The registry

The registry does not decide anything. Positions are computed by the engine from public, archived evidence under the published rules; the registry only records the results that warrant a durable, independently checkable certificate. A record here restates what the engine computed and carries a signature so that a firm, a journalist, or a court can confirm it without trusting this site or its stewards.

Issued certificates

Each certificate verifies offline against the committed public key; open one to see the signature checked.

Award records

An award record recognises a top-five position, or a tenure milestone a firm reaches by holding a rank across quarters. It is emitted by the engine from a signed edition, never drafted by hand, and it restates the exact position: firm, table, period, rank, score, the rules version in force, and the dataset tag it derives from. Awards are rank-upward-only, consistent with the Constitution — the registry never records a negative.

Each award carries a permanent registry id in a fixed scheme:

CNST-2026-Q2-IN-SNB-SMB-R01-3F9A
     │    │  │  │   │   │   └ 4-hex checksum of the record
     │    │  │  │   │   └ rank held  (R01 … R05)
     │    │  │  │   └ tier           (SMB · ENT)
     │    │  │  └ category code      (fixed by the taxonomy)
     │    │  └ geography             (ISO-style code)
     │    └ period                   (YYYY-Qn · YYYY-ED · YYYY-MM)
     └ prefix

The code segments are the same tokens that anchor table URLs and never change once published, so a certificate issued in one period remains resolvable in later years.

Extraordinary admissions

An admission is the second and only other place a human touches the system (GOVERNANCE §5). On a documented request, the steward committee may admit a firm that falls below a table's evidence floor, on the strength of an extraordinary, independently verified public contribution. An admission grants a floor exception for that one table and period; it does not set a rank or score. The engine still computes the admitted firm's position from its evidence, so determinism holds: an admission is a committed input, exactly like an evidence file. Both outcomes are recorded — approved decisions the engine consumes, and declined ones kept for the public trail.

Admissions carry their own id scheme, keyed to the firm slug:

ADM-2026-Q2-IN-SNB-SMB-ostler-architecture-office-1A2B
    │    │  │  │   │   └ firm slug                    └ 4-hex checksum
    │    │  │  │   └ tier
    │    │  │  └ category code
    │    │  └ geography
    │    └ period effective from
    └ prefix

An admitted firm is marked admitted in the ledger and on its record page, with a link to the decision, so the exception is never hidden. Because an admission is a floor exception and never a penalty, no adverse deduction is applied to an extraordinary entry, and the exception lapses once the firm clears the floor on its own evidence.

How a record is verified

Every record is signed over the canonical byte encoding of a fixed payload — sorted keys, rounded numbers, one and only one serialization — using the protocol's Ed25519 key. Only the public half of the key is committed to the repository (registry/keys/); private keys never enter it. Because the public key lives in the record, anyone can check a signature offline, against the repository, without trusting this website.

Each certificate has its own verification page showing the canonical payload, the signature, and the public key that validates it — the check runs at build and is shown as a genuine result, not a claim. The example walks through the mechanism step by step.

Where the records live

• registry/awards/ — award records (signed once the key exists).
• registry/admissions/ — extraordinary-admission decisions, approved and declined.
• registry/keys/ — the public key chain: genesis, publishing, and annual rotation records.

The full record — awards, admissions, keys, rules, evidence, and corrections — is plain-text Git history, so the registry can be verified, audited, or forked with the record intact.