NIL-0 Specification

Purpose

This page collects the normative requirements referenced throughout the preceding documentation into a single reference. It is not a replacement for the individual sections, which contain the rationale each requirement is drawn from.

Normative Requirements

1. An Obligation Object's economic fields MUST be immutable after compilation (04).
2. State MUST only transition along the paths defined in 21.
3. A router MUST re-validate domain liquidity capacity at assignment time rather than trusting advertised figures alone (05, 08).
4. An obligation MUST NOT transition to WITNESSED or RESOLVED without a valid witness matching its finality condition (15).
5. Cycle detection and multilateral netting MUST preserve every domain's net position exactly (12).
6. Recipient-facing finality guarantees MUST depend only on local finality, never on global finality (16).
7. Failure states MUST be surfaced as first-class obligation states, not generic errors (17).

Status

NIL-0 is a draft specification. Sections marked FINAL above (00, 04 core structure, 21) are considered stable; sections marked DRAFT or ACTIVE remain subject to revision through the NIP process (see Improvement Proposals).