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Tessera is a liquidation protocol for permissioned real-world assets. It runs identity-aware Dutch auctions for ERC-3643-style collateral, gates participation through the issuer’s identity registry, and settles atomically through a pluggable settlement adapter. These docs describe the protocol — its primitives, its architecture, its invariants. They are the technical reference for anyone reasoning about how Tessera works.

What Tessera does

The protocol in one paragraph, the three-actor structure, the four-layer architecture.

The composability problem

Why standard liquidation breaks for permissioned tokens, and why incumbents do not extend into the long tail.

Architecture

Registry, identity, auction, and settlement layers. Composed with explicit interfaces.

Invariants

What the protocol guarantees, and how those guarantees are enforced on-chain.

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A note on naming

The protocol’s name comes from the Latin and Italian tessera, the small individual tile used in mosaic work. Each compliant liquidation is a discrete tile in a larger compliance picture; each verified solver, each issuer integration, each settled auction is a small precise unit that composes into a larger continuous infrastructure. Tesserae historically referred to the small clay or stone tablets used as identity credentials in Ancient Rome and the Byzantine Empire — a direct etymological link to the identity-verification core of the protocol.