Environment Class and Parity Declaration

An Environment Class says where the system under test runs, production, pre-production, qa, dev or lab-replica, and a Parity Declaration says, for each of topology, scale, data, identity, control configuration, dependencies and traffic, whether the environment is identical, scaled, synthetic or absent relative to production. A record's claims extend only as far as its parity supports.

ProofJack Rating: Human 25% · AI 75% (self-estimated; PP-SPEC-079 AI_DISCLOSURE: Environment Classes proposed by Claude)

Also known as: Environment Class, Parity Declaration, Reference Environment, Regulatory Regime, Sovereign Registry, production, pre-production, lab-replica

Mynted 2026-10-23 · Updated 2026-10-23

First used: PP-SPEC-079, Proof of Performance Engagement: The Coal Mine Protocol, 13 October 2026, by Craig Thomas Ellrod

The classes

Class	Definition	Permitted content
`production`	The Implementor’s live environment serving real users	Non-destructive canaries only; Production Stream Mode; no PP-SPEC-078
`pre-production`	Mirrors production and receives production-like traffic, no real users	All canary classes under the Parity Declaration; 078 permitted
`qa`	An Implementor test environment	All classes; 078 permitted
`dev`	A developer environment	All classes; results carry the lowest In-Situ weight
`lab-replica`	An Independent Test Lab environment built from a Parity Declaration or Reference Environment	All classes; 078 permitted

The class is declared in the Engagement Manifest before the first commitment. A change of class is a new Engagement.

Parity Declaration

Every class other than production publishes one: for topology, scale, data, identity, control configuration, upstream dependencies and traffic mix, whether each is identical, scaled, synthetic or absent relative to production, with a one-line description. It is hashed into the manifest. A record from dev with synthetic data does not prove behavior on production data, and its summary must say so.

Reference Environment

For lab Engagements with no specific Implementor: a published, versioned, fingerprinted description of a representative system for one technology profile. Two records on the same Reference Environment version share a Comparability Class.

Regulatory Regime

The external rules the environment and records must satisfy: none (stated explicitly), fedramp_moderate, fedramp_high, il4, il5, il6, cjis, hipaa, pci_dss, nis2, dora, gdpr, or an x- extension. A regime may constrain where the Witness, Issuer and Registry sit and what canary content is allowed. Where records may not leave a boundary, a Sovereign Registry inside the boundary cross-anchors its roots to one outside, so existence and timing are provable outside while contents stay inside. The regime set is part of the Comparability Class.

Related terms

Sources

Proof of Performance Engagement: The Coal Mine Protocol (PP-SPEC-079)

Updated 2026-10-23