A post-quantum secure channel for adversaries who are already listening.

The quantum threat

ECDH and RSA are broken by Shor's algorithm. Nation-state adversaries are already executing harvest-now-decrypt-later operations: collecting classical ciphertext today, to decrypt when quantum capability matures.

In June 2026 this became official US policy: Executive Order 14409 directs federal agencies to migrate to NIST post-quantum encryption by the end of 2030 and post-quantum authentication by 2031 (contractors included) and states that adversaries “may already be collecting” encrypted government data.

No widely deployed protocol provides quantum resistance: not Signal, WhatsApp, Telegram, or iMessage. Their ciphertext is being collected now.

The sovereignty problem

Every major platform routes messages through infrastructure controlled by a third party, under jurisdictions that can compel disclosure, on infrastructure that can be seized, under terms that can change. Every mainstream identity model requires an external anchor (a phone number, an email) that can be revoked, surveilled, or coerced independently of the user.

Sovereignty means identity is a keypair generated locally. Nothing else. No server holds plaintext. No intermediary can be compelled to produce communications it does not have.

Wire format v5 — self-describing, parser-safe

Parser behaviour is determined entirely by the wire, not by receiver state inference. Every security-relevant field is in the ML-DSA signed region. A tampered flags byte breaks the signature before the parser acts on it.

Sovereign identity

A DID Document published on-chain contains the identity's ML-DSA verification key, ML-KEM public key for session establishment, and inbox service endpoint. Session establishment requires only the recipient's on-chain ML-KEM public key. No handshake, no round-trip, no registration server.

No party in the Bastion infrastructure can produce your communications, revoke your identity, or modify your published keys. The record lives on a PoW chain that no operator controls.

In-protocol trust levels

Trust propagates through explicit peer endorsement only. A trusted peer issues an introduction; only trusted peers can issue introductions. Expiry demotes to Known, not Unknown.

Tamper-proof audit records

The audit trail requires a ledger that no operator, not even the Bastion operator, can retroactively amend. A permissioned ledger can be silently modified; that is its design. A PoW chain cannot be rewritten without consensus across independent miners. A controlled ledger produces a record; it cannot produce proof the record is unaltered.

Protocol-level economic accountability

Every message or agent action requires a micro-transaction, not an application-layer rate limit but a protocol-level economic constraint. Attack cost scales linearly with attack volume in a way no software control can replicate. TeraNode demonstrates one million transactions per second across six global regions (AWS case study, March 2026).

No single point of control

A trustworthy audit trail requires that no single party can modify it: not the infrastructure operator, not the application developer, not a regulator who compels one. A proprietary ledger operated by any single entity cannot satisfy this by design. A public, permissionless PoW blockchain can.

Compliance infrastructure

DORA Article 11 requires tamper-evident ICT incident communication records not under unilateral operator control. MiFID II Article 25 requires immutable transaction-related communication records. HIPAA requires demonstrable end-to-end confidentiality without reliance on a third-party audit function.

Bloomberg Terminal, Symphony, and Slack satisfy record-keeping, but the records are under operator control, a single point of regulatory and competitive risk. Bastion's on-chain anchoring removes that dependency; your existing KYC infrastructure provides the legal identity binding.

Authenticated agent infrastructure

Every agent action is ML-DSA-signed by the authorising identity and permanently anchored on-chain. A rogue or compromised agent cannot forge actions without the identity's ML-DSA secret key. As autonomous-agent deployment accelerates, the absence of a trustworthy attribution and audit layer becomes a structural infrastructure gap. This primitive, cryptographically authenticated, economically accountable, and on-chain-audited, does not exist elsewhere in this combination.

The reference implementation

Messaging is what was built to prove the channel works. For journalists, lawyers, healthcare providers, financial professionals, and anyone whose communications have consequence, this is the channel that should have existed: quantum-resistant, identity-sovereign, forward-secret, post-compromise-recovering, with no server that can be compelled.

Authenticated origin for systems

Any system requiring authenticated origin verification for messages or actions, without trusting the transport layer, can use a Bastion channel as its communication primitive. ML-DSA authentication makes origin forgery computationally infeasible. The economic layer makes identity spam irrational at scale. Wire overhead: 6,346 bytes minimum per message.