Channels

A channel is the top-level scoping unit in CRE Connect. Every other resource — watchers, wallets, events, and operations — lives inside exactly one channel. Channels give you:

• Isolation. Two unrelated business flows (for example, a regulated-fund subscription pipeline and a treasury operations pipeline) can run side-by-side without ever sharing event streams or watcher state.
• A single, ordered event stream. All events produced inside a channel — watcher events, operation status updates, wallet status updates, watcher status updates — are delivered through one paginated stream.
• A simple lifecycle. A channel is either active or archived. Archiving a channel disables it for future writes; the immutable event history remains queryable.

When to create a separate channel

Use a separate channel whenever you want a separate audit trail, a separate set of subscribers, or a separate set of watchers. Common patterns:

• One channel per environment — a staging channel for testnets and a production channel for mainnets.
• One channel per business line — a dta-fund-A channel for one tokenized fund and a dta-fund-B channel for another.
• One channel per integration — useful when integrating CRE Connect into multiple downstream services that should not see each other's events.

There is no hard limit on the number of channels per tenant; create as many as your operational model needs.

What lives in a channel

Each channel owns:

• A set of Watchers that monitor on-chain contracts (see Watchers).
• A set of Wallets (Smart Accounts) authorized to execute operations (see Smart Accounts).
• An ordered, immutable stream of Events in four shapes — watcher.event, watcher.status, wallet.status, and operation.status — each carrying an Off-Chain Reporting (OCR) proof for verification.
• A history of submitted Operations and their lifecycle transitions.

Channel lifecycle

Channels move through two states only:

A channel cannot be archived while it has active watchers. Every watcher in the channel must be archived first.

Related

• Watchers and Smart Accounts — the resources that live inside a channel.
• Verifiable Events — what the channel-scoped event stream delivers.