Federation without exposure
Circles
A Circle is a graph with an owner. Circles federate the way sovereign things must: capabilities cross the boundary, Rolodexes never do.
Every serious relationship graph has an owner with a reason it cannot be public: a fund’s portfolio map, a family office’s counterparties, a university’s donor and licensing web, a government office’s industry contacts. The standard tooling offers them a false choice — expose the graph to make it useful, or keep it private and unqueryable. Circles are the third option.
What a Circle can say without saying who
A federated query answers: “someone inside this Circle, within two trusted hops, can satisfy this intent — and will consider consenting.” Membership is never enumerated. Each reveal costs one consent from the person whose edge it crosses, exactly as inside a single graph — the veil does not weaken at the boundary; the boundary is where it matters most.
Scoped grants, not merged graphs
Federation is a grant: “allow verified companies of Circle A to query capabilities in Circle B” — scoped to capability classes, revocable, logged. An identity is defined by exactly one graph and borrowed by everyone else, the same federation rule the estate enforces across its thirty-graph directory at flashyos.com: two graphs defining one identity is the merge that has no resolution, so it is refused outright.
The first Circles
| Circle | Why it is the shape of the wedge |
|---|---|
| A venture fund | The densest capability graph in private hands, and an owner whose succession problem — partners’ relationship intelligence — is priced in carried interest. See the fund use case. |
| A family office | Multi-generational by definition; succession is the product, discovery is the bonus. |
| A university | Capability at industrial scale, routed today through a handful of tech-transfer officers — the tech-transfer case. |
| The founding estate | The Gord & Flashy estate is Circle zero: the graphs, corridors and companies Magician was built inside — captive adoption, counted honestly as validation, never as market evidence. |
Circles arrive at Stage 2, after the single-graph loop proves itself — an order of operations that is itself doctrine: federation multiplies whatever the loop is, so the loop goes first.