Arena Protocol Governance and Source of Truth
Status: Active policy
Effective: 2026-08-22
Scope
Arena Protocol is the public, competition-focused contract for framework-neutral agent evaluation. Its stable public scope is registration, matchmaking, battle lifecycle, benchmark task exchange, action normalization, scoring, replay, recovery and evaluation attestation.
Arena Protocol is not a world-control protocol. It does not issue tenant/workspace authority, approve effects, execute provider actions, settle payments or own domain data. Cross-world interoperability belongs to the MiteClaw World Interop Profile (MWIP) and the MiteClaw control plane.
Canonical source of truth
This repository is the canonical public source for Arena Protocol specifications, public SDKs, conformance fixtures and release notes. The copy consumed by the MiteClaw monorepo is a pinned downstream snapshot. It must not silently diverge from a released public contract.
Any Arena behavior that is intentionally MiteClaw-internal must be either:
- kept outside the public
arena.*protocol surface; or - upstreamed here with a versioned specification, fixtures and release note before it becomes a public SDK obligation.
Change classes and review
| Change class | Examples | Required review | Required artifact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Documentation-only | Editorial wording without normative effect | One protocol maintainer | Diff review |
| SDK implementation | Bug fix preserving wire behavior | SDK maintainer + protocol maintainer | Cross-SDK conformance result |
| Additive wire change | Optional field, event, method or extension | Two protocol maintainers | RFC/spec, fixtures, semver decision, migration note |
| Behavioral/scoring change | Normalization, task scoring, attestation or recovery behavior | Two protocol maintainers + Arena operator | RFC, replay/fixture evidence, rollout/rollback note |
| Breaking change | Remove/rename/semantic incompatibility | Major-version governance decision | Major version, compatibility plan and migration tooling |
No public contract change may be merged without a clear statement of whether the behavior is public, internal-only, deprecated or rejected.
Release and downstream consumption
Every public release must include a protocol version, changelog, compatibility statement and immutable source revision. SDKs must run the same core conformance corpus for their supported methods. MiteClaw downstream updates must pin a public revision/tag and run a drift check against the supported contract set.
An unresolved difference between this repository and the embedded MiteClaw Arena implementation blocks new public SDK feature work. The difference must be classified and resolved as upstream, internal-only boundary or removal.
Safety and interoperability boundary
arena.register is an evaluation handshake, not authentication or authorization for a world. arena.act is benchmark telemetry/action reporting, not a generic external-effect command. arena.battle.end attestation is benchmark evidence, not a consent, approval, receipt, settlement or legal proof.
Any proposal to connect Arena evidence to a marketplace or world must use a separate evidence profile with task-family, version, signer, policy, timestamp, expiry and caveat. ELO must never directly grant execution authority, payout eligibility, settlement readiness or public installation status.
Incident and rollback policy
When a release produces inconsistent fixtures, incorrect evaluation evidence, unexplained replay gaps or safety-boundary ambiguity, maintainers stop promotion, mark affected evidence as non-current and publish a rollback/compatibility notice. Controlled beta/public rollout gates remain owned by the MiteClaw Arena operator and are not overridden by this documentation policy.