Conformance
The vectors are the authority.
An implementation is conformant if it satisfies every REQUIRED clause of the spec and round-trips the published vectors with no skips. The vectors are not illustrative: each is a real, cryptographically computed value, regenerated by a generator and re-verified by the harness. A change to wire behaviour MUST regenerate the vectors and record it.
Content addressing (b3: + base64url over BLAKE3-256) and the canonical det-CBOR encodings of a coding operation and a receipt core reproduce byte-for-byte. No float appears in any canonical form; key order is length-first per RFC 8949 §4.2.1.
A coding operation's Ed25519 signature, computed over the operation id concatenated with the prior tree id, verifies under the author key. A mutated edit, a wrong prior, or a reattributed author all fail. The operation id validates edit ordering and non-overlap before any signature is accepted.
A receipt round-trips through its JCR-1 envelope — canonical det-CBOR inside COSE_Sign1, EdDSA (alg -8) — and verifies under the signer key. The measured + estimated microjoules are integers, and the provenance ↔ measured coupling holds: a HwShunt reading carries a measured figure; an Estimator reading carries none.
A request resolves at the first tier that can close it and records the closing tier. An L0 cache hit closes with no higher tier consulted; a stage that cannot close yields to the next. The closed resolution carries the operation and the receipt for the tier that closed.
Artifacts a conformant implementation MUST reject: a receipt whose HwShunt reading has no measured figure, a signature over the wrong prior, overlapping edit anchors, a JCR-1 envelope with a single-bit mutation, and a cascade that claims a close at a tier that did not produce the operation.
Negatives are what a standard certifies
A standard whose vectors only assert the happy path certifies nothing. The highest-value contribution is a new negative — an artifact a conformant implementation must reject. The vectors, not any brand, define what is correct.