# Covenant

> Covenant is an open, local-first, agent-native operating layer. It runs as a local daemon on the host and exposes eight operating-layer primitives (intent, runtime, memory, identity, permissions, comms, compositor, and settlement) through which human users, software agents, and tools coordinate work, share state, and account for resource usage. License Apache-2.0. Version 0.1.0-alpha.1.

Covenant sits between the host OS and agentic applications. Agents are package directories with an agent.toml manifest; permissions are ed25519-signed capability tokens; every state change is appended to a hash-linked audit log; resource usage produces local settlement receipts. The canonical vocabulary is: intent, agent, capability, memory record, audit event, settlement receipt.

## Docs

- [FAQ](https://opencovenant.org/faq): Short answers to common questions (what Covenant is, how it differs from MCP, whether it needs a blockchain, the eight primitives, and its pre-1.0 status).
- [Overview](https://docs.opencovenant.org/): What Covenant is and where it sits in the stack.
- [Getting started](https://docs.opencovenant.org/getting-started): Build from source, run the daemon, dispatch a first intent.
- [Concepts](https://docs.opencovenant.org/concepts): The data model: intents, agents, capabilities, memory, audit, settlement.
- [The eight primitives](https://docs.opencovenant.org/primitives): Definitions of all eight host-level primitives.
- [Glossary](https://docs.opencovenant.org/glossary): Canonical one-line definitions of the eight primitives and core artifacts.
- [System architecture](https://docs.opencovenant.org/architecture): Daemon, runtime, local control plane, settlement scaffold.
- [CLI reference](https://docs.opencovenant.org/cli): Every covenant subcommand.
- [HTTP API](https://docs.opencovenant.org/http-api): Local gateway routes and schemas.
- [Agent manifest](https://docs.opencovenant.org/agent-manifest): Full agent.toml schema and validation.
- [Capability tokens](https://docs.opencovenant.org/capabilities): ed25519 permission token structure, encoding, verification, revocation.
- [Security model](https://docs.opencovenant.org/security): Trust boundaries, threat model, defaults.

## Protocols

- [MCP integration](https://docs.opencovenant.org/mcp): Tool trait and external MCP servers over JSON-RPC.
- [Agent-to-agent](https://docs.opencovenant.org/a2a): A2A transport.
- [Settlement](https://docs.opencovenant.org/settlement): Local receipt model and the on-chain scaffold.

## Research

- [Technical whitepaper](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20134416): Covenant, a capability-based operating layer for autonomous software-engineering agents.
- [Source repository](https://github.com/open-covenant/covenant)

## Optional

- [Autonomous workflow](https://docs.opencovenant.org/autonomy)
- [Validation profile](https://docs.opencovenant.org/validation)
- [Alpha release contract](https://docs.opencovenant.org/alpha-release)
- [A2A idempotency](https://docs.opencovenant.org/a2a-idempotency)
- [Audit log](https://docs.opencovenant.org/audit)
- [Audit integrity](https://docs.opencovenant.org/audit-integrity)
- [Identity and keys](https://docs.opencovenant.org/identity)
- [Memory tiers](https://docs.opencovenant.org/memory)
- [Local IPC](https://docs.opencovenant.org/ipc)
- [Live coverage](https://docs.opencovenant.org/live-coverage)
- [Linux gVisor runner](https://docs.opencovenant.org/gvisor-live-runner)
- [Provenance](https://docs.opencovenant.org/provenance)