Protocol Overview
Four protocols, one evidence trail: what happens, how it is controlled, and how it is proven.
Quox is built on four open protocols. Each answers a different question about an agent action; together they produce the evidence trail behind every governed action Quox takes.
The four protocols
| Protocol | Answers | Role |
|---|---|---|
| AEE | What was said? | Agent Envelope Exchange - the message format for every inter-agent communication |
| AOCL | How was it controlled? | Agent Orchestration Control Layers - the OSI-inspired stack a request passes through, including the POLICY layer that gates risky actions |
| VOLT | What actually happened? | Verifiable Operations Ledger & Trace - tamper-evident, portable records of agent operations |
| WARD | Can I trust the record? | Write-once Append-only Receipt Digests - the central meta-chain that witnesses AEE, AOCL and VOLT events without storing their content |
WARD is central
AEE, AOCL and VOLT each produce their own events. WARD does not replace them; it witnesses them. Every event from every protocol gets a WARD receipt: a hash-chain entry that references the event by ID and payload hash, content-free by design. That means you can independently verify that a record has not been altered without WARD ever holding a second copy of what it recorded.
How a request flows through them
- A message arrives in AEE format and is routed to the right agent.
- The request passes through the AOCL layer stack - identity, policy, planning, execution - each layer emitting an observable event.
- What the agent actually did is recorded as a VOLT evidence record: a tamper-evident, portable trace of the operation.
- WARD witnesses every one of those events, chaining them into a verifiable, content-free receipt trail.
Where to go deeper
- The Evidence Spine - what evidence by default means in practice
- AEE Protocol
- AOCL System
- VOLT Protocol
- WARD Protocol