Prototype, Paper, Pilot: The Three-Act Launch

What this means for you

VEST launches in three acts. Act one is the working prototype with public benchmarks. Act two is the academic paper, with a target conference and a target submission window. Act three is the law-firm pilot, which only opens after the paper is on arXiv and the prototype has cleared the formal-verification milestone. The order is deliberate: a regulated buyer will not sign a verifiable-log contract with a vendor whose underlying mathematics has not been published.

The pitch

The roadmap is dated and named in the research plan. Build the prototype on Trillian and Tessera in a three-month sprint. File the arXiv preprint in the first quarter of 2026. Submit the full paper to NSDI 2027, with USENIX Security 2027 and ACM CCS 2026 named as backups. Open the law-firm beta the same quarter the preprint goes public, so the first commercial conversations have a citable artefact in hand.

Who it’s for

The advisor, the early customer, or the partner asking when VEST will be a product they can buy.

Proof points

• Three target conferences named with venue tier in the research plan: NSDI 2027 first, OSDI 2027 second, USENIX Security 2027 if the threshold-signature variant matures, with ACM CCS 2026 as the earliest backup
• Validation plan names a 32-node Kubernetes cluster as the scale target and 1 million operations per second per node as the linear-throughput goal
• Beta cohort is specified, not generic: “invite-only beta with law firms” running real legal audit use cases, gated on the preprint and the formal-verification model in Ivy or TLA+
• Year-one cost frame is realistic for an open-source-led launch: arXiv preprint is free, the formal model uses open-source Ivy, the prototype runs on Tessera which is a Google open-source project, and the only paid line is the conference submission cycle

timeline
  title Three-act VEST launch
  Act 1 Prototype : 3-month sprint : Trillian and Tessera personality
  Act 1 Prototype : Benchmarks public : P99 under 70 ms append
  Act 2 Paper : arXiv preprint : Q1 2026
  Act 2 Paper : Formal model in Ivy or TLA-plus : tamper-evidence and causality proofs
  Act 2 Paper : Submit to NSDI 2027 : OSDI and USENIX as backups
  Act 3 Pilot : Law-firm beta opens : same quarter as arXiv
  Act 3 Pilot : First commercial contract : after paper is accepted