
ERC-8226 × ERC-8320
Composing two asset standards so authority stops when backing does.
ERC-8226, the Regulated Agent Mandate, says who may act on an asset. ERC-8320, the Regulated Asset Claim, says what the asset's registered state is and who signed it. Both were proposed by Brickken, and neither referenced the other. FACTOS wired them: an agent's authority does not execute once the backing claim is pulled, even while the mandate itself is still valid. Demonstrated on-chain, on the authors' own reference implementation, with the discussion live in the standard's thread.
None of this claims the asset is worth anything. It is a measured fact: what backs it, attested by a key other than the registry operator's, and a gate that stops when the backing is not clear. Proof of reserves tells you the money is there; it does not tell you the right is enforceable, or still yours. Backing, not valuation.
ILLUSTRATIONPicture a warehouse of cars, and for each car a receipt that says the bearer owns the car in bay 12. The receipt can be sold, pledged, endorsed, and keep circulating spotless while the car is gone, its engine swapped, or already someone else's. That is a token for a real-world asset, and it is the gap this registry fills.
Read the illustration: The car in the warehouse →A scoped, time-bounded authority for an agent: move this asset, up to this amount, until this date. It answers who is authorized to act.
A registry of signed, versioned, revocable statements about an asset: present, inspected by a named author, backing current. It answers what the registered state is and who signed it.
FACTOS contributed the informative BACKING schema example now published in ERC-8320, and a threshold reader that checks any issuer's claim against a lender's own rule.
The wiring is a single asset that is at once the subject of an ERC-8226 mandate and the anchor of an ERC-8320 claim registry. When the agent acts, the mandate reads the registry: suspend the backing claim and the action reverts on its own, though the mandate stays valid until its own expiry.
A reviewer then caught a case the first version missed. A bare existence check passes whenever any backing signature is present, so pulling the one that matters leaves an unrelated one behind, and a claim reporting partial coverage passes like a full one. We fixed it in code: the gate now requires a claim from a specific, trusted author rather than any signature, shown live with two authors signing the same asset. That exchange is in the standard's thread, in the open.
FACTOS operates the claim registry; a different key authors the backing claim. In this demo the auditor role is played by a test key; the design requires the author's key to be distinct from the validator's, and in real use it would belong to an independent third party. The separation is deliberate: FACTOS publishes the registered state, it does not vouch for the asset. When the true state is "there is a lock and no one knows whose," that is what the registry publishes, and the machine stops rather than guess.
Each reference identifies the registry state of an instrument held by FACTOS. The reference is stable and is written once into the instrument that points at it. The record it describes is versioned and anchored, and changes without the reference ever changing.
Where the state is read from depends on the rail. A tokenised instrument points
at a record through its url() field. An ERC-8226 mandate does not: since 8
September the state is read by the mandate's asset, at execution time, from a FACTOS contract
keyed by instrument. Since 18 September the same asset also anchors an ERC-8320 claim registry,
so an agent's action can be gated on a signed backing claim that a separate key authors (a test key
in this demo) and FACTOS operates.
Every record states what it is, what registry state FACTOS publishes for it, the reference of the evidence package, and the on-chain anchors that let a third party check the claim without asking us.