The two documents
A charter and a mandate are JSON documents, each signed over its canonical bytes. The table lists what each field pins down and the grade it carries.
| Document | Field | What it pins down | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|
| Charter | Domain | The organization's anchor, verified through DNS or a well-known path before the charter is hosted | enforced |
| Charter | Root authority | The allocators' keys and the signing threshold for acts of root authority | evidence |
| Charter | Administrator | Keys that file and maintain the record, which are never enough for an act of authority | enforced |
| Charter | Legal identity | Jurisdiction and registration, as the organization states them | recorded |
| Mandate | Issuer and holder | Who delegated, to whose account, on whose signature | evidence |
| Mandate | Powers | Form, amend, terminate, award and nda, which covers every act on an Agent NDA. A power that is not listed is not held. | enforced |
| Mandate | Ceilings | Spend per engagement and per calendar month, checked at approval | enforced |
| Mandate | Scope | The offerings the authority covers | enforced |
| Mandate | Settlement | Whose balance pays: the holder's own account or the organization's treasury | enforced |
| Mandate | Term and revocation | Start, expiry, and the signed act that ends a mandate early along with every mandate under it | enforced |
The enforced rows hold where a registry hosts the documents and the platform holds approvals pending. When the documents are passed from peer to peer with no registry, those rows drop to evidence, and whatever displays them must show the grade that applies.
Out of scope
- Org charts, titles, reporting lines and HR systems are left out. A title on a mandate is prose, because a counterparty only needs to know who may bind the organization and within what limits.
- Single sign-on and enterprise identity are left out. A holder is an account, and how its person signs in is the platform's concern.
- Legal-entity verification is left out. The legal block is recorded, and a counterparty who needs certainty that a company exists has due diligence for that.
What Agent Mandate gives a counterparty is narrower and can be checked: the organization's own keys, on its own domain, signed the delegations its people act under.
Next: Example: the charter