The target open network

This page describes what BATHRON is being built toward. It is TARGET NETWORK: with the exception explicitly marked below, none of it is deployed today.

Status & claims prevails over this page for anything about the present.

What the target network looks like

• A public, open network.
• Several independent Consensus Operators, none of whom chooses markets, providers or assets.
• Open Consensus-Operator admission, once the Sybil model and the economic conditions are validated.
• Several independent Settlement Providers, several Clearing Providers, several Liquidity Providers.
• Several competing applications and interfaces.
• No listing committee. No protocol-imposed matching engine. No privileged provider.
• Several providers may serve the same instrument or market.
• A provider may disappear without removing the protocol or the instrument.
• Users choose their application, their provider and their counterparty.

What is true today

Application building is already open: anyone can build an application or propose a settlement flow without a listing committee, and nothing in consensus registers or approves one.

Consensus-Operator admission is not open. The current operator set is run by the project while the open-admission threat model is worked out. That is the single largest gap between today and the target, and it is deliberate.

The invariants that will not change

Whatever admission mechanism is eventually chosen, these hold:

1. One Consensus Operator, one vote. Sybil resistance is counted per operator identity, never per node or per masternode.
2. No operator chooses what settles. Operators order and finalise; they do not curate.
3. No privileged provider. The protocol publishes facts about identities; it never ranks them.
4. Admission opens only when the cost of acquiring a threatening share is understood and acceptable — not when the code merely permits it.

Open design points

The exact admission mechanism is OPEN DESIGN. It is not decided, and this documentation will not pretend otherwise. What is settled is the goal and the invariants above; what is not settled is how identities are admitted, priced and bounded.

Related open points, none of them defects:

• how the expected committee size should be set for an open network;
• how the value at risk within a finality window should be bounded;
• what economic sizing makes a one-third share prohibitively expensive.

See Open-network hardening for the arithmetic that constrains any answer.