23 entries · numbered and dated
The Canon
The vocabulary of building on the convergence. Not a definition of Web 4 — that belongs to GDA Group — but the construction concepts: what you have to understand to build on it rather than to invest in it.
Every entry carries a permanent reference, a definition written to be quoted, and the failure it prevents. Entries are never silently revised. Where a view changes, a new dated entry is published and the previous one is kept.
§ 01
By condition
01 · Somewhere to be
W4-003Enforceable scarcityEnforceable scarcity is property whose limits hold against the party that issued them — verifiable by someone who does not trust the operator, and surviving the operator’s change of mind, business model or existence.
W4-004Persistence guaranteeA persistence guarantee is the commitment that a world’s state — property, history, standing and obligations — continues to exist and be honoured across sessions, ownership changes and the operator’s own discontinuity.
W4-005World economyA world economy is the set of activities inside a persistent world that produce and exchange value people want independent of speculation — labour, services, goods and the settlement between them.
W4-015Persistent-world labourPersistent-world labour is work performed inside a virtual world by agents holding identity and authority — venues that stay open, services that continue, and operators that transact when no human is present.
02 · Someone to be
W4-006Portable standingPortable standing is reputation, history and entitlement that travel with their holder between surfaces and remain verifiable by parties who do not trust the issuer.
W4-007Credential portabilityCredential portability is the property that an attestation issued on one surface can be presented and verified on another, without the verifier contacting the issuer or the holder losing control of what is disclosed.
W4-017Digital citizenshipDigital citizenship is membership of a digital economy carrying rights, standing and obligations that persist across its surfaces — the condition under which a participant is a member rather than a user.
03 · Something to earn
W4-008Redemption pathA redemption path is the route by which a unit converts into real-world value, goods, services or experiences — the property that gives it a floor set by something other than the next buyer.
W4-009Emission versus redemptionEmission economics pays participants in newly issued units and depends on new entrants to hold price; redemption economics pays them in units backed by deliverable value and depends on the operator’s supply.
W4-010Contribution attributionContribution attribution is the property that every unit earned can be traced to a specific act by a specific participant — the precondition for rewarding contribution rather than mere activity.
W4-021Settlement realitySettlement reality is the test of whether value claimed by a system actually clears into something the holder wanted — the single measurement that distinguishes an economy from a simulation of one.
04 · Someone to do the work
W4-011Scoped authorityScoped authority is a bounded, explicit, revocable statement of what an agent may do, issued by an accountable principal and verifiable by a counterparty who does not trust the agent.
W4-012Delegation chainA delegation chain is the traceable sequence of grants from an accountable legal person through every agent that acted on their behalf — the structure that makes autonomous action attributable to someone who can answer for it.
W4-013Audit trailAn audit trail is a system-written record of what was instructed, by whom, under what authority, and what resulted — sufficient for a party outside engineering to reconstruct any action after the fact.
W4-014Agent-native companyAn agent-native company is one whose operating work is performed by a persistent fleet of AI agents under human governance from the outset, rather than by staff whose tasks were later automated.
Across all four
W4-001Condition auditA condition audit is the examination of a company against the four conditions of Web 4 — establishing which it supplies itself, which it obtains from elsewhere, and which it is silently missing.
W4-002The missing conditionThe missing condition is the specific one of the four whose absence explains a failure — the diagnostic claim that most Web 3 categories collapsed structurally rather than for want of execution or demand.
W4-016In-world autonomous businessAn in-world autonomous business operates inside a persistent world, staffed by agents under human governance, settling in a unit that redeems for real-world value — the convergence of all four conditions in a single company.
W4-018Layer borrowingLayer borrowing is obtaining a Web 4 condition from an existing operator instead of building it — the practice that makes a convergence company buildable by a founding team rather than a consortium.
W4-019Studio assemblyStudio assembly is the stage at which a venture is stood up on conditions the studio already operates — configuring identity, settlement and agent governance rather than building them.
W4-020Proof populationA proof population is a live audience against which a venture is tested — real participants with real alternatives, as distinct from a waitlist, a testnet or an incentivised cohort.
W4-022Convergence premiumThe convergence premium is the durability advantage held by a company supplying all four conditions over one supplying fewer — the claim that completeness, not capability, determines which survive a cycle.
W4-023Four-condition diligenceFour-condition diligence is the assessment of a convergence company by establishing, for each condition, whether it is supplied, borrowed or absent — and what the company does when the borrowed ones are withdrawn.
§ 02
What the Canon is not
It is not a definition of Web 4. That is GDA Group’s published position and this property links to it rather than restating it. One claim, one canonical home.
It is not the agent-economy vocabulary either — AAO, AAAS, RWA Rewards and the coordination terms belong to Flashy Group, and the engineering vocabulary to MLG Blockchain. See the term contract.
What remains — and what nobody else was writing — is the builder’s vocabulary: the concepts you need to construct something on the convergence, diagnose what is missing from it, and know what you have borrowed.