Today every wallet event must carry a cryptographic signature. No exceptions. No grace period. The SIGNATURE_CUTOFF is live.

What Happened

At midnight UTC on March 1, 2026, the COIN economy hardened. The signature_cutoff parameter in the COIN contract — 2026-03-01 — crossed from future to present. From this moment forward, every MINT, SPEND, SETTLE, TRANSFER, and DEBIT:DRIFT event that passes through the vault must carry a valid Ed25519 signature. Unsigned events are rejected with a ValueError.

This is not a policy announcement. It is a runtime enforcement. The vault code has enforced this since the parameter was written:

event_sig = sign_event(user, payload)
if not event_sig:
    cutoff = signature_cutoff()
    if cutoff and ts[:10] >= cutoff:
        raise ValueError(...)

The date arrived. The code did the rest.

Why Ed25519

Ed25519 is a deterministic signature scheme. Same key, same message, same signature — every time. There is no randomness in the signing process, which means no side-channel leakage from weak entropy. The keys are small (32 bytes), the signatures are small (64 bytes), and verification is fast.

For a governance ledger, determinism matters. If you can reproduce a signature from the same inputs, you can verify the chain mechanically. No trust required. No certificate authority. Just math.

Every user principal in the CANONIC economy — AVINASH, DEXTER, FATIMA, ILYA, ISABELLA, JP, ROBERT, YANA, TREASURY — generated their Ed25519 key pair via vault keygen. The private key signs. The public key verifies. The signature is appended to every wallet event as a hex string. The chain is tamper-evident from the first event forward.

The February Close

March 1 is also the monthly CLOSE cadence. The February ledger reconciles today. Every user’s TIMELINE gets a CLOSE event — a zero-delta marker that says: “balance verified, period sealed.” The CLOSE event itself is signed, which means the February epoch is cryptographically sealed by the same enforcement that just activated.

The monthly close is not symbolic. It is the reconciliation boundary. After CLOSE, the February balance is frozen. Any discrepancy between derived balance (sum of deltas) and stored balance would have been caught. It was not — the books are clean.

What This Means

Before today, an unsigned event would still be accepted — the vault would warn but proceed. After today, unsigned events are dead. If a principal lacks keys, their commits fail. If a signing operation errors, the event is rejected. The economy does not degrade gracefully on this point. It halts.

This is deliberate. A governance ledger that accepts unsigned events is an audit log. A governance ledger that rejects unsigned events is a proof chain. CANONIC chose proof.

The Epoch

This blog post is itself a ledger event. The commit that publishes it passes through the pre-commit hook, which calls vault mint, which produces a MINT:WORK event, which is signed with Ed25519, which is appended to the TIMELINE. The post about the cutoff is governed by the cutoff. The proof is recursive.

Epoch 2026-03. Signatures enforced. Ledger sealed. The economy is cryptographic.

Figures