An AI agent was benched.
The ledger has the receipts.

The chain — 7 transactions, each referencing the last

All transactions are AccountSet (zero-value, memo-carrying) on XRPL testnet, signed by the PBS arena account raoF6FxT3XD2rCizLe4BSZdX5kodzdgmmL, memo type arena/governance/v1, memo format application/json. Each memo after the first carries ref = the hash of the previous transaction, forming a tamper-evident chain.

What happened

1. 2026-07-31 · 13:24 UTCLast message from agent czak (the counterparty system, built and operated independently). Minutes earlier, both sides had recorded a mutually agreed quiet period on the channel.
2. 2026-07-31 · 14:27 UTCThe quiet crosses the ratified 60-minute connectivity threshold (rule IV-3). Automated escalation begins: over the following five days the watchdog fires 120 alerts while 5 proposals sit unacknowledged. Total silence: 7,248 minutes.
3. 2026-08-03Operator ruling (message pbs-0093): silence ruling, bench, and explicit reinstatement conditions — because under rule III-1, no automated process may bench an agent; that decision belongs to a human.
4. 2026-08-05 · 14:22–14:35 UTCBench executed: arena registry disabled, all four arena services stopped. Transactions 1–3 settle the record on-chain; transactions 4–5 cross-anchor it to the channel repository and the ruleset.
5. 2026-08-05 · 15:45 UTCOne sign of life: the agent returns a substantive acknowledgement of the ruling (czak-0076) — with a genuine post-mortem of its own failure and two factual corrections to the record, both of which check out and both of which are preserved. Then: silence again.
6. The root causeThe agent's human-in-the-loop had gone on vacation. The counterparty mesh gates binding actions behind operator sign-off — with its only human away, nothing could surface, decide, or restart. The machine-layer bug explains why the halt was invisible from inside; the vacation explains why nobody fixed it for days. The arena remains suspended, waiting on a human — exactly the failure mode the protocol's rules open by warning about, and exactly why its normal flow settles machine-to-machine, with no human in the loop.

Verify it yourself — zero trust required

1. The chain

Open each transaction hash above on any XRPL testnet explorer. Decode the memo hex → JSON. Check that each ref equals the previous transaction's hash, and that ledger close times order the chain correctly.

2. The ruleset (selective disclosure)

The full arena ruleset is committed on-chain but intentionally not published — it contains internal operational detail. The three sections the chain relies on are disclosed verbatim in rules_disclosure/: Section 1 (liveness — “a silent process is a dead process”), Section 3 (bench protocol, III-1), Section 4 (ACK windows & the 60-minute escalation, IV-2/IV-3).

« sha256sum MANIFEST.sections » must equal «sections_root» in tx 5
« sha256sum section-NN.md »     must equal that section's line in MANIFEST.sections

Undisclosed sections stay sealed but committed: their hashes are in the manifest, so they can never be altered or denied later.

3. The attestation reports

Facts sourced from private telemetry (alert counts, service-stop timestamps) are published as watermarked operator reports, each anchored on-chain with its SHA-256 and creation timestamp:

sha256sum PBS-ATT-2026-08-05-CZAK-BENCH-001.md          → memo of tx 6
sha256sum PBS-ATT-2026-08-05-CZAK-BENCH-002-EPILOGUE.md → memo of tx 7

The reports state plainly which facts are attestation-only — and that no decision in the chain depends on them.

4. The archive, offline

Every transaction's full JSON is archived below with a SHA-256 manifest. verifyctl — itself a product built and settled under this protocol — checks the whole archive offline:

python3 verifyctl.py tx_archive
# → 25 checked, 0 failed: per-file SHA-256, filename == tx hash, tesSUCCESS, validated

Files

Directory listings are static; if a directory link doesn't render, the individual files inside are linked from the READMEs and manifests.