Known Limitations
ALX defines specific guarantees for Block identity, declared lineage, and verification. Implementation versions, optional capabilities, and external infrastructure add separate constraints.
When to Use These Limits
Review the applicable limitations before production deployment, implementation upgrades, infrastructure changes, or user-facing claims based on verification results.
Protocol Limitations
ALX verification establishes protocol-defined properties. ALX verification does not establish:
- Factual or semantic truth
- Complete real-world provenance
- Authorship, ownership, authorization, or approval
- Quality, safety, or legal validity
- Continued Block availability
Declared parents represent the lineage encoded by an application. Verification binds those declarations to Block identity; application evidence determines whether the declarations represent every relevant real-world dependency.
- Protocol and Package
- Build, Deployment, and Audit
- Contract Control Model
- Verification Boundaries
Evaluate supported behavior against the exact implementation version and source revision.
Before integrating an implementation, record:
- Supported protocol version
- Canonicalization and parent-normalization behavior
- Block, graph, and traversal coverage
- Supported signing, commitment, and proof capabilities
- Compatibility requirements
- Published conformance results
Connect every contract address to reproducible source, build, deployment, and review evidence.
Record the source revision, compiler configuration, artifacts, deployment manifest, chain ID, contract address, transaction evidence, and audit status. Contract source code alone does not establish deployment or audit status.
Evaluate authorization, administration, recovery, upgrade, publication, timestamp, and finality controls.
Contract controls belong to the specific implementation and deployment. Core ALX Block validity remains independent of those controls.
Match every successful result to the property evaluated by that operation.
- Block verification establishes deterministic correspondence to protocol data.
- Graph verification establishes structural properties of the evaluated relationships.
- Signature verification establishes validity for a specified message and context.
- Merkle verification establishes inclusion relative to a specified root.
Additional claims require application-defined evidence and trust assumptions.
Integration Checklist
Before deploying an integration, record:
- Protocol specification version
- Package or implementation version
- Source revision and conformance results
- Signing domain and message format, when used
- Contract source, build configuration, and deployment evidence, when used
- Application trust and acceptance policies
Reevaluate the recorded assumptions after implementation upgrades, canonicalization or signing changes, infrastructure changes, or broader user-facing claims.