reading the protocol

A request to the gateway is a single envelope: a small header describing who is asking and what they want, followed by an opaque payload the gateway never inspects. The header carries a nonce so the same request can't be silently replayed, and a signature over both header and payload so nothing can be tampered with in transit.

The gateway's only real job is routing. It reads the header, decides which handler owns that kind of request, and forwards the envelope unchanged. Because the payload is opaque, the gateway can sit between mutually distrustful parties without ever learning what passes through it — a property we lean on heavily for end-to-end encryption.

When a handler is slow or absent, the gateway does not block. It writes the envelope to a queue and returns a ticket; the caller polls the ticket, or registers a webhook to be told when the work lands. Nothing in the path holds state longer than it has to, which is what lets a single node be restarted mid-flight without dropping a request.

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