groundnet — a federation protocol for shared, re-validated remediation

Share the fixes that actually worked — verified, never taken on trust.

groundnet lets independent autonomous-operations agents exchange distilled, outcome-verified remediation knowledge. Every shared fix is stripped of your estate, signed by a pseudonym, and re-proven locally before anyone acts on it.

share the distillate, not the trace · subordinate, not authority · signed, not asserted

One estate learns from its own incidents.
A network of them learns from everyone's — safely.

A single agent only ever sees its own estate. A network of governed agents, each contributing remediations that were verified to actually work, learns far faster than any one of them could alone — the way a security community pools attack signals, but for remediation.

The hard part is doing it safely. groundnet is the set of decisions that make it safe: share the distillate, not the trace. Hostnames, topology, and raw incidents never leave. Only the generalized unit — this alert-class → this diagnosis → this operation-class → this verified outcome — is shared, and only when a machine confirmed it worked.

A mesh of equal peer nodes, each grounding into a shared baseline — no central hub.

From one incident to shared, re-earned trust.

Verify it locally

An agent resolves an incident, and a mechanical, LLM-free verifier confirms the fix actually did what it predicted — the agent never grades its own homework.

verifier: mechanical · verdict: clean

Distill & de-identify

The estate layer is stripped. What remains is a generalized unit: alert-class, diagnosis, operation-class, and the verified outcome — nothing that points back at you.

no hosts · no addresses · no raw traces

Sign & log

The unit is signed by a stable pseudonym and recorded in a public, append-only, multi-witness transparency log. Reputation follows the keypair, never a name.

sigstore · certificate-transparency · not a blockchain

Re-graduate on the next estate

A peer receives it as a hint. It passes that peer's own policy gate and re-validates against that peer's own verified outcomes before it earns any local trust.

✓ federated graduation

Trust is non-transferable — every estate re-earns it. No unit, and no reputation, can make another agent act.

The whole design is a safety argument.

Invariant · subordinate

Subordinate, not authority

An imported unit is a hint that passes your own governance first — access-list, never-auto floor, mode chokepoint, local verification. No one, not even the author, can make your agent act.

Invariant · pseudonymous

Pseudonymous, not identified

Contributions are signed by a stable keypair. Reputation accrues to the pseudonym; no real-world or estate identity ever leaves the instance.

Invariant · transparency

A signed log, not a blockchain

Append-only, multi-witness, tamper-evident provenance — the Certificate-Transparency / Sigstore model. groundnet needs no global consensus, so it uses no chain and no token.

Invariant · verified · off by default

Verified-outcome, opt-in

You share a fix only when a mechanical verifier confirmed it, and only after an operator turns federation on. Absent configuration fails closed to sharing nothing.

What groundnet is not.

Not federated learning

No weights or gradients cross the wire — only symbolic, human-auditable artifacts.

Not a data dump

Members are authenticated, contributions signed. Nothing sensitive is required to take part.

Not a blockchain

No chain, no token, no on-chain vote. A signed log, because there is no single truth to agree on.

Not a central authority

No server decides what's true. Each consumer re-validates locally; the log records what was said.

A stable envelope. A versioned payload. Six invariants.

groundnet v0 freezes the shape of the exchange so a node can be born compatible instead of retrofitted. The envelope — identity, signature, transparency proof — is stable; the payload evolves.

The shareable unit carries a generalized diagnosis, an operation-class, and a mechanically-verified outcome — and nothing that identifies your estate. It's specified in the open, and archived with a DOI.

Sigstore / Rekor in-toto Certificate Transparency Apache-2.0

Read the spec →

payload · wisdom/0

{
  "v":           "wisdom/0",
  "alert_class": "service-down/http",
  "diagnosis":   "process exited; port unbound; no upstream implicated",
  "op_class":    "restart-service",
  "reversible":  true,
  "blast_class": "single-host",
  "outcome": {
    "verifier": "mechanical",   // never self-graded
    "verdict":  "clean",
    "n":        7            // independent confirmations
  }
  // no hosts · no addresses · no estate identity
}

The contract is here. The network is next.

groundnet is contract-first: the shape is frozen so the network can grow into it. Read the spec, cite it, or build a node that speaks it.

Cite this

Papadopoulos, K. (2026). groundnet: a federation protocol for sharing re-validated remediation wisdom between sovereign autonomous-operations instances. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21466523

One estate learns from its own incidents.A network of them learns from everyone's — safely.