SIM
← NIPS
NIP-0003

Settlement Domain Discovery

STATUS
ACTIVE
TYPE
CORE
AUTHORS
NIL Research
CREATED
2023-06-02
VERSION
0.9.1

1. ABSTRACT

Describes how Settlement Domains advertise liquidity capability and how routers discover which domains are eligible destinations for a given obligation.

2. MOTIVATION

Obligations cannot be routed without a shared mechanism for domains to declare what they can settle, and at what capacity, without requiring routers to trust a single centralized registry.

3. TERMINOLOGY

DomainCapability — a signed, periodically published record of a Settlement Domain's advertised liquidity and exposure.

4. SPECIFICATION

Each Settlement Domain periodically publishes a signed capability record:

DomainCapability {
  domainId: DomainID
  currency: CurrencyCode
  availableLiquidity: Decimal   // as reported, not independently verified
  openObligations: Integer
  exposure: SignedDecimal
  status: BALANCED | SURPLUS | DEFICIT
}

Routers MUST treat availableLiquidity as advisory rather than authoritative and MUST re-validate capacity at the point of HSC assignment (NIP-0004).

5. INVARIANTS

Routers MUST treat `availableLiquidity` as advisory, never authoritative, and MUST re-validate capacity at HSC assignment.

6. FAILURE CONDITIONS

A domain that over-reports liquidity causes obligations routed toward it to fail at assignment; no penalty mechanism for repeated over-reporting is yet defined.

7. SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS

A domain that over-reports liquidity can cause obligations to be routed toward it and subsequently fail at assignment. NIP-0003 does not currently define a penalty mechanism for repeated over-reporting; this is tracked as an open question for a future proposal.

8. REFERENCE IMPLEMENTATION

The reference implementation is the NIL-0 simulation network. No production implementation of this proposal exists; behavior described here is normative for the simulation only.