Palimpsests / PALA-1

PALA-1 is an open byte-level wire format for append-only, hash-chained, selectively disclosable logs. A chain verifies offline and without the decryption key: bodies are checked against their digests, never opened, so the right to verify is separated from the right to read. The format is frozen at v1.0; five independent implementations, three of them made outside the project, reproduce every published value from the specification text and test vectors alone. It is described in IETF Internet-Draft draft-sparysh-pala-audit and can register a chain head with a SCITT transparency service. Palimpsests is the reference implementation: a local-first LLM runtime that writes every request into a PALA-1 chain. OpenSSF Best Practices Gold.