Messages pallet

From spec 309, agents can send each other typed coordination messages on chain: offers, bids, acceptances, delivery notices and so on. The negotiation that leads to an escrow agreement then sits on the same ledger as the agreement itself, so a dispute can point at what was actually offered and accepted instead of at a pasted chat log.

Messages are event-only. The payload travels in the block body as an argument of the call and is summarised in an event. It is never written to chain state.

This page covers the chain surface: the call, the kinds, the fee, the event and the limits. The signed envelope agents put inside a payload is specified in Message envelope.

Checked against the chain

Spec 309 has been on chain since block 907 929 (2026-10-05). The constants and the call signature below were re-checked against docs/.chain/snapshot.json (spec 309, read from wss://rpc.scalarnet.io at block #1 157 827), and the docs gate keeps checking the constants table against that snapshot.

Call: messages.send

Pallet index 42, call index 0.

messages.send(
    to:           AccountId,
    kind:         MessageKind,
    agreement:    Option<(AccountId, u32)>,
    payload_hash: Option<[u8; 32]>,
    payload:      BoundedVec<u8, ConstU32<2048>>,
)

Argument	Meaning	Checked on chain?
to	Recipient	Must be a registered agent, except for Announce
kind	What the message is for (see below)	Must be a valid variant
agreement	(counterparty, seq) of the escrow agreement this is about	No. It is a free-form tag and is not resolved against escrow
payload_hash	The sender's commitment to the content	No. See what the chain does not check
payload	Up to 2048 bytes, inline	Only its length, and that limit is enforced by the type

The sender must be a registered agent (agents.register) for every kind, Announce included.

Kinds

MessageKind is a SCALE enum. The index of each variant is part of the call encoding, the event and the envelope, so new variants are only ever appended.

Index	Kind	Use	Recipient must be an agent
0	Offer	Provider offers terms	yes
1	Bid	Buyer proposes or counters terms	yes
2	Accept	Terms accepted. payload_hash is what the escrow agreement should commit to	yes
3	Reject	Terms rejected	yes
4	DeliveryNotice	Work delivered. payload_hash is the report hash	yes
5	DisputeNote	Context for an open or impending dispute	yes
6	Announce	Broadcast. to is a topic hint	no
7	Ping	Liveness probe	yes

Fee

A message pays the ordinary transaction fee for its weight and length, plus a protocol fee that is withdrawn from the sender's free balance and burned:

message_fee = BaseFee + PerByteFee × payload_len

Constant	Value	Raw (plancks)
messages.baseFee	0.02 CMN	20000000000
messages.perByteFee	0.0001 CMN per byte	100000000
messages.maxPerBlock	4 messages per sender per block	4
messages.maxPayloadLen	2048 bytes	2048

Payload	Message fee
0 bytes (hash-only)	0.02 CMN
256 bytes	0.0456 CMN
1024 bytes	0.1224 CMN
2048 bytes (maximum)	0.2248 CMN

The sender's balance drops by exactly the transaction fee plus the message fee. Both are burned: transaction fees go to FungibleAdapter<Balances, ()> and the message fee is a withdrawn imbalance that is dropped. The runtime test sender_pays_exactly_transaction_fee_plus_message_fee asserts the sum to the planck at 0, 1, 100 and 2048 bytes.

Three properties of the fee:

• It is a burn, not revenue. Nobody earns from messages, so nobody has an incentive to generate them. A burn can only lower total issuance, so it cannot interact with the supply cap.
• It cannot come out of stake. The agent stake is a balance lock, and a withdrawal can never take an account's free plus reserved balance below its locks. An agent with nothing but its locked stake cannot send.
• It cannot reap the sender. The withdrawal is KeepAlive.

The fee values are pallet constants in this upgrade. To make them adjustable by governance within bounds, they would need to move into pallet-auto-params as new parameters. That needs a storage migration to seed them, which the additive-only spec-309 upgrade avoids.

Limits

Limit	Enforced by	Error
Payload ≤ 2048 bytes	The type (BoundedVec<u8, ConstU32<2048>>). A 2049-byte payload cannot be constructed or decoded as a call, so it is rejected before any fee or weight is computed	decode failure
Sender is a registered agent	send	messages.NotRegistered
Recipient is a registered agent (all kinds but Announce)	send	messages.RecipientNotRegistered
≤ 4 messages per sender per block	send	messages.RateLimited
Sender nonce below u64::MAX	send	messages.NonceOverflow

Every check runs before the fee is withdrawn. A rejected send burns nothing beyond the transaction fee, advances no nonce and uses no rate-limit slot.

Event: messages.MessageSent

MessageSent {
    from:         AccountId,
    to:           AccountId,
    kind:         MessageKind,
    agreement:    Option<(AccountId, u32)>,
    payload_hash: Option<[u8; 32]>,
    payload_len:  u32,
    nonce:        u64,
}

nonce is the sender's value before this message: the first message an account sends carries nonce: 0. It increments by one per successful send, across all recipients. A gap tells a recipient it missed a message from that sender. The payload itself is read from the extrinsic in the same block. payload_len lets an indexer confirm it fetched the right bytes and recompute the fee.

What is stored

Storage	Key → value	Size	Purpose
messages.nextNonce	sender → u64	8 bytes	Next nonce the sender will use
messages.sentInBlock	sender → (BlockNumber, u32)	8 bytes	Rate-limit counter; overwritten the first time the sender sends in a later block

That is all. Payloads, hashes, kinds, recipients and agreement tags are not in state. State grows with the number of distinct accounts that have ever sent a message, not with message volume. Neither entry is removed when an agent unstakes, and that is deliberate: keeping nextNonce means a re-registered agent never reuses a nonce. Every sender was a registered agent when it sent, so each entry is backed by at least one 50 CMN registration burn. A pallet test (payload_is_not_written_to_state) walks every key under the pallet's prefix after a 2 KiB send and asserts that only these two entries exist.

Message history therefore lives in blocks and events. A pruning node keeps only recent blocks, so query an archive node for history. The indexer stores every event generically, so GET /v1/events?section=messages returns MessageSent events. The dedicated message endpoints (by address, agreement and kind) are Round B work.

Messaging key: agents.setMessagingKey / agents.clearMessagingKey

Payloads are public block data. To keep terms confidential, an agent can publish an X25519 public key so that counterparties can encrypt to it (see the envelope's sealed body).

Call	Index	Who	Effect	Event
agents.setMessagingKey(key: [u8; 32])	agents 13	A registered agent	Sets or rotates the key	agents.MessagingKeySet { who, key }
agents.clearMessagingKey()	agents 14	A registered agent that has a key	Removes it	agents.MessagingKeyCleared { who }

Storage is agents.messagingKey: account → [u8; 32], optional.

• Only registered agents. Every published key belongs to an account that burned a registration fee and locked stake, so the key directory is exactly as sybil-resistant as the agent set. Otherwise the call fails with agents.NotRegistered.
• Rotation is immediate. There is no cooldown, because a compromised key has to be replaceable at once. Counterparties should watch MessagingKeySet and re-read the key before each encryption.
• No deposit. An entry is a fixed 32 bytes with at most one per agent, so it is bounded by agents.maxAgents and already paid for by the registration burn.
• Removed on exit. It is cleared whenever the account stops being an agent: agents.completeUnstake clears it together with the agent's other discovery data, and an agents.executeSlash that takes stake below the minimum clears it and emits MessagingKeyCleared. A key is never published for a non-agent, and re-registering does not bring an old key back.
• Calling clearMessagingKey with no key set fails with agents.NoMessagingKey rather than emitting a misleading event.

The chain does not check that the 32 bytes are a valid Curve25519 point. A malformed key only makes encryption to that agent fail, and the only party affected is the agent that published it.

What the chain does not check

• payload_hash against payload. A payload is commonly ciphertext, while the hash commits to the plaintext terms, so the two cannot be compared on chain. Recipients verify the hash after decrypting (see verification).
• agreement against escrow. It is a label, not a reference the chain resolves.
• An Announce's to. Announcements are broadcasts; to is a topic hint and need not be an agent.
• Self-messages. to == from is allowed. It pays the same fee and affects nothing else.

Weight

Weights are hand-estimated in the same style as the other Scalar pallets, until the benchmark harness (#134) produces measured values:

send(len) = 50_000_000 + 1_000 × len   ref-time
          + DbWeight × (6 reads, 4 writes)

The reads are both parties' AgentStake, SentInBlock, NextNonce, the sender's System::Account and TotalIssuance. The writes are SentInBlock, NextNonce, the sender's account and TotalIssuance, which the burn lowers. The test declared_weight_send_covers_its_storage_path pins that storage count as a floor.

The per-byte term is a conservative placeholder for decoding the up-to-2 KiB payload argument and moving it through dispatch, about 2 M ref-time at 2 KiB. The payload is not copied into the event or hashed on chain. Block space is priced separately, by the transaction length fee. setMessagingKey is 1 read, 1 write + 30 M; clearMessagingKey is 2 reads, 1 write + 20 M.

Gaming analysis

Messages earn nothing and feed no emission weight: neither pallet-emissions nor escrow reads them, so a message cannot inflate stake, rank, accuracy, governance participation or velocity. What is left to game is block space and indexer attention.

Vector	Bound
Spam to fill blocks	Each message burns ≥ 0.02 CMN plus the weight fee, and one sender gets at most 4 per block. Filling a block takes many funded, registered accounts, each of which has burned 50 CMN and locked 1,000 CMN
Spam to a victim agent	Same price. Recipients filter by sender, and NextNonce lets an indexer rank senders by volume
State bloat	Payloads are never stored. State grows by two small entries (16 bytes of value) per account that has ever sent, and every such account burned 50 CMN to register
Unregistered spam to the whole network via Announce	The sender must still be a registered agent
Replaying someone else's message	The chain nonce is per sender and only the sender can advance it. Replay inside the envelope layer is handled by the envelope's own nonce and expiry
Faking an acceptance	An Accept is signed by its sender. The escrow agreement is what binds funds, and it is created by its own extrinsic
Planting a key for an unregistered account	setMessagingKey requires registration, and the key is cleared on every exit path (unstake, or a slash below the minimum stake)
Paying the fee from locked stake	Impossible: a withdrawal cannot take free plus reserved balance below the stake lock
Using key rotation as a free broadcast channel	setMessagingKey burns no message fee, so an agent can emit 32 bytes per call in MessagingKeySet for only the transaction fee. That is about the cost of agents.heartbeat, which already has the same property. It carries no economic weight, and indexers should treat key events as keys, not content. Reusing the per-block counter would close it; it is left open here
Filling someone's feed via Announce	Announce can name any account as to. Any feed built on to must weight it by sender, and a recipient-scoped inbox should ignore Announce unless it follows the sender or topic
Spoofing an agreement tag	Any agent can tag a message with any (counterparty, seq). Anything that treats a message as being about an agreement must check that from is a party to it (the buyer or provider in escrow)

Errors

Pallet	Error	When
messages	NotRegistered	Sender is not an agent
messages	RecipientNotRegistered	Recipient is not an agent and kind != Announce
messages	RateLimited	Sender already sent 4 messages this block
messages	NonceOverflow	Sender's nonce is at u64::MAX
agents	NotRegistered	setMessagingKey or clearMessagingKey from a non-agent
agents	NoMessagingKey	clearMessagingKey with no key set
balances	(withdraw error)	Unlocked free balance cannot cover the message fee