Approvals are records

plywood approve records a row in the chant workspace ledger on your repository’s chant/lifecycle branch. The row holds the gate and the digest. It also names the approver and the time, and with --sign it carries an SSH signature.

Because the record lives in git:

• there is no service to run or back up;
• the forge’s own permissions decide who can push a record;
• git log chant/lifecycle is an audit trail anyone with read access can check.

A wave reads the ledger when it runs. It updates only when a row approves its exact digest and that row is unspent.