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arXiv · 2610.33350

EVM-Anchored Provenance for AI-Assisted Code Evolution: A Smoke-Scale Deployment Report

Abstract

We report a smoke-scale deployment of an EVM-anchored provenance framework for the state stream produced by AI-assisted code generation. The system comprises codebase-state-manager, an open-source Model Context Protocol (MCP) server (MIT, v0.2.1) that exposes codebase state, transition, and reward operations to any MCP-compatible assistant, and CodebaseStateRegistry, a Solidity contract deployed on Base Sepolia that emits per-state commitment events. Payloads are pinned to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and indexed through a rebuildable SQLite mirror that resynchronizes by replaying contract events. We delimit precisely what anchoring does and does not attest (existence, ordering, and non-equivocation by the committer key; never truthfulness or fabrication-prevention) and outline the orthogonal supply-chain controls required to close that gap. Under an author-produced synthetic workload on a local Anvil simulator, the median commit costs 103,282 gas, modeled at US$0.0018-0.0035 in rollup fees per commit (US$17.9-34.8 per 10,000 states), and simulator latency for the create operation is 539.8 ms (p50) and 725.0 ms (p95) under loopback storage and instant mining. The live deployment holds 14 StateCommitted events verifiable on-chain; the last consumed 98,977 gas at 1 gwei (about US$0.30). All empirical figures are descriptive quantiles from a single author run; no testnet latency is reported, and no claim of superiority is made against any baseline. A receipts-trie consumption mechanism, a BountyEscrow use case, and a FAIR-aligned dataset publication pattern are specified as outlook and are not implemented. A property-by-property comparison against OpenTimestamps, Sigstore Rekor, Centrifuge AnchorRegistry, in-toto/SLSA, Radicle, and Lalli et al. places this work relative to the surrounding provenance landscape.

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BibTeXRIS

Einar César Santos. 2026-10-23. EVM-Anchored Provenance for AI-Assisted Code Evolution: A Smoke-Scale Deployment Report. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.33350

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