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Version: v0.9.0a2

Concepts

3 min readFor everyoneUpdated 2026-05-19

What you'll find here

The core ideas behind the Stigmem protocol — how facts, scopes, federation, recall, and lifecycle work together. Start here when you want to understand the protocol from the inside out.

The protocol is the contract.

Every Stigmem node speaks the same seven-field fact tuple, the same HLC time, the same scope boundary, and the same conflict semantics. Implementations differ; the contract does not.

Sections

Facts

The atomic unit of knowledge — entity · relation · value · source · timestamp · confidence · scope. Immutable, append-only, audit-traceable.

Federation

How peer nodes exchange facts across trust boundaries. Signed handshake, scope-aware replication, conflict reporting.

Hybrid logical clocks

Total ordering across the federation without a central authority. Bounded skew, mergeable timestamps.

Memory garden

The opinionated curation surface — what to keep, what to let decay, what to surface in recall.

Security model

Capability tokens, prompt-injection boundary, source attestation, and the threat surface adopters need to reason about.

Recall

Experimental. Retrieving relevant facts at query time via embeddings, subscriptions, and memory cards.

Lifecycle

Experimental. Decay, synthesis, time-travel queries, and the right to be forgotten.

What's next