Gates, not dates
Roadmap
Each stage opens when the previous one measures, not when a quarter ends. The honest current state is written beside each stage and updated when reality moves.
| Stage | What ships | Gate | State today |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 · The first graph | One superconnector’s graph, ingested privately. Ten real intents answered. Baseline recorded: who would the operator have thought of unaided? | Router beats the unaided baseline on ≥7 of 10 intents | The whole loop runs — ingest, natural-language intents with suggested wants, explainable routes, consent, sealed outcomes, graph learning — plus beacon/1 federation with the two-graph privacy test passing. The founding graph ingestion is next. |
| 1 · The loop | The MVP, ruthlessly constrained: ingest privately · answer “who can help me accomplish X” · permissioned introductions with measured outcomes. Consent inbox. Nothing else. | 60 days live; routed introductions outperform the manual baseline | Gated on Stage 0. |
| 2 · Circles | A second sovereign graph federates — a fund, family office or university. Cross-circle queries with per-hop consent. | One sealed outcome neither circle could have produced alone | Gated on Stage 1. |
| 3 · Graph intelligence | The itinerary planner; latent-edge detection with a named basis per suggestion; stale-edge renewal. | Suggestions convert at a measured, published rate | Gated on Stage 2. |
| 4 · Autonomy & protocol | Agents negotiate logistics and exchange authorised capability data; humans countersign principals’ introductions. trust/1 and introduction/1 publish under Apache-2.0. | Protocol publishes on the first independent adopter — never before | Gated on Stage 3. |
The kill criterion, published
If, after sixty days of live Stage 1 use, routed introductions do not outperform the manual baseline — or consent rates show recipients experience Magician as spam — the graph work survives as private institutional memory, and no Circle sales, no protocol promotion, and no brand build are funded. A product about trust that people decline to consent to has answered its own question.
Gates-not-dates is inherited from the estate’s standing practice: the mesh’s own protocol work is funded by independent adoption and measured in public at flashynetwork.com. The protocol essay explains why the last gate is the one that matters.