Unit 18 of 22 · Advanced

Data → sim → paper → live

The short version

Progressive authority means an agent earns its way up a ladder — read data, run sims, paper-trade, then trade live — and the Envelope widens one deliberate step at a time. Each rung is a scope on the pod tree, and a human signature is required exactly where scope becomes legally irreversible, not before. Reading a broker account is a reversible OAuth import that lands early; executing against that account is a separate, human-signed connection that lands late — two scopes, never one ask. A dedicated agent account acts as a broker-enforced dollar ceiling, and revocation advances an authority epoch so no stale grant can initiate. Nothing is promoted on vibes: every step up rides signed, replayable receipts. This unit shows why the ladder is structural — the runtime enforces the widening, it is not a policy a caller can talk past.

Authority is climbed, not switched on

An agent does not get "trading access." It climbs a ladder, and each rung widens the Envelope — the single grant of {scope, budget, ceiling, expiry, revocation} — by exactly one step:

  • Data — read a market slice, or a reversible OAuth import of an existing book's positions and watchlist. Commerce-only, a wallet can root it.
  • Sim — run a deterministic simulation over managed licensed data. Still commerce-only; no capital is anywhere near it.
  • Paper — trade a simulated book against live-shaped conditions, producing the same signed receipts a live book would.
  • Live — put real capital at risk.

The Envelope is narrowing-only: a child grant can never widen its parent, so climbing is additive and bounded, never a blank cheque. The reference doc says what the Envelope is; this unit is about why the rungs are ordered this way.

The human signs exactly at the irreversible edge

The two scopes people conflate are broker-read and broker-execution, and the ladder keeps them apart on purpose:

  • Broker-read is the reversible import — "sim your own book." It powers agent-authored personalization and lands early, on a wallet-class grant.
  • Broker-execution is the legally-weighted connection for paper and live promotion. It is human-signed at the term sheet, and it lands late.

A wallet may authorize commerce-only, reversible scopes; a human signs the identity-bound, legally irreversible ones. Live trading authority never extends past a human root.

A worked example

Suppose an agent manages a generic index book. It imports the account read-only (OAuth), runs a month of sims on GENCO and a broad index, and mints certified proofs. To go from paper to live it must cross a human-signed Envelope — and the account it trades is a dedicated agent account, a broker-enforced ceiling: the worst case in dollars is fenced by the broker itself, not by a promise. Revoke, and the authority epoch advances: new initiation is blocked, only bounded management of already-open obligations remains.

See it in kestrel

The first rung costs nothing and needs no account. Mint a certified proof from the anonymous trial:

npx kestrel.markets prove

That runs a default scenario over managed licensed data — no signup, no card, no human — and prints a public, certified proof URL like /proof/art_66d7dda7f0466f69c123463c. Every rung above it is reached by handing a human a receipt like this one, never by asking for trust.

Keep the ladder one command away: drop the kestrel.markets MCP server into your client and the capability returns across sessions — the next rung opens where this one left off, no fresh discovery hop.

Recompute it

Every claim in this unit recomputes from a certified proof — no account, no card.

/proof/art_66d7dda7f0466f69c123463c
Keep readingProofs that reference proofs

Agent twin: /education/kestrel-native/kn-progressive-authority/content.md