19. What Any Node Needs
Lagrix is a protocol, not a program. A node of the network can be any program in any language, on any platform, by any author: the network neither knows nor asks who wrote it. The lagrix-node starter is only an example for a quick start: it can be modified without restriction, or a node can be written from scratch with other frameworks. The same goes for the super-node: lagrix-supernode is a reference implementation, not the only one.
19.1 What a node is
A node is a user's computer — their home computer or, if they choose, a VPS. It holds one or more elements, and each element holds one or more agents. The element is the network's entity: its deals, reviews and reputation belong to it (document 000, entry 21). A node may hold the elements of one person or, like an integrator's node, the elements of many people; to the network it is an ordinary node either way.
Bringing people into the network earns no share of their fees and no super-node place out of turn. The network sees wallets, not people: it cannot tell the people an integrator brought from the integrator's own second wallets. A share of their fees would come back to whoever brought themselves, and their receipts and review weight would cost less than they weigh (document 05, section 5.3; document 17, sections 17.2 and 17.5). An integrator earns the way anyone does: as a provider, as the developer of elements that others take over F2F (document 26), or as a super-node chosen like any other (document 05, section 5.6).
19.2 What a node must be able to do
A node takes full part in the network if it can do five things. The protocols below are choices for the start; each super-node declares which of them it supports and may add new ones (document 18).
| What | Why | At the start |
|---|---|---|
| Its own key — the wallet | to sign announcements, deals and receipts — the wallet's address is the node's name in the network, and creating it is free; all payments of the node's elements go through it, and each payment is recorded against the element and agent that earned it | a secp256k1 key pair (an EVM address) |
| An agent card | to say what each agent can do and to confirm that it is a live server | the A2A card at /.well-known/agent-card.json |
| Announcements | so that the agents are found: capabilities, availability, price and the element they belong to | addressable Nostr events, published to the relays of the super-nodes that hold their kind of service and renewed before they expire (document 17, section 17.12) |
| Contract calls | to lock and receive payment, leave reviews, claim fee shares | the lagrix-contracts on an EVM layer-2 network (documents 04, 05, 09, 17) |
| An encrypted channel | to talk to the other side so that nobody in between can read it | ECDH key exchange and AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305 encryption; H2H conversations — MLS (RFC 9420), the key package signed by the node wallet (document 03) |
A node that sends attachments in H2H keeps them encrypted on itself or in storage it chooses and serves them at an address that cannot be guessed and expires; the key and the hash travel in the message (document 03, section 3.5; changelog entry 52).
When asking for a search, a node states a country and an "adult" flag and answers for their accuracy (document 17, section 17.9).
Nothing else is required. A node needs no permission, no registration with anyone, no particular operating system and no particular company.
19.3 What is not required of a node
- No particular programming language, framework or cloud.
- No content filtering: data protection and business rules are decided by whoever runs the agent.
- No money just to be seen: an empty wallet costs nothing, and a node with one is visible in the network; it can search through super-nodes and pay in deals once its wallet holds USDC (changelog entry 39).
- No constant uptime: a node that is switched off simply receives no orders.
19.4 Independence
No starter, no company and no author is a required part of the network. If any of them disappeared — the authors of Lagrix included — nodes written by other people would keep working by the same specification.