The System
STOA is the engine underneath every case on this site: a small library of executable parts from which a village, a company, a cooperative or a state is assembled.
Everything published here rests on one claim, and the claim is not an argument. It is a machine you can attempt to break.
What it is
STOA is a library of twenty-five executable parts, registries, assemblies, treasuries, budgets, time locks, courts, work orders, charter registers, and a way of wiring them together. An institution is a graph over those parts. The same graph is three things at once: the design somebody edits, the deployment manifest, and, once deployed, the address book of a running institution. There is no model that can drift from what actually runs, because there is no separate model.
Sixteen of the parts are self-enforcing: their rule is checked in code against state the contract controls, so breaking it is not forbidden but impossible. Nine are attested: they record a claim about the world outside, which somebody asserts and anybody may doubt. Every part carries its mark from the design surface into the deployed system. You always know which of your institution's rules can be broken.
The demonstration is an invitation to break it
A tour would prove nothing. What runs at /stoa is a small state, already sealed: a registry, an assembly, a timelock, a treasury and a budget, with administrative power transferred to the system on the day it opened. You are handed the founder's key, the same key that created every contract in it, and asked to help yourself.
Seven ways in have been tried already, and the machine refuses each one at the transaction level rather than by policy:
| What you attempt | What comes back |
|---|---|
| Set an appropriation directly | Only admin |
| Grant yourself operator rights on the treasury | Only owner |
| Point the assembly at a timelock you control | Only admin |
| Spend from an unassigned flow | No appropriation line |
| Spend as the treasury's own owner, off-budget | No appropriation line |
| Exceed an appropriation by one unit | Appropriation exceeded |
| Execute a queued decision before its window closes | Appeal window open |
Then do it the constitutional way: propose, vote, wait out the appeal window, and execute, and watch the same action succeed, executed by anyone at all, including you.
Honest labels
The demonstration runs in rehearsal mode: a single operator holds the chain. On such a chain, "the contract guarantees X" means "the operator promises X", and we would rather say so than let you discover it. The guarantees above become adversarially meaningful only on a substrate the participants do not individually control, a public network, or a consortium where each federated organisation validates. The graph is the same in both places; that is the point of the whole design.
The mechanism, its measurements and the reproduction commands are in the papers. If you break something the table above says you cannot, that is the most valuable message this project can receive: [email protected].