Sovereign Trace Protocol: A Cryptographic Infrastructure for Permanent Significance Registration Across Plural Civilizational Time Systems

This paper introduces the Sovereign Trace Protocol (STP), a cryptographic infrastructure for permanent significance registration that binds a moment in time across three simultaneous civilizational calendar systems: the Gregorian civil calendar, the Hebrew lunisolar calendar with full four-dehiyot computation, and the 13 Moon Dreamspell calendar. Each seal is a SHA-256 hash computed locally from Python's standard library with zero external dependencies, zero trusted third parties, and no network requirement. The seal is tamper-evident, reproducible offline, and permanently verifiable by any party with access to the public parameters and FROZEN-4.0 source code. STP operates at two scales. At the individual scale, it provides a sovereignty-first permanence infrastructure for personal record-keeping — the cryptographic registration of observations, decisions, and experiences in a form that is not contingent on institutional intermediaries or audience acknowledgment. At the organizational scale, it introduces the Epistemic Debt Score (EDS), a five-component metric for measuring AI governance integrity: the degree to which an organization maintains a tamper-evident, append-only record of AI system failures, resolves them at a documented rate, and demonstrates improvement over time. The protocol is released as FROZEN-4.0 — a frozen, permanently deployed implementation with 82 self-test checks passing, a documented four-version retirement lineage, and a structured red-team findings log of 48 findings (45 PDE diagnostic findings and 3 MPTE meta-diagnostic findings), all resolved or formally declared open. The paper applies its own epistemic tagging system throughout, distinguishing directly observed claims, reasoned inferences, strategic assessments, and open questions — including explicit declaration of unmitigated vulnerabilities and unvalidated constructs.