§ 03 · Tier specification
The timed-ledger spectrum.
One micro-ledger primitive runs at every horizon. The tier is a triple of (retention, anchoring, signature) — changing the tuple changes the use-case, not the codebase.
Ephemeral
CPU cache
Session
RAM / DA blob
Operational
SSD
Compliance
cold storage
Eternal
tape / permaweb
§ 03.02
Promotion. Demotion. Crypto-shred.
Three transitions are first-class. Promotion takes a short-lived ledger and durably persists it; demotion truncates retention; crypto-shred destroys per-record keys so personal data goes dark while the Merkle path remains verifiable.
// Take the head of a T1 session ledger, re-sign every entry with Falcon,
// and emit a permanent T3 anchor. Existing T1 Ed25519 signatures remain
// valid for offline replay of session history; the durable copy uses PQC.
fn promote_t1_to_t3(src: LedgerHandle, dst_spec: TierSpec) -> Result[Promotion, Error] {
assert(dst_spec.sig_scheme == Falcon1024);
let head = src.head();
let checkpoint = build_checkpoint(src, head);
let dst = open_ledger(dst_spec);
dst.append_attested(checkpoint, hatp_host_key());
anchor_now(dst, AnchorPolicy::MerklePermanent);
Ok(Promotion { src_head: head, dst_head: dst.head() })
} // Destroy the per-record AES key in the vault. The header (with its hash
// chain & signature) survives; the payload becomes unrecoverable bytes.
fn shred_entry(handle: LedgerHandle, cid: bytes32) -> Result[ShredReceipt, Error] {
let entry_key = vault_key_for(cid);
vault_destroy(entry_key);
handle.mark_shredded(cid, ts_now());
Ok(ShredReceipt { cid, ts_ms: ts_now(), proof: handle.head_attestation() })
} § 03.03
Where the tiers meet the law.
T3 · DORA
ICT incident audit logs.
EU regulation 2022/2554 mandates append-only, cryptographically-signed audit logs with multi-year retention and TEE/HSM signing. T3 is the named implementation.
T3 / T4 · EU AI Act Art. 50
AI provenance records.
From 2026-08-02, tamper-evident records for AI-generated content with multi-year retention. Per-record crypto-shred preserves erasure rights at scale.
T1 · GDPR Art. 25
Data-minimisation by default.
Session state that auto-expires is state you are not retaining. Privacy-by-design is the storage policy, not a process annotation.
T0 · GDPR Art. 17
Right to erasure, structurally.
T0 ledgers are destroyed by elapsed time. There is nothing to erase because nothing was kept.