LEDGER CANONICALIZATION RULES

0. Purpose

This document defines how ledger payloads are transformed into canonical form before hashing.

Canonicalization guarantees:

Deterministic hashing

Replay consistency

Cross-node hash equality

Cryptographic immutability

If canonicalization differs across environments, the protocol is broken.

1. Core Principle

Hash(input) must be identical across:

OS

Runtime

Language version

Time

Node ordering

Developer machine

No implicit behavior allowed.

2. Canonicalization Scope

Canonicalization applies to:

GovernanceRecordV1

LedgerEntry

PolicyV1

Settlement payload metadata