SITP — the Structured Interchange Transfer Protocol — is the neutral record of what agents were authorized to do, what they promised, and what they did. Email moved messages. The web moved pages. SITP moves commitments, and keeps the record.
An agent books a €5,000 trip. The API returns 200 OK. The observability trace is clean. Three weeks later the hotel has no record of the reservation. Every layer did its job, and nobody can prove what was committed, by whom, under what authority.
How an agent reaches a tool, and how agents hand work to one another. Standardized, and ends when the request returns.
What happened during execution: spans, timings, which service called which. Self-reported, editable, useful for debugging.
A durable, cross-party claim about what was promised, with counterparty, authority, scope, and a state that keeps changing long after the request finished.
A neutral layer doesn't ask for trust. It makes verification cheap enough that trust stops being the bottleneck.
Every commitment on SITP is a Staple. It names the parties, the action promised, the authority it was made under, its limits, and its state. The record becomes final when the promisee accepts it. Corrections are new entries, never edits.
A Staple remains relevant long after the tool call is over. A refund approval, a booking, a purchase order — each creates an obligation that may live for months, and the Staple is where that obligation is readable by both sides.
A log answers "what happened?" It does not answer "was this allowed to happen?" Detail and verifiability are different axes. A log can be extremely detailed and still be self-reported, editable, and impossible for an outside party to check without trusting the company that wrote it.
Nothing is edited after the fact. A correction is a new entry that points at the old one.
Each entry carries the hash of the last. Tampering is mechanically detectable, not a matter of opinion.
Illegal transitions are rejected when attempted, not logged and flagged later. An overspend never gets written.
An auditor, a counterparty, or a court checks the chain directly. No account, no export, no cooperation required.
SITP is a record built on the assumption that the party who wrote it might one day be the party being questioned about it.
The world already runs on this sequence. People just rarely see it, the way they rarely see gravity. SITP makes it visible. Commitments inscribed in a neutral layer create accountability. Accountability is scored on the record — a green check or a red X, counting up or counting down — and resolves into reputation. Reputation is how humans and agents orient to one another.
SITP is the record, not the referee.
SITP v1.0 is written as a grammar with thirteen operators and a formal BNF. A commitment is composed, not configured. The same sentence means the same thing on every relay, to every agent, and to every person reading it back a year later.
Lineage: @ gave every person an address · www gave every document one · & ^ ~ ! give every commitment one
The full grammar specification, the emulator, and the developer kit live at staplit.org.
Integrity, existence, and lifecycle of any Staple can be checked by anyone, without credentials. Did it exist, was it altered, what state is it in.
What a Staple says discloses only to role-authorized counterparties. The auditor sees the chain. The parties see the terms.
Staplit's Director of Developer Communications is writing the protocol out in public, one argument at a time. Five parts so far. Read in order.
The stack handles transport, identity, tool calls, and logging. It cannot answer "what did this agent commit to, on whose behalf, and can I prove it later?" A trace is a record of activity, not of accountability. Nobody signed it. The commitment layer doesn't make agents smarter; it makes the record honest by construction.
Read on Medium →When the actor is also the witness, a log is not enough. Two companies' agents disagree on a delivery date and each has a diary entry from a system with every incentive to write itself a favorable account. A commitment record has to be structurally independent: signed by the parties with their own keys, hash-chained, and checkable by a counterparty without an account or special access.
Read on Medium →Call ≠ Trace ≠ Commitment. MCP carries the interaction and observability records the execution; neither defines a durable, cross-party record of what anyone committed to. The API response is not the end of the story. Sometimes it is where the story begins.
Read on Medium →Observable is not accountable. Logs answer what happened; they cannot answer whether it was authorized. Four properties a log lacks by default: append-only, hash-chained, legality enforced at write time, and verification without credentials.
Read on Medium →Authority is leased, not owned: a named sponsor, listed operations, a cap, a domain, an expiry. Revocation works immediately and everywhere, including reads, and is itself a signed entry. Ghost access, authority creep, and blame diffusion are what happens without it.
Read on Medium →And what that choice buys a developer building on it.
Follow Kevin on Medium for the rest of the series as it publishes.
Permission is not the same as accountability. An agent that is allowed to act still has to be seen keeping, missing, or leaving hanging what it said it would do. SITP records the promise, the promiser, the moment, and the outcome — and keeps all three outcomes visible.
Read on Substack →Subscribe at staplit.substack.com.
Sixteen articles on commitment, accountability and earned trust, collected as one volume. Organized into four chapters that follow the CARE model: Commitment, Accountability, Reputation and Earned Trust.
SITP is an open protocol. Its standard will be governed by an independent organization with a board elected by its members, chartered in freedom-protecting jurisdictions. Staplit Inc. is the inventor and first operator: it runs a commercial relay, the way an airline flies under rules it does not write. Enterprises and governments can run federated SITP servers behind their own firewalls.
Math is good. Freedom is better.