There is one record. Its owner is not a wallet but the contract that writes it, which means nothing with hands can revise it, reorder it, or clear it. What it holds at any moment is written in a single struct and nowhere else. It does not trade. It observes the distance between two clocks and writes down what it can prove about that distance.

These are not a delay anyone added. They are two numbers returned by two reads in the same transaction. One gives the L2 block, which advances constantly. The other gives the L1 block the sequencer has synced to, which advances in jumps and sometimes not at all. When the slow clock is standing still the chain is still producing blocks, still filling, still moving money, and none of it has settled. That condition is normal, it is invisible in every other interface built on this chain, and it is the only thing this record looks at.

The record has no loop and nobody runs it. It knows only what a mark tells it, and a mark tells it one pair of readings at one instant. Anyone may call mark. The contract reads both clocks, closes whatever interval it can prove, and credits it. Marking returns a bounty which is a pure function of how long it has been since the last mark, so the longer nobody looks the more it pays to look, and it resets to nothing the moment someone does.

A stall is recorded as at least as long as it was observed to be and never longer. If two marks land inside a stall, the span between them is witnessed. If a stall opens and closes with nobody present, its length is knowable only as a lower bound, and the excess is credited to dark. Dark is not an error term. It is the exact amount of unsettled time that passed with no one looking, and it is as permanent as the other number.

Growth is prewritten. When witnessed crosses the next entry in bands, anyone may call advance, and the contract rerolls the trait bits, moves the form index up one, and writes the crossing permanently with the address that landed it. The bands are in the record, readable now, and there is no band beyond the last one.

If no mark lands within the quiet window, anyone may call lapse. Nothing is destroyed and no vault opens. The running interval is closed at its proven length, the remainder is written to dark, and the form index does not move. Lapse is how the record admits a gap instead of guessing across it.