The Wall
Structure without mortar: pieces that hold because they fit.
Built on Drystone, a protocol with no central authority acting as the glue. Like a drystone wall, every piece is placed to fit its neighbors, and nothing holds it together but good alignment.
A drystone wall has no mortar. Every stone is chosen and placed to fit the stones around it, and the wall stands because the fit is good. Walls built this way outlast the people who built them.
Drystone, the protocol underneath Croft, is built on the same discipline. There is no central authority holding the structure together and no privileged node whose copy of events counts as the real one. Every participant can check, locally, that the record in front of them is consistent and corroborated.
The protocol also knows what is not its job. Machines are good at provenance: what was said, by whom, and what corroborates it. Machines have no access to utility: what is true, fair, or right. Drystone computes the first and never pretends to the second; judgment stays with people. And when people genuinely disagree, the protocol does not manufacture a winner. Disagreement is recorded plainly, and communities part or reconcile on human terms. A fork, not a verdict.
The full specification, its reasoning, and the running experiments live in the open discovery repo.