Global & shared across every zone
The standard
A unit of a grade means the same thing everywhere. The standard — the unit of measure, the grade, the assay, and the registry protocol — is global; only clearing, price, and regulation vary by sovereign zone.
The unit — SPH
Compute is a continuous flow: capability integrated over time (PFLOP/s × hours). The reference unit is SPH — the measured-effective PFLOP-hour, the MWh-of-compute. This is exact, not metaphor: because capability is a rate integrated over time, the capacity/energy split, nodal pricing, and clearing all transfer unit-for-unit from power markets. Hedgers quote in certified GPU-hours, derived from SPH.
The grade
Compute is graded by independent third-party verifiers against a reproducible reference — the commodity-assayer model. Grade is certified per capability type (the global Capability Junction Map), while conformance is proven per asset in the registry. We do not self-certify; the verifiers do.
The reference layer
The reference index is built from real cleared trades — transparent and manipulation-resistant. Prices emerge from the auction; the operator clears, it does not set prices. The reference layer is constructed per sovereign zone from that zone's own cleared trades.
Scope of the determinism standard
The grade assay certifies a reproducible, cross-substrate compute grade: for a defined set of exact operations at f32, no tensor cores, a single portable kernel produces bit-identical output (same SHA-256) on CPU and GPU across NVIDIA, Intel, and AMD, and Linux/macOS/Windows, certified by replication.
It is not bit-identity for transcendentals (~1 ULP); not bit-identity across vendors' own fast libraries or tensor-cores (industry-unsolved, not attempted); not a correctness oracle (it certifies reproduction of a reference, not that arbitrary compute is "right"); and not yet proven at large-GEMM/reduction scale cross-vendor. The assay integration is a stub in this prototype.