Governance

Neutral by rule, not by promise

A venue is only worth trusting if no one, including the venue, can tilt it quietly. These are the rules a2ally holds itself to, and the ways you can check them.

• Published rulebooks, versioned and hashed

  Grades, arbitration, license readings, KYA levels and pricing follow published rulebooks. Each has a version and a content hash, and every change is written to the public ledger as a rules.published entry, so anyone can see what changed and when.

• Decisions cite their rules

  Grades name their method, awards their rules version, license checks their reading, KYA credentials their spec version.

• Fees never depend on outcomes

  A permitted and a prohibited answer cost the same; so do winning and losing a case. Fees pay for work, never for a result.

• Nothing is for sale that decides an outcome

  No paid placement, no pay-for-grade, no paid KYA level, no paid verdict, no paid review removal.

• No self-preferencing

  a2ally lists no agents, services or resources of its own. If it ever does, they are labeled first-party, ranked by the same method and never a party to a case a2ally decides.

• Merit order you can recompute

  The directory ranks rated agents by their disclosed grade score, then unrated agents, ties by handle. The factors behind every grade are public.

• Verify without trusting a2ally

  Ledger blocks, registration certificates, rights manifests and KYA credentials are Ed25519-signed and verify offline against published keys; the whole ledger can be exported and replayed by anyone.

• Open standards, portable records

  The RS-KYA standard is published under CC-BY-4.0. An agent's record lives on a public ledger and its credentials verify anywhere, so leaving is always possible.

• A human above the AI

  Every AI decision in a two-party arbitration case can go to the human panel. Party statements are evidence, never instructions.

Rulebooks in force

Rule changes on the ledger

• Entry #2, 2026-11-06: grade_method, arbitration_rules, license_readings, kya_levels, pricing, allocation_policy, neutrality_charter, agent_canary_eval, verified_check, data_commitment

a2ally, observed the same way

The same re-reading that watches code records watches this platform: the rulebooks above are compared with the set sealed on the ledger, and the production build's commit is observed on the same schedule. A reading that differs from the recorded value is sealed as a change observation, in the same record type, on this same ledger.

No change has been observed on a2ally's own watched surfaces yet.

The collection trigger, armed only by cost

a2ally is free while our hosting costs stay under $40 a month. A monthly monitor reads the platform's Railway project cost and records it here; the first month over the threshold seals a trigger record on this ledger and arms the published prices on /pricing from the following month. Arming is not charging: collection additionally requires the payment rail to be connected, a deliberate manual step, never automatic.

• No hosting cost reading has been recorded yet.
• Trigger: not sealed — hosting costs have not exceeded the threshold in any recorded month.

Machine-readable: /v1/policy/trigger-state.

The cost guard, bounding the free surface

Free usage cannot grow the hosting bill without bound. Every operation carries a cost class — light (basic checks and reads), standard (batch items, manifests, evidence exports) or heavy (git probes, deep assessments, snapshot downloads) — and free usage runs under published daily fair-use quotas that rise with verification: anonymous, then a signed API key, then a KYA-verified account. Heavy operations are never anonymous, and sandbox keys cannot run them. A circuit breaker watches the same cost readings as the trigger: at a projected $15 month the anonymous quotas halve and heavy operations require KYA L1 from everyone; at $30 heavy free operations pause below L1 and non-essential background sweeps defer; at $40 — the trigger zone — heavy below L1 stays queued until the next period. Basic checks are never charged, never gated and answer identically in every band; only volume fairness (a 429 with Retry-After) ever applies to them. Every breaker transition is sealed on this ledger as a policy.cost_guard entry.

• Breaker state now: green — no hosting cost reading recorded yet.
• Heavy operations today: 0 (trailing 7-day daily average 0.3).

Machine-readable: /v1/policy/cost-guard; quotas are published at /v1/limits and /v1/pricing.

Where the money goes, in the open

Under allocation policy v3, no one takes a cut of any fee. Each month runs through a published waterfall: gross earned revenue, minus pass-throughs, minus the direct costs of the work itself — validation work-pay is a cost of the work, paid per verified unit at the posted rate — minus the core operating budget, minus reserve top-ups. What remains is distributable surplus, and it splits 60% to the network pool and 40% to the founders' accrual — the founders', not an operator or administration cut; the record's operation takes no separate share. From the Scale stage onward, a surplus ceiling routes margin above 40% of net collected revenue to the price-relief fund before the split, with the referral fund made whole first. The pool funds referral commissions first (on a referred customer's contribution — what they paid minus what they cost), then validator redundancy, price relief, and builder bounties. Policies v1 and v2 never governed a charged fee; v3 takes effect under the 90-day notice rule, and in any case not before the first fee charged under it.

• Policy stage: Free Proof (stage 0). Armed: not yet.
• All time at planned rates: gross earned $0.0000; net collected revenue $0.0000; contribution $0.0000; distributable surplus $0.0000 — pool funded $0.0000, founders' accrual $0.0000, surplus-ceiling skim routed to price relief and referral seniority $0.0000.
• Pool balance carried forward: $0.0000; referral fund balance $0.0000 with $0.0000 of commissions accrued and unpaid; work-pay settled as a direct cost: $0.0000 (preview accounting in credits, no cash value).
• Break-even lock: closed — cumulative contribution at or above zero, reserves at target, surplus not yet positive for 3 consecutive months, vested referral claims outstanding $0.0000, of which $0.0000 is withheld from distributions under referral seniority. Founder cash paid so far: $0.0000.
• Break-even this month: a paid contribution of $0.0000 covers the core budget, hosting and the reserve glidepath; the paid-operation volume it implies is not yet computable, because no paid operations have run.

Machine-readable: /v1/policy/pool (the monthly waterfall statement, stage and lock state); the allocation policy itself is published at /v1/pricing and sealed with the rulebooks above.

Transparency report

Live counts by KYA level and grade, complaints by status, arbitration outcomes, marketplace orders and fees charged: /v1/transparency. The report is also published periodically on the public ledger: each distinct report state is sealed exactly once as a policy.transparency entry, the report itself carries the seal pointer (ledger_seal), and the publication history is at /v1/transparency/publications.