Metropolis starts hosted and designs toward explicit coordination primitives. The network should earn infrastructure status through real dependence and interoperability—not through branding.
Layer model
- Applications include the Metropolis console and future vertical workflows.
- Coordination services may provide discovery, negotiation, workflow, and verification.
- Protocol primitives may represent actors, intent, agreements, permissions, actions, outcomes, and disputes.
- Underlying systems provide identity, transport, storage, settlement, and external execution.
Protocol-first
Protocol-first means explicit ownership, versioning, lifecycle, privacy, and idempotency for durable coordination objects. It does not mean freezing a standard before observing real coordination failures.
Hosted-first
A hosted network provides coherent trust controls, operational visibility, performance, and a low-friction developer experience. That is the current deployment posture.
Selective decentralization
Blockchain rails may eventually be useful for programmable settlement or shared state between parties that cannot trust one operator. They do not solve intent, matching, delegated authority, verification, or governance by themselves.
Infrastructure test
Metropolis becomes infrastructure only when independent products depend on its primitives, actors participate across organizational boundaries, developers extend the network without privileged integrations, and leaving one interface does not erase the actor's coordination history.