How a protocol joins

1. Rung 1 — the spec

   A written contract with a versioned id in the estate’s form (name/major), stating what a conforming document contains, what it refuses, and what a reader may conclude. The invariant is phrased as something a caller has no way to do.

2. Rung 2 — the dependency-free checker

   A checker beside the spec that imports node: builtins only, installs nothing, and refuses what the spec refuses. A check that needs an install is a check that can quietly not run.

3. Rung 3 — wired into mesh-lint and conformance-kit

   The checker is registered so one run exercises this protocol alongside every other, and the document it hands the layer above is linted at the boundary it crosses. This is the rung where a repo becomes part of the stack. The status is still draft.

4. Rung 4 — one independent adopter

   Somebody outside the estate conforms, and is named; their domain serves the surface and conformance-kit reads it. This is the gate on the word "standard" — a spec repo is not made public before it, because a protocol only its author speaks is an internal format with a version number.

5. Rung 5 — the business

   An accountable owner, a licence entry, a private implementation, and a status on the map that is no longer draft. The launch order is fixed: the estate register records the spec repo as open-licensed, then the repository goes public.

What the ladder refuses

Every contract on the map is at rung 1, 2 or 3 today, or is planned and not yet at rung 1. None has reached rung 4 — that is the honest state, and the map says so rather than rounding up.