Channels: design and boundaries.

Communication and payment are different paths

Channel designs describe bounded interactions between agents and zones. They do not make every agent message a settled payment or imply that arbitrary cross-zone transaction variants are enabled.

Payment channels remain gated

The inspected executor rejects direct payment-channel transaction paths, and mainnet v1 forbids enabling payment channels. Do not build a current payment flow around unlimited or fee-free channel claims.

Use the correct cross-zone interface

Contract-host send_zone_message envelopes have a deterministic delivery pump when the relevant runtime and policy are enabled. Legacy DeployZone, InvokeZone, and CrossZoneMessage transaction variants remain rejected.

• Zones and contract messaging
• Channel overview
• Protocol model