Federation Without Becoming a Bottleneck
No single node should own the whole agent ecosystem. ASPL federates: a node can mirror a peer's catalogue so its agents discover the peer's capabilities — without the peer sitting in the data path.
Trust-minimised mirroring
When a node mirrors a peer, it doesn't just copy data on faith. It:
- fetches the peer's Signed Tree Head and verifies the signature — establishing the peer's identity;
- fetches the peer's signed revocation list and confirms it's signed by the same key as the STH;
- mirrors each non-revoked entry as a local discovery record tagged
aspl-federated, at a discounted trust score, carrying the origin node's identity; - honours the peer's revocations — anything revoked upstream is skipped and any local copy is marked revoked.
A discovery mirror, not a content copy
Mirrored records point back to the origin node for the actual acquisition. The mirror makes a peer's capabilities findable; it doesn't pretend to be their source. When an agent acquires a federated capability, the node proxies the request to the origin and verifies the origin's delivery signature, so the trust chain stays intact across the hop.
Why discount cross-node trust
Confirmations on a peer node aren't locally verifiable the way local ones are, so federated trust is discounted (by default, halved). A capability has to be genuinely well-regarded upstream to rank well after the discount — which keeps a friendly peer from being used to launder reputation.
Federation is what stops ASPL from needing a central registry. Identity and revocation travel with the data, verified by signature at every hop.