FOUNDATIONS

Mempool observations · raw price volatility · liquidity depth · transaction intent signals · gas market narrative.

τ texture (long-term structural regime, 5–13 h window) · π pressure (short-term operational friction, ~5 min window) · their divergence. The single exception on the demand side: the echo of activity (sigma, size, transaction count) measured on confirmed blocks, not on intent flow.

There is no cross-chain normalization. Every threshold is derived from each chain's own multi-year historical distribution. What constitutes an anomaly on Ethereum is calibrated from Ethereum data. What constitutes an anomaly on Solana is calibrated from Solana data.

The data is what Invarians produced at computed_at. It is non-repudiable on the server side, integrity-protected end-to-end, and reproducible against the canonical JSON form (sorted keys).

That the underlying observation is correct (calibration responsibility) · that the regime classification is appropriate for the agent's policy (interpretation responsibility) · that the chain is safe to act on (fitness-for-action responsibility, see Primitive 3).

The HMAC envelope includes "anchor": null in v2.0. Once the InvariansAnchor contract is deployed on Arbitrum, each canonical payload hash will be batch-anchored on-chain (Merkle root with epoch boundary). The anchor field will then contain { tx_hash, block_number, contract }, providing a permissionless integrity check independent of the HMAC server.

S2D1 is the regime with the highest diagnostic value. It captures infrastructure events, validator behavior anomalies, timing disruptions, network-layer issues, that produce no fee signature. A fee monitor would report S1D1 during an S2D1 period. This is the core of the two-axis approach: the structural and demand layers must be read independently to detect it.

D2± captures composition asymmetry that the legacy 4-state grid misses. Size-up + tx-down (or vice versa) means the chain is processing fewer but larger transactions than baseline (the typical profile of a bot cascade on Aave or Compound, MEV searcher dominance, or stablecoin depeg arbitrage HFT). The first such pattern observed on Invarians was the rsETH cascade of 2026-04-18 on Ethereum: with signed codes active, the panel would have emitted S1D2- at 14h UTC instead of the legacy S1D1.

Each classifying observable carries two exponential moving averages: a short EMA (~10 h half-life) tracking the current state, and a long EMA (~30 d half-life) representing the chain's structural baseline. The shift = ratio_short - ratio_long measures how far the chain currently deviates from its 30-day pace.

The shift alone tells you the magnitude of deviation. Two derived fields tell you whether it is amplifying or reverting:

shift_delta = shift_now - shift_prev  — direction of the value movement between cycles.

shift_magnitude_delta = |shift_now| - |shift_prev|  — whether the deviation is growing (positive) or shrinking (negative), regardless of which side of the baseline.

An agent that reads only the regime sees a snapshot. An agent that reads the Drift Signal in addition can distinguish:

• Regime D2+, drift growing → demand surge active and accelerating, regime sticky
• Regime D2+, drift shrinking → demand surge ending, return to D1 within hours
• Regime D2-, drift growing → starvation deepening, depressed demand persists
• Regime D2-, drift shrinking → starvation recovering, return to D1 likely

An agent making a 30-minute decision uses the regime + drift to estimate whether its operating context will hold long enough to execute. That estimate is left to the agent's policy — Invarians provides the data, not the threshold.

The Drift Signal is a substrate-physics concept. Chains evolve under sustained agentic load on the time scale of weeks: structural rhythm slowly shifts, demand baselines slowly migrate, validator participation slowly trends. The 10 h / 30 d EMA pair captures exactly that scale.

Bridges are operational pipelines, not substrates. Their fitness-for-action is fully captured by current state (BS1 / BS2), per-message latency P90 / P99, success rate, and crypto anchor verifiability — at the cycle granularity of the collector (10 min). Forcing a substrate-style drift onto operational latency would conflate two different physical phenomena. The three-primitive architecture therefore exposes Drift Signal on L1 and L2 entries only; bridge entries expose state, metrics, and crypto pointer without a drift block.

L1/L2 regimes (SxDx) reflect structural conditions, inertial, slow-moving, derived from multi-year calibration. Bridge state (BS1/BS2) reflects operational throughput, fast-moving, binary, measured in seconds to minutes. The distinction is architectural. Mixing them would distort both signals.

Each CCTP message is captured individually: the source DepositForBurn event, the MessageTransmitter.MessageSent payload, the resulting messageHash, and the Circle ECDSA secp256k1 attestation signature (65 bytes). The signature is retrievable via GET /v2/cctp/attestation/{message_hash} and is independently verifiable against Circle's published attester public key, providing a cryptographic chain of trust distinct from the Invarians HMAC envelope.

Bridge entry exposes metrics.latency_p90_s, metrics.latency_p99_s, metrics.success_rate_1h computed on per-message latencies, plus crypto.anchor = "circle_ecdsa" and crypto.verifiable_via pointer. A pending queue handles the asymmetry between collector cycle (10 min) and source-chain finality (~13-19 min on Ethereum-anchored chains): messages whose Iris attestation arrives after their first observation are re-polled at each subsequent cycle until attested or 2 h expiry, with no message lost.

Each CCIP message is captured individually: source CCIPSendRequested on the OnRamp and destination ExecutionStateChanged on the OffRamp, matched per message by the bytes32 messageId. Real send-to-execute latency per lane per direction is derived from the match.

Bridge entry exposes metrics.execute_latency_p90_s computed on per-message latencies, plus metrics.sequence_gap and metrics.messages_confirmed_1h. RMN.isCursed() per chain remains a safety boolean. crypto.anchor is null today (no per-message cryptographic anchor captured yet for CCIP). Each captured message is retrievable via GET /v2/ccip/message/{message_id}.

A pending queue handles the asymmetry between collector cycle and CCIP end-to-end latency, mirroring the CCTP pending model.

For every axis (structural, demand) the panel reports three numbers in a single drift object: magnitude, raw delta, and magnitude_delta. Magnitude is the maximum absolute shift across the axis observables (rhythm, continuity, beacon_participation on ETH; sigma, size, tx, complexity, gas_complexity on demand). Magnitude_delta tells whether that deviation is widening (positive) or shrinking (negative) between cycles.

Regime classification remains the primary output. The drift composite gives systems that require it a continuous fitness-for-action signal: substrate stable, mild drift, active drift, or imminent transition probable. Per-metric blocks (in diagnostic mode) expose the same triplet (shift, shift_delta, shift_magnitude_delta) at observable granularity.

Invarians certifies what the infrastructure is and where it is drifting. It does not prescribe what the agent should do. Execution policy, thresholds, risk tolerance, fallback logic — belongs to the agent. The three primitives provide the factual basis for that policy. The decision does not.