[ PROOFECONOMY ]™GlossaryOriginSpecsFive-Tier Corroboration
Five-tier corroboration is the sequence of states a Proof Record passes through before it can support a claim: Activated, Committed, Witnessed, Analyzed and Sealed. A claim is valid only against a Sealed record.
The five tiers
| Tier | What has happened |
|---|---|
| 1. Activated | The execution parameters are defined and committed. |
| 2. Committed | A pre-execution anchor is established with an independent time or randomness source, so the run is fixed before it starts. |
| 3. Witnessed | The execution is observed by an independent party, a Proof Witness. |
| 4. Analyzed | Outcomes are evaluated against criteria defined before the run. |
| 5. Sealed | The final hash is computed and the ledger anchor is written. |
A claim is valid only against a Sealed record.
What the tiers do and do not prove
The tiers describe what happens to evidence once it exists: that it was committed in advance, observed, evaluated and preserved. They do not by themselves show the evidence was faithful when it was generated.
That precondition is fidelity-at-capture. Witnessed and Sealed carry evidentiary weight only if the capture was structurally independent. A Sealed record built on a self-attested capture is a well-preserved unreliable record, which is stupid cryptography in practice.
Where the term comes from
Defined in the Proof Economy Universal Framework by Craig Thomas Ellrod, 10 July 2026, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21379780.