> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.inkwell.finance/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Methodology

> The four status tags behind every Dagon benchmark number, and the rules for citing each one.

> **CONFIDENTIAL & PROPRIETARY © 2026 Inkwell Finance, Inc. All Rights Reserved.**
>
> This document is for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or investment advice, nor an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security or other financial instrument. Any examples, structures, or flows described here are design intent only and may change.

Performance claims in a pre-alpha FHE product are easy to get wrong:
per-op microbenches projected into graph-level wall-clock; numbers
from a different graph quoted as current-state; scheme comparisons
that mix hardware tiers. Dagon's benchmark discipline is built around
four status tags. Every number in the pitch, the docs, and the
dashboard must fit one of them.

## The four tags

<CardGroup cols={2}>
  <Card title="✓ measured" icon="circle-check">
    Wall-clock recorded end-to-end on the real graph. **Parity
    verified** against the plaintext shadow within tolerance.
    Reproducible from a committed script. Cite directly.
  </Card>

  <Card title="⚠ measured-with-caveat" icon="triangle-exclamation">
    Wall-clock recorded but correctness is compromised — typically
    CKKS at a bootstrap chain depth that exceeds the absolute noise
    floor. Cite **only** with the failure mode stated inline.
  </Card>

  <Card title="⊘ projected" icon="compass">
    Computed from measured per-op times × the target graph's op
    histogram. No end-to-end wall-clock run. Acceptable when the
    full-graph run OOMs locally; never cite without the "(projected)"
    suffix.
  </Card>

  <Card title="✗ extrapolated from SOTA" icon="book-open">
    Not run at all; computed from published literature constants
    (e.g., a published per-bootstrap cost). Always cite as "expected," never
    "measured."
  </Card>
</CardGroup>

## Rules for citation

1. **Always attach the tag.** "CKKS on H100 runs the production
   matcher in 257 s (measured, parity FAILED)" is OK. "CKKS on H100
   is 257 s" is not.

2. **Any `measured-with-caveat` number must state the failure mode
   inline.** The 257 s H100 CKKS run measured graph throughput,
   **not** end-to-end correctness. Decryption after the bisection
   chain diverges from the plaintext shadow by more than tolerance.
   Every use of the number must acknowledge that. See
   [Why CKKS fails at scale](/dagon/performance/why-ckks-fails).

3. **Next-generation-backend numbers are always prefixed
   `expected`.** The production-target FHE backend is pre-alpha.
   Any figure for it is a target derived from public primitive
   costs, not a measurement.

4. **Compare same hardware.** "TFHE on CPU at 731 ms vs CKKS on H100
   at 257 s" is an apples-to-oranges comparison. CPU vs CPU or GPU vs
   GPU only.

5. **Name the precision tier.** The match circuit exists at several
   precision tiers that differ in op count. Numbers measured at one
   tier are not interchangeable with another.

6. **Logged or it didn't happen.** Every `measured` and
   `measured-with-caveat` number is backed by a committed run log.
   "It was 7.77 s on H100" without a log reference is not a
   defensible claim.

## Why this discipline matters

Three things go wrong in FHE benchmarking when the discipline isn't
enforced:

* **Graph-swap smuggling**: a number measured on a small development
  circuit gets cited as the current-state number for a much larger
  production circuit. The kind of mistake that produces an order-of-
  magnitude over-projection.

* **Correctness laundering**: GPU wall-clocks get reported without
  the decryption round-trip. A throughput number that doesn't pass
  parity is not the same as a correctness-preserving match
  wall-clock; the word "measured" without qualification hides that.

* **Extrapolation without provenance**: "the next-gen scheme will
  be under 1 second" with no path to how. Defensible extrapolations
  are op-count × per-primitive cost × overhead. An undefended claim
  isn't a number.

## Active gaps

| cell                               | how to fill                            | cost             |
| ---------------------------------- | -------------------------------------- | ---------------- |
| CKKS on H100 (alternative library) | run on H100 pod                        | small pod cost   |
| Next-gen FHE end-to-end            | wait for production SDK                | blocked upstream |
| Improved scheduler                 | move from O(N²) pairwise to O(N log N) | engineering      |

All three are tracked. None of them change the headline number.