Concepts

Trust Signals: Advisories, Attestations & Lineage

Beyond the automatic trust grade, ChainRender has a layer of social trust signals — ways for the community to attest to, advise on, and trace the lineage of components. These are informational and ownerless; they inform users without gating anything.

Attestations (vouching)

An ownerless attester registry lets attesters vouch for components (genesis attesters + multi-hop vouches). An attested dependency can lift a component's grade from unproven (C) to attested (B) — a verifiable statement that someone staked their reputation on it. Trust is delegated, not centralized: you choose which attesters you trust.

Advisories (alerting, not vouching)

An advisory registry is the inverse: a way to flag a concern about a component (e.g. "this resolver's source changed"). Advisories alert, they don't vouch — and they never silently block a component. They surface information so a user can decide, preserving the ownerless, un-censorable property.

App DNA (forking & lineage)

Every composition can be forked, and a fork records its parent on-chain. This creates a verifiable lineage — you can trace any app back through its ancestry. It makes ChainRender apps genuinely composable building blocks: fork a known-good app, modify it, and its provenance is permanent and public.

Annotations (component metadata)

The ComponentAnnotationRegistry is an ownerless, append-only key-value metadata layer for registered components — a way to attach labels, descriptions, tags, or references to a component hash. Like everything in the trust layer, an annotation is a claim by its annotator, keyed to a verified hash — a hint, not gospel. Multiple annotators can annotate the same component; consumers weigh them by who they trust. It's how components carry discoverable metadata (a name, a category, links) without any central catalog owning that data.

Why these are separate from the grade

The grade measures structural trust (is it on-chain? are deps immutable?). These signals add social trust (has anyone vouched? flagged? where did it come from?). Keeping them separate keeps the grade objective and computable, while letting human judgment layer on top — transparently, ownerlessly, and without any party able to censor or force a verdict.

The Trust Grade — the automatic, structural grade.
Contracts → Registries — the on-chain registries.