug is never ambiguous.
entries:
  - id: fvm-execution-engine
    tier: irreplaceable
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "VM & Programmability"
    function: "FVM execution engine (deterministic WASM actor execution)"
    value: "Shared execution engine that produces gas spent; a divergence here forks execution across all clients. Co-maintained by Lotus and Forest."
  - id: builtin-actor-suite
    tier: irreplaceable
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "VM & Programmability"
    function: "Storage market / miner / power / system / reward / datacap actors"
    value: "Storage market, miner, power and reward logic at protocol level. FIPs may propose modifications. Co-maintained by Lotus and Forest."
  - id: proving-subsystem
    tier: irreplaceable
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Proving"
    function: "Proving subsystem - PoRep (StackedDRG sealing), WinningPoSt/WindowPoSt, crypto primitives (BLST, bellperson, neptune)"
    value: "Storage proofs make physical storage trustless and gate block production and sector onboarding; a regression halts proving network-wide."
  - id: p2p-networking-stack
    tier: irreplaceable
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Networking"
    function: "GossipSub propagation, Kademlia DHT peer/content discovery, transports (TCP/QUIC) + NAT traversal"
    value: "Blocks must propagate within ~30s; precondition for propagation, discovery and every connection - failure threatens consensus."
  - id: distributed-randomness-beacon
    tier: irreplaceable
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Randomness"
    function: "Distributed randomness beacon (threshold-BLS, League of Entropy)"
    value: "If the beacon stops, the chain halts instantly and (without months of R&D) irrecoverably. Governance and on-call support required."
  - id: consensus-validation-client
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Ledger & Consensus"
    function: "Consensus/validation client: fork-choice, state validation, message pool"
    value: "Most widely-deployed full node with broadest feature coverage; the client most of the network currently runs."
  - id: chain-sync-state
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Ledger & Consensus"
    function: "Chain sync & state management (snapshot bootstrap, heaviest-chain, RPC)"
    value: "A correct, fast sync path keeps nodes in consensus rather than forking. Read/write surface used by miners, wallets, explorers, RPC providers and FEVM dApps."
  - id: forest-full-node
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Ledger & Consensus"
    function: "Independent Rust full node (sync, validation, RPC, snapshot export)"
    value: "Second production client bounds the blast radius of a Lotus bug - client diversity is a security property; ~30% lighter footprint, efficient snapshots, more performant Eth RPC."
  - id: block-production
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Block Production (mining)"
    function: "Block production - WinningPoSt leader election & block assembly"
    value: "Without miners running WinningPoSt there is no block production; the chain stops advancing. Majority of block producers run this (70%+)."
  - id: sealing-pipeline
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Block Production (mining)"
    function: "Sealing pipeline (PC1/PC2/Commit, SupraSeal, Snap)"
    value: "How SPs onboard committed capacity and data onto the network."
  - id: proving-scheduler
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Block Production (mining)"
    function: "Proving scheduler - WindowPoSt deadlines + WinningPoSt eligibility"
    value: "Recurring liveness proofs and block production; missed windows mean fault penalties and power loss."
  - id: venus-pooled-mining
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Block Production (mining)"
    function: "Pooled block production (sophon-miner) + distributed sealing cluster (Damocles)"
    value: "Independent block-winning and sealing path for Venus SPs - SP-side client diversity. Dominant stack for China-based SPs (~15% of miners)."
  - id: evm-eam-actors
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "VM & Programmability"
    function: "EVM + EAM actor"
    value: "Enables smart contract programmability. Requires keeping shared VM/actors/finality libraries consistent across clients through upgrades. Co-maintained by Lotus, Forest and Fil-B."
  - id: randomness-relays
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Randomness"
    function: "High-SLA HTTP + gossipsub relays & quarterly resharing"
    value: "Keeps randomness reachable and the threshold group healthy as members rotate. Infrastructure and on-call support required."
  - id: validated-snapshots
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Mainnet Infrastructure"
    function: "Validated snapshot generation & hosting (~2h cadence)"
    value: "New/recovering nodes cannot sync from genesis in reasonable time; fresh snapshots keep operators off bad forks. Forest produces them; Lotus can, with more resources."
  - id: bootstrap-seed-nodes
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Mainnet Infrastructure"
    function: "Operation of seed nodes a new peer contacts on startup"
    value: "Without reachable bootstrap nodes a fresh node 'starts and just sits there'."
  - id: groth16-params
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Mainnet Infrastructure"
    function: "Serving Groth16 trusted-setup parameters to every node and SP (go-paramfetch)"
    value: "The network cannot generate/verify proofs without these present and unaltered; impacts all nodes (verifiers) and miners (sealers and provers)."
  - id: calibnet-upgrade-rehearsal
    tier: essential
    category: "Coordination & Hardening"
    sub_category: "Testnets"
    function: "Mainnet-realistic testnet for rehearsing every network-version upgrade"
    value: "Required rehearsal path that catches consensus-breaking issues before mainnet."
  - id: infra-stewardship
    tier: essential
    category: "Coordination & Hardening"
    sub_category: "Shared infra stewardship"
    function: "Vendor/access governance, runbooks, Slack/Workspace/GitHub stewardship"
    value: "Connective infra the ecosystem relies on; reduces systemic and key-person risk."
  - id: calibnet-miners
    tier: essential
    category: "Coordination & Hardening"
    sub_category: "Testnets - miners"
    function: "Calibnet miners (Lotus-Miner / Curio / Venus) for upgrade rehearsal"
    value: "Makes Calibnet a faithful rehearsal; degraded coverage if missing."
  - id: calibnet-explorer
    tier: essential
    category: "Coordination & Hardening"
    sub_category: "Testnets - explorer"
    function: "Explorer for Calibration testnet"
    value: "Supports rehearsal and analysis (need at least one)."
  - id: network-monitoring-ir
    tier: essential
    category: "Coordination & Hardening"
    sub_category: "Network data & monitoring"
    function: "Monitoring, archival access and incident response (Grafana, OpsGenie, IR coordination)"
    value: "Observability and rapid response/recovery through upgrades and outages. Critical for network security; any provider can populate it."
  - id: open-network-datasets
    tier: essential
    category: "Coordination & Incentives"
    sub_category: "Network data & monitoring"
    function: "Aggregates Filecoin on/off-chain data into open, queryable datasets and dashboards"
    value: "Prepares and presents network KPI metrics; free, vendor-neutral network data anyone can reuse - no rebuilding their own pipeline."
  - id: chain-etl-spacescope
    tier: essential
    category: "Coordination & Incentives"
    sub_category: "Network data & monitoring"
    function: "Chain ETL, indexing, normalization & parameter matching (BigQuery, Spacescope API)"
    value: "Free, vendor-neutral chain data anyone can reuse - no rebuilding their own pipeline."
  - id: chain-etl-indexing
    tier: essential
    category: "Coordination & Incentives"
    sub_category: "Network data & monitoring"
    function: "Chain ETL and indexing"
    value: ""
  - id: mainnet-explorer
    tier: essential
    category: "UX/DX"
    sub_category: "Explorers and Tooling"
    function: "Mainnet block explorer (Lotus archive, indexing, NV maintenance)"
    value: "Primary accessibility/observability surface for users and SPs."
  - id: network-documentation
    tier: essential
    category: "UX/DX"
    sub_category: "Explorers and Tooling"
    function: "Network-wide documentation along with source code availability and source control"
    value: "Onboarding to the ecosystem."
  - id: content-routing-ads
    tier: essential
    category: "Storage Market Middleware"
    sub_category: "Content routing"
    function: "System to advertise CID content records"
    value: "An adopted solution for content routing is essential. The network doesn't halt, but it stops being a useful storage network."
  - id: dealmaking-pdp-retrieval
    tier: essential
    category: "Blockchain Core & Physical Storage"
    sub_category: "Block Production (mining)"
    function: "Deal-making + PDP + HTTP retrieval"
    value: "Composable deal interface and hot-storage proving - the demand-side onramp for SPs."

  # ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  # IMPORTANT tier. The first entries at this tier; the schema has always permitted it.
  # Both adopt a requirement the committee already stewards in
  # funding_model_static.requirement_stewards (status: approved, fds_tier: important,
  # from_inventory: true) — they are not new judgements. sub_category is the committee's own
  # wording verbatim; category collapses to the nearest enum member, since _kernel.yaml has no
  # "UX / DX - Structural DeFi".
  # ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  - id: stablecoin-settlement
    tier: important
    category: "UX/DX"
    sub_category: "Stablecoin & yield"
    function: "Overcollateralized stablecoin settlement rail for storage and service payments (USDFC)"
    value: >-
      Storage and retrieval priced in a volatile native token cannot be quoted or invoiced across a
      multi-month term; a stable unit of account on FVM is what lets paid storage, Filecoin Pay
      rails and onchain-cloud services be sold to enterprises. If it depegs or its liquidity dries
      up, onchain payments lose their unit of account. Committee steward: Secured Finance
      (requirement usdfc-overcollateralised-stablecoin).
  - id: ecosystem-coordination
    tier: important
    category: "UX/DX"
    sub_category: "Public-goods coordination"
    function: "Technical program coordination, ecosystem technical support and discretionary grant administration across kernel teams"
    value: >-
      The kernel is maintained by ~15 independent teams with no shared employer. Coordination is
      what sequences cross-team upgrades, gives SPs and integrators a support path, and funds gaps
      too small or too urgent for a funding round. Without it, gaps surface only when something
      breaks. Committee steward: Open Impact Foundation - FilPonto Cell (requirement
      public-goods-coordination-rpc-indexers-wallet-oracle).