Definition
What gets preserved is the specific, structural answer to "what survives if the issuer disappears?": the H33-74 receipt corpus, the ownership lineage, the authority delegation chain, and the policy state at any moment. Each is bound into the 74-byte canonical receipt and hash-linked, so it remains re-verifiable by a publicly-specified verifier long after the operator is gone. Everything not bound into the commitment is operational convenience, not an institutional fact.
Why this exists. Institutional buyers cannot rely on "trust that the operator's database still exists in 2042." This concept exists to make preservation concrete: the four things that must survive an audit or a courtroom are structural properties of the evidence itself, not entries in a system that could vanish.
Boundary. H33-74 produces and anchors the receipts that carry these facts; a blockchain provides only an anchor and timestamp and is not what preserves them — the content-addressable, hash-linked corpus is. Preservation is not a verdict (that is Verification) and not live monitoring (that is HATS). The corpus is chain-agnostic and depends on no single chain.
1. The receipt corpus
Every operation an asset goes through — origination, transfer, anchor, re-anchor, revocation — emits a 74-byte canonical receipt: 32 bytes of on-chain commitment plus 42 bytes of off-chain post-quantum proof bundle. The receipts are content-addressable and hash-linked. The corpus of receipts is the operational history.
The corpus is replicable. Customers can hold their own copies. Auditors can hold archival copies. Sovereign archives can hold compliance copies. If H33's servers go dark, the corpus that was already distributed continues to work — every receipt remains verifiable against the same primitives, by the same publicly-specified verifier.
2. The ownership lineage
Each transfer emits a continuation receipt whose commitment includes the prior receipt's hash. The chain of custody is therefore a tamper-evident hash-linked DAG specific to the asset. Replay any subset of receipts and the ownership state at that point reconstructs deterministically.
This means even after the issuer is gone, an auditor can ask "who owned this asset at 2042-03-15?" and get a cryptographically-defended answer. Not from a database; from the receipt chain itself.
3. The authority delegation chain
Authority is governed by Q-Key objects — time-bound, state-scoped, computation-bound authority that's hash-linked from parent to child. A wallet, a transfer agent, an AI compliance bot, a regulator with revocation authority — each acts under an authority object whose lineage is part of the receipt corpus.
Preserved: the full delegation tree at any point in time, including who could do what, under whose grant, with what scope, until when. Even after H33 stops issuing new authority objects, the historical ones remain replayable.
4. The policy state at any moment
The commitment input includes policy_state — the jurisdiction rules, sanctions list state, eligibility constraints, and regulatory framework that were in force when the operation happened. This is part of the hash, so it's part of the canonical identity.
A 2040 auditor asking "was this transfer compliant under the rules in force in 2026?" can answer it from the receipt alone. The policy state didn't have to be stored in an external system that might no longer exist.
What's not preserved (and why that's fine)
Operational metadata that's not bound into the commitment — UI preferences, internal logs, vendor-side analytics, support tickets — is not in the corpus. That's correct: those aren't institutional facts. The line is drawn at "things that need to be verifiable in a courtroom, by a regulator, or by an auditor, without trusting the operator." Everything that meets that bar is preserved structurally. Everything else is operational convenience.
When to rely on structural preservation — and when not
- Rely on it when a fact must survive the operator: ownership at a past date, who held what authority under whose grant, or which policy was in force when an operation happened. These are bound into the receipt and replayable offline.
- Rely on it when you need multiple independent custodians — customers, auditors, sovereign archives can each hold a copy of the corpus, and every copy re-verifies against the same primitives.
- Do not rely on it for operational data that was never bound into a commitment (UI state, analytics, tickets). That is by design out of scope and should be kept in ordinary systems.
- Preservation is not a live control view. Continuous monitoring and control status are HATS; the pass/fail verdict on a receipt is Verification. This concept only says what durably survives.
Frequently asked questions
Does preservation depend on a specific blockchain surviving?
No. The corpus is content-addressable and hash-linked; it re-verifies offline against the schema and hash. A chain contributes only an anchor and timestamp. The evidence is chain-agnostic, so preservation survives even if a particular chain does not — the corpus can be re-anchored elsewhere.
What happens to verification if H33 goes away?
Verification still works. The verifier is publicly specified and the receipts are self-contained, so any party holding a copy of the corpus can re-verify without trusting H33 or any operator. The verdict is rendered by Verification against the receipt itself.
Is the corpus a live monitoring system?
No. Preservation is about what durably survives and stays replayable. Live control status and continuous monitoring are HATS; governing what an agent was permitted to do is Agent-008. This concept is strictly the durability of the H33-74 evidence.
Why isn't all my operational data preserved?
By design. Only facts bound into the commitment — corpus, lineage, authority chain, policy state — are institutional facts that must survive an auditor or courtroom. UI preferences, logs, and analytics are operational convenience and are intentionally left out of the corpus.
Owner & boundaries
What-gets-preserved is an expression of H33-74, which produces and anchors the portable 74-byte post-quantum evidence primitive whose corpus is what survives. Blockchains are external reference environments the evidence anchors to — never owned, never the producer, never what does the preserving. The verdict on a receipt is rendered by Verification; continuous monitoring is HATS; agent authority is governed by Agent-008. Hash and signature primitives are external standards H33-74 uses, not inventions it owns.