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THOX.ai Research · Technical report v1.0.1 · 2026-11-03

Preprint, not peer reviewed

THOX MeshStack: Capacity-Priced Pipeline Sharding, Grant-Gated KV Transfer and Lease-Fenced Device Roles for a Private Household Mesh

Two design lineages reconciled into one specification, with the parts that run on a general host measured, the parts that depend on public device floors calculated, and the parts that need a fleet stated as a gated protocol.

Craig Ross

Chief Executive Officer

ORCID 0009-0005-9872-3673

Tommy Xaypanya

CTO and Co-Founder (corresponding author)

ORCID 0009-0000-4425-9565

THOX.ai LLC · Cedar Park, Texas

DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23919580

Abstract

A household owns several small computers that are idle most of the day and together hold more memory than any one of them. Today every serving path in the THOX fleet routes a whole request to one node that already holds a whole model, so the largest model a home can run is bounded by its largest device. This paper reconciles two THOX design lineages for MeshStack™, the private device mesh, into one specification and tests the parts of it that can be tested without a device fleet. The design has four mechanisms: a capacity-priced pipeline sharder whose two-domain admission rule fails closed; a KV cache organised as a parent-chained, HMAC-keyed graph whose cross-node transfer is gated by both a cost model and a live authority path; a lease-fenced role layer that keeps device owners sovereign under routine churn; and a control plane that degrades to a 239-byte LoRa carrier when the LAN is gone. We report measured results for the mechanisms that run on a general host: lossless compression of real bfloat16 KV state from Qwen2.5-0.5B reaches 1.51x with a byte-split zstd codec at 122 MB/s encode on a 2-vCPU host, with every round trip verified bit-exact; parent-chained HMAC keying costs 9.7 microseconds per 64-token chunk. We report calculated results where the inputs are public: at the published THOX class floors (2, 4 and 6 GB) a three-device mesh cannot place the 27.8B demo model used by the current reference implementation at any usable fraction we tried, which contradicts the reference demo’s fixtures and is the paper’s central negative result. A simulation of the lease protocol shows that epoch fencing rejects every stale completion and that consumption-time validity removes the stale authorisation window that a cached decision leaves open. No engine throughput, no cross-host run and no device measurement is claimed; the evaluation protocol that would produce those numbers is stated with its claim gate.

In one line

MeshStack connects authenticated THOX devices into one private system, pools the devices and resources the user chooses, and places work where it fits; larger model classes run device-plus-hub.

1.51×

Lossless bf16 KV compression, byte-split zstd-3, real Qwen2.5-0.5B state

Measured

9.7 µs

Per 64-token parent-chained HMAC-SHA256 chunk key

Measured

3/3

Stale completions rejected by epoch fencing in the lease-protocol simulation

Simulated

27.8B

The largest model class in the study runs device-plus-hub: layers placed where they fit across the pool, with a hub in the mesh

Calculated

Download the paper (PDF)Zenodo record

Contents

  1. Executive summary
  2. 1. Introduction
  3. 2. Background and related work
  4. 3. System and threat model
  5. 4. Design
  6. 5. Implementation
  7. 6. Evaluation
  8. 7. Discussion and limitations
  9. 8. Conclusion
  10. 9. Roadmap and decisions for the founders
  11. Appendix A. Reproducibility
  12. Appendix B. Notation
  13. Appendix C. Authorship and disclosure
  14. References

Where the paper lives

  • Zenodo record (DOI)

    Version of record: the v1.0.1 public edition, published 2026-11-03, CC BY 4.0

  • GitHub paper repository

    The thox-meshstack-paper repository: paper source, experiment code, and the publication record

  • Browser demo

    Runs the chunk keying (with known-answer tests), two-domain admission, PLACE crossover and LoRa airtime logic client-side with the paper’s measured data

  • Experiments and build pipeline

    The thox-meshstack-inference repository, papers/research-paper-v1.0.1: experiment scripts, raw results, summary.json, figures and the render pipeline

  • Hugging Face whitepapers dataset

    The v1.0.1 public edition (HTML and PDF) in the meshstack folder of Thox-ai/thox-whitepapers

Cite this paper

@misc{ross_craig_2026_23919580,
  author       = {Ross, Craig and
                  Xaypanya, Tommy},
  title        = {{THOX MeshStack: Capacity-Priced Pipeline Sharding,
                   Grant-Gated KV Transfer and Lease-Fenced Device Roles
                   for a Private Household Mesh}},
  month        = nov,
  year         = 2026,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  version      = {v1.0.1},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.23919580},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23919580}
}

Licensed CC BY 4.0, matching the Zenodo record.

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