Agora

The agora is where decisions live: consensus topics, scoped ledgers, and the legs that carry ballots between sovereign nodes. The vant agora CLI is the participant’s window into all of it.

What the agora is

Two layers share the name, and they connect:

The decision layer (lib/consensus, lib/forum): topics, ballots, tallies, deadlines. Topics are created on the node whose org model their scope points into.
The sync layer (lib/agora-sync): the wire legs that carry ballots and ledgers between nodes over the signed crew-bus, plus ledger hygiene (the reaper) and gossip.

vant agora operates the sync layer. Your node votes on a PEER’s topic; the owner’s gate stack decides. You pull a peer’s ledger to read it locally; the merge re-derives status, so the wire can never declare a topic passed.

CLI reference

Command	What it does
`vant agora nodes`	List bus peers + this node’s identity
`vant agora status`	Sync surface status: buses installed, pending round-trips
`vant agora vote <node> <topic> <outcome>`	Vote on a peer’s topic
`vant agora pull <node> <topic>`	Pull + merge a peer’s ledger
`vant agora push <node> <topic>`	Push a local ledger to a peer

Common options: --agent <id> votes as a specific pre-registered principal; --timeout <ms> bounds the round-trip.

# Who can I reach, and who am I on the wire?
vant agora nodes

# Cast a ballot on acme's topic (their gates verify it)
vant agora vote acme-node q3-platform-call thursday-1400utc

# Bring the finished ledger home so local scope checks can read it
vant agora pull acme-node forum-q3-platform-call-abc123

# Share YOUR topic's ledger with a peer (they re-derive, never trust)
vant agora push beta-node my-local-topic

MCP equivalents

The same legs as tools, for agent-driven flows (full schemas in the MCP Tools Reference):

Tool	Matches
`agora_vote`	`vant agora vote`
`agora_pull`	`vant agora pull`
`agora_push`	`vant agora push`
`agora_nodes`	`vant agora nodes`
`agora_sync_status`	`vant agora status`

Task-shaped examples: Federation Playbooks.

Scoped reads

A scoped topic’s ledger is only readable by its member set. Two ways that check runs:

On the owner: consensus_get(topic, viewerId) admits members, returns null for everyone else (same shape as not-found: an outsider cannot even distinguish exists from missing).
On your node after a pull: the group’s org model arrives as a replica (org-sync), so your local scope check admits group members without a round-trip. Non-members stay denied, fail-closed.

const consensus = require('./lib/consensus');
const ledger = consensus.get('forum-q3-platform-call-abc123', 'beta-1');
// member: full ledger | non-member: null

The trust model

Everything vant agora does rides the signed crew-bus (HMAC envelopes against your registered peers). On top of the transport:

Registered peers only: an unknown origin gets no ballot door
Sender binding: replies resolve only the request they were sent for
Owner-side gates: scope, registry vetting, quarantine, one-vote, and deadline all run where the topic lives
Merge-only adoption: local votes are never overwritten; status is re-derived locally

Federation - the concept layer: mesh, groups, stewards
Federation Playbooks - task recipes using these verbs
Webhooks - the transport the legs ride
CLI Reference - federation verbs at a glance