Where the design ideas came from
OpenChainGraph and its kernels build on ideas published elsewhere. This page lists every one of them in a single place, with attribution, license, and whether the idea has shipped as a live tool or is specced but not yet built.
Ideas only, never text or code
Every entry below is a design idea we studied and adapted in our own words and our own implementation: an aggregation formula, a delegation construction, a verification pattern. None of it is a runtime dependency, and none of it is copied text or copied source. Where a project's license requires attribution for that kind of design reuse, we give it here and again inline wherever the idea is used.
Borrow the idea, credit the source, never the text or the code. If a page or a spec section on this site uses one of these ideas, it links back to this entry.
Every borrowed idea, one entry each
Merkle-sum-tree node layout (hash + running balance sum per node) and the leaf/sibling range-check discipline Summa uses to close the "broken MST" negative-balance attack (Maxwell, eprint 2022/043 §4.1) informed a from-scratch, non-ZK, plain-JS inclusion checker. No Summa code, circuit, or package was imported; only the documented design pattern.
Used in: the MST inclusion checker. github.com/summa-dev/summa-solvency ↗
Reputation aggregation design: combining a set of signed attestations into a single decaying score across multiple dimensions, self-issued attestations excluded.
Used in: the reputation score aggregator kernel. github.com/vouch-protocol ↗
Weakest-link claim-strength composition across a chain of steps, named determinism classes for kernel outputs, and a PRNG-keying rider for reproducible randomness.
Used in: §CLAIMSTR-1 (claim_strength composition) and §DETCLASS-1 (per-kernel determinism class) in the OpenChainGraph spec. FrankenSim's license carries unvetted terms, so only the ideas were taken, never any of its text or code.
The awesome-zk-ai list surfaced the discovery path; opML's optimistic assert-then-challenge verification (arXiv 2401.17555) and the Merkle sampled-trace commitment from eprint 2026/541 inform the planned execution_claim surface.
Used in: the EXECLAIM-1 execution_claim design (specced, not yet a shipped kernel).
Robocorp's work-item taxonomy and Windmill's counted-resume approval flow shape how a stalled agent run gets escalated to a named human and resumed as a signed artifact.
Used in: the EXQ-1 exception-queue spec rider. Windmill's core is AGPLv3; only the approval semantics were borrowed, never its code.
Three separate borrows landed together in the SPEC-TICK-088 pass: C2SP's checkpoint/cosignature format for witness cosigning anchor batches, the IETF RATS EAR/AR4SI trustworthiness-vector shape for signed failure receipts, and Eclipse Biscuit's offline attenuation-block chaining for multi-hop mandate delegation. Biscuit's Datalog authorization runtime was not adopted, only its block-chaining construction. Two further C2SP specs were read and implemented later: tlog-policy, whose log/witness/group/quorum grammar is the format both checked-in trust policy files use and the offline verifier parses, and tlog-tiles, whose tile path scheme the same verifier decodes. This estate's attribution pins the first three as tlog-checkpoint/v1.0.0, signed-note/v1.0.0 and tlog-cosignature/v1.0.1. All five specs were re-read on 2026-08-15 and every one of them is published as an editor's copy carrying no version string of its own, so tlog-tiles and tlog-policy are cited by name with no version invented for them.
Used in: §WITNESS-1, §VERDICT-1, and §ATTEN-1 of the OpenChainGraph spec, the shared c2sp-tlog-verify.mjs module, and the C2SP Transparency Log Verifier.
The W3C Deterministic Profile enumerates the escape hatches a deterministic Wasm/JS guest must close; the RISC-V frozen base-ISA policy is the model for never revising a ratified kernel-semantics profile in place, only adding a new one alongside it.
Used in: §24 of the OpenChainGraph spec (the Deterministic Compute Profile and its §24.2 freeze clause).
Pattern borrow: the ICS23 declarative existence/non-existence Merkle proof format (spec + wire schema + verification algorithm, including the October 2022 VSA-2022-103 forged-membership fix) was re-implemented inline in JS from the public spec and cosmos/ics23's own Go reference implementation. @confio/ics23, the JS reference implementation, is unmaintained and was not vendored.
Used in: ics23-verify.mjs, the shared declarative Merkle proof verifier module, and T585 ICS23 Proof Verifier, the tool page that carries that module inline so it stays a single self-contained file. github.com/cosmos/ics23 ↗
Merkle-sum-tree node layout (hash + running balance sum per node) and the leaf/sibling range-check discipline Summa uses to close the "broken MST" negative-balance attack (Maxwell, eprint 2022/043 §4.1) informed a from-scratch, non-ZK, plain-JS inclusion checker and an optional liability-aggregation kernel. No Summa code, circuit, or package was imported, only the documented design pattern. Backing audit: SUMMA-MST-BUILD-SPEC.md (workspace root, 2026-08-14).
Used in: the MST inclusion checker and liability-aggregation kernel. github.com/summa-dev/summa-solvency ↗
Runtime dependencies bundled directly into kernel code: @noble/curves + @noble/hashes, @noble/post-quantum (ML-DSA + SLH-DSA), @sd-jwt/core + @owf/identity-common, rtoy/fdlibm-js (embedded SunPro fdlibm port). Full per-item license and path detail is generated into THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md, not duplicated here.
Used in: kernel bundles across the ChainGraph standard library.