Readiness Summary

One page. What's production-ready, what's pilot-ready, what's testnet-only, and what's blocked on external work. The deeper diligence index is at Enterprise Readiness; this page distils it for fast reads.

Current positioning. Brain Core is a credible staging / controlled-pilot autonomous finance core. It is not yet "unrestricted production mainnet" until the external smart-contract audit clears and mainnet bytecode is verified.

What's production-ready today

• Six-layer protocol (Raw, Ledger, Wiki, Policy, Agent, Audit) with strict layer boundaries enforced by lint guards.
• §6 deterministic pre-execution gate. 23 entries (13 numbered + 10 hardening), no LLM judgement, no Wiki reads, no skip paths.
• Append-only audit chain with Merkle anchoring to Base. /v1/audit/verify is unauthenticated. Verifiable without trusting Brain.
• External-agent MCP surface (JSON-RPC 2.0) with HMAC handshake and per-tenant rate limits.
• Postgres RLS + least-privilege role separation at the storage layer: the request path runs as brain_app (FORCE ROW LEVEL SECURITY) and every cross-tenant job/resolver runs under one of eight scoped BYPASSRLS roles (each limited to its layer's tables), so cross-tenant access is impossible by construction once infra/db-roles.sql is applied.
• AES-256-GCM credential encryption at rest (Azure Key Vault in production).
• 7+ fail-closed boot fences. Misconfigured deploys fail to start rather than running degraded.
• Tenant deletion (GDPR Article 17 database scope).

What's pilot-ready

Suitable for controlled-pilot use under SLA, not yet for unrestricted production.

• Payment rails on Base Sepolia: bank_ach (Plaid sandbox or production), onchain_base, x402_base, escrow_base. All four register at boot when env is present.
• Internal AI agents: reconciliation, payment, anomaly. Run under inbound HMAC + the §6 gate on every proposal.
• Document ingestion without Plaid (RFC 0004): an uploaded document (CSV / text / XLSX; PDF deferred) flows through POST /raw/{id}/parsed → the document_extractor agent → doc_obligation_v1 normalize → a candidate obligation (confidence ≤ 0.5), answerable by the Wiki question endpoint. The components are wired; the upload-to-extract auto-trigger is a follow-up.
• Earned-autonomy confidence gate (RFC 0004 §5.2): a tenant policy rule agent.confidence.gte gates a payment on the confidence of the evidence it rests on. A document-extracted obligation starts low-confidence and must be corroborated (reconciliation lifts it upward-only, ≤ 0.9) or confirmed before it can drive an unattended payment. The §6 gate is unchanged and still reads Ledger, never Wiki.
• Investor-grade demo: pnpm run demo:golden-path with BRAIN_DEMO_STRICT_PROOF=true proves the full chain end-to-end (propose → gate → execute → anchor → verify) in one command.
• Operator readiness tools: pnpm run production-readiness aggregates per-rail + per-fence + per-guard status (and reads docs/risk-register.json) into a single go/no-go readout. Open P0 risks pin the result to red. Each row also carries evidence_state (exercised, configured, scaffolded, or missing), and profile gates fail when staging/mainnet evidence is too weak. The PR CI workflow uploads the JSON as a per-commit artifact; pnpm run readiness-trend prints the per-release trajectory from docs/readiness-history/. pnpm run readiness:evidence -- --profile staging emits a diligence-ready markdown report.

What's testnet-only

• BrainEscrow (USDC custodial escrow, RFC 0001 §7.6). Deployed on Base Sepolia; mainnet deploy is boot-fenced pending external audit.
• onchain_base and x402_base rails are wired against Base Sepolia by default. Mainnet promotion is per-tenant config, gated by the same boot fences.

What is automated today

• Docker VM production deploy. GitHub Actions builds GHCR images, deploys to the Docker VM on green main, runs migrations before recreate, and smokes https://api.brain.fi/health.

What requires external work (not yet done)

• External smart-contract audit of the six contracts (BrainAuditAnchor, BrainPolicyRegistry, BrainSmartAccount, BrainMCPAgentRegistry, BrainEscrow, BrainReputationRegistry). contracts/AUDIT-SCOPE.md is ready; engagement is pending.

What requires customer deployment work

• Applying infra/db-roles.sql to the production Postgres instance (creates brain_app, brain_wiki_reader, and the eight least-privilege cross-tenant roles) and provisioning each role's BRAIN_*_DB_URL (all required at boot in production).
• Configuring Azure Key Vault credentials for the source-credential AES key, or using the documented non-production env-var key path outside production.
• Setting BRAIN_ESCROW_AUDIT_RECEIPT to the audit report URL/hash (or the legacy BRAIN_ESCROW_AUDIT_APPROVED="true") once the audit completes and bytecode is verified.
• Running the existing pnpm run production-readiness check against the customer env before promotion. It reports readiness per deploy stage (demo / staging / mainnet), so the staged story is explicit rather than one aggregate: demo is ready today, staging needs exercised testnet rail evidence, and mainnet needs the external contract audit. Scope a gate with --profile <stage>.
• Running pnpm run readiness:evidence -- --profile staging for every release candidate. The report lists row status, evidence state, promotion blockers, audit status, rail posture, connector guard status, and known limitations. Staging fails if core safety rows remain scaffolded rather than exercised.

How to verify any claim on this page

Each item maps to a code or runtime anchor in Enterprise Readiness. For runtime claims, the brain.runtime.capabilities log line at boot reports the per-rail + per-fence state; for static claims, the lint guards at pnpm run lint enforce the boundaries in CI.

Risk register

The open risks corresponding to "what requires external work" and "pilot-ready" categorisation are tracked in the Risk Register with current mitigation, owner, status, and exit criteria per risk.