Not a shared chain. A nation of your own.
The instinct, on first hearing "one platform for many nations," is to picture a shared network - a common ledger onto which each participant is admitted as a tenant. The Federation is the opposite of that arrangement, and the distinction is the whole point.
Each nation in the Federation runs its own chain. Its own currency. Its own validator set, on infrastructure it owns. Its own law, enforced inside consensus rather than promised above it. Its own treasury and its own cryptographic proof. What the nations share is not a ledger but an engine- a single, hardened core, the same battle-tested ACL consensus and the same compliance-native execution running beneath every cell. Same engine; entirely separate sovereign networks. No foreign community governs your settlement, no shared operator can freeze your funds, and no neighbouring nation can see inside your books.
Same engine, separate sovereigns. The Federation grants reach. Currency, rulebook, and the right to refuse stay with the cell. The commercial license is Class A or Class B.
How sovereigns settle without a trusted middleman
Sovereignty that cannot transact is merely isolation. The harder achievement is letting two independent nations move value between them without either one surrendering its rules - and without a shared intermediary that both must trust. The Federation offers two paths to this, and both re-check the destination's own compliance policy on arrival, so a nation never accepts inbound value that fails its own law.
Governed corridors
A federation corridor is a formally opened channel between two cells. The destination pins the source's identity and the exact arrival policy that inbound value must satisfy; releases are dual-signed, protected against replay by settlement identifier, and credited only after passing the destination's own in-consensus compliance gate, which anchors its decision for the record. A corridor is a diplomatic instrument rendered in cryptography: deliberate, auditable, and revocable.
Trust-minimized inter-cell settlement
The second path removes the intermediary altogether. In the IBC-style model, a destination cell accepts a cross-border packet only after it has verified, for itself, a header signed by more than two-thirds of the source nation's validator power, together with a mathematical proof that the packet truly exists in the state that header commits to. Value is escrowed at the source and credited at the destination; replays are refused by on-chain receipts; a relayer carries the headers and proofs automatically. No hub sits in the middle holding trust. Each nation verifies the other by mathematics, then applies its own arrival policy before crediting a single unit.
Two reference cells, already live and federated
The Federation is not a diagram. Two reference cells run today as demonstrations, each with its own currency object and federated to the other. Issuance stays off until a licensing event:
- The Nation 1 cell is a fictional reference cell, designed to a national virtual-asset regulatory framework, with currency object JN1, on chain jil-cell-demo-1. It is not a Class A or Class B purchase. The commercial license is Class A or Class B.
- The Nation 2 cell is a fictional reference cell, designed to a national monetary-authority regulatory framework, with currency object JN2, on chain jil-cell-demo2-1. The demonstration is JIL-operated. It is not a Class A or Class B purchase.
Every validator in each cell carries a post-quantum identity - ML-DSA-65 (Dilithium, FIPS 204) pinned at genesis - a posture chosen for infrastructure meant to outlast the cryptography of its founding decade. The regulatory framings are illustrative reference postures for demonstration; they are not statements of a signed national programme.
Stated plainly, in candour
The two reference cells are single-node today. Binding the inter-cell light client to real ACL (Attested Consensus Layer) consensus signatures is on the hardening roadmap, to be closed before a nation carries real value. Agreement on the recorded fleet is 10 of 10 responding validators, all operated by JIL. That is not Byzantine fault tolerance. What is demonstrated is demonstrated. What is roadmap is named as roadmap.
Class A, Class B, hubs, and annexes
The commercial license is a class, not a second engine. Class A and Class B license the same core. What shifts is the joining fee, the annual fee, and the desk the paper names for that class.
- Class A. $2,500,000 to join and $400,000 a year. The paper names this class for global commodities and tier 1 nations. The corridor credential stays on the root.
- Class B. $1,500,000 to join and $250,000 a year. The paper names this class for regional hubs and philanthropic desks. India on the showcase is the worked example. It is not a purchase claim.
- Hubs and annexes. Up to 10 hubs are included. A hub past that is $25,000 a year on the sovereign. That is not a second license. The hub license stays $0. An annex license is $0. A new hub under a hub is rejected.
An invitation to the constellation
The Federation begins with two. The two reference cells are live as demonstrations, federated across a governed corridor, with issuance gated off until a licensing event. That is a working proof of the model: a nation can keep its rules and still transact with its neighbour. The architecture is designed for the third nation, and the tenth, and the fiftieth: each a sovereign of its own economy, none a tenant of anyone else's.
Standing up a sovereign root is a licensing and provisioning engagement. The October 2026 white paper states the architecture and the license. The worked example is at https://jilsovereign.net/demo.