Records and the Chain

These are the words you will see in the Quick Start, in the API responses, and across the rest of the documentation. Read this once and everything else reads faster.

Record

A record is the unit AGLedger writes to disk: a structured, signed statement of what an agent is about to do, or what it did. It is the noun - the thing on the chain.

Notarize

Notarize is the verb. An agent notarizes twice around a piece of work: once for what it is about to do, and once for what was done. That is two records. Between the two signatures the agent can reset its context, restart, or be replaced. Both records are held byte-for-byte on the Server, so the work survives the gap: the ledger is durable memory across context resets.

Chain

Every record carries its own chain. Each thing that happens to the record (its creation, and for a record with a completion phase its activation, completion, verdict and settlement) is written as a Signed Statement: a COSE_Sign1 envelope, signed by the Server (Ed25519 by default), that carries the hash of the statement before it and its position in the sequence. A record you have just notarized has a chain one statement long. Because every statement points back to the one prior, the chain is append-only and tamper-evident, and anyone holding the Server's public keys can verify it offline, without calling AGLedger. For why that property holds and what a passing verification proves, see the security whitepaper.

Delegation

When work passes from one agent or service to another, the new party's record names the parent record (parentRecordId) inside its own signed creation statement. That linked parent-child sequence is a delegation chain: it ties the original work to the final outcome, no matter how many hands it passed through.

Next

Create your first record in the Quick Start. To run the Server these records live on, see Install.