About

What this is, who makes it, and what it deliberately is not.

Substrata maps the bottlenecks on the path to much faster technological progress: the constraints that decide how quickly compute, energy, materials, robotics and manufacturing can actually be built. For each one it records why it binds, who makes it, what has happened to it lately, which rules govern it, and which technology could remove it.

The research is free and public. Every row is either backed by a source you can open or marked as unverified, and the site shows which. That distinction is the whole product: a map of this kind is only worth reading if it is honest about what it has not checked.

It is also open. If you work in one of these chains, the fastest way to change what this site says is to say so — every page carries a link that files the correction in public.

Where it stands today

Producer rows: 99 of 113
Events recorded: 24
Building since: 2026-08-26

Who makes it

Said plainly, because a research project that is vague about its own size is asking to be trusted for the wrong reasons.

An open project, not a private one: The data, the method, the code and the list of what has not been checked are all public. Anyone can read how a row got here, disagree with it in the open, and change it. That is the point of publishing rather than a side effect of it.
Contributors, and how to become one: The contributor list is short and the project is young. The parts that need expert knowledge — which firm ships the qualified grade, what a lead time really is, where an export control actually bites — are exactly the parts that cannot be settled from a desk. If that is your work, the Join page says which rows would benefit most.
Research assisted by software, checked by people: Automated agents search for sources and file candidates; they never publish. A person reads the source before a row is marked verified, and the site shows which rows have had that read and which have not. The automation widens the search. It does not lower the bar.
Built in public since 2026-08-26: The whole site is generated from files in a public repository, so its history is the commit log. Nothing is backdated, and every correction is visible as a commit.
Not a firm, not a fund: Substrata is a repository and a website. There is no legal entity, no licence, no trading desk, no fund, no client and no staff. It holds no position in anything it covers, is paid by nobody it writes about, and pays nobody.
No schedule: There is no note series on a calendar. Things are published when they are ready, and the dates are whatever the repository says they are.

How a row gets here

First test: does it move one of three curves?: Compute per joule, joules delivered, or actuation. A node that does not bear on one of those is out of scope, however interesting it is.
Second test: does it actually gate that curve?: Four questions: how few suppliers qualify, what happens if it disappears, how long from decision to new capacity, and whether the buyer can walk away at any price. Most of a supply chain is substitutable, and substitutable is not interesting.
Evidence has three states, and only one is a finding: Verified means a person opened a source that says so, and the link is on the page. Source found means an agent located a page that appears to say so and nobody has checked it yet. Unverified means neither. Only verified rows are findings.
Scores are judgements, and they are dated: Severity (0 to 12) and when a bottleneck bites are written by hand, carry the date they were judged, and sit next to a sentence explaining the call so a reader can disagree with it. They are not measurements.
Corrections are the point of publishing: If you work in one of these chains and a row is wrong, saying so makes the map better for whoever reads it next. Every page carries a link that opens a prefilled issue on GitHub. That is the only intake route, and it needs a GitHub account.

What this is not

Not advice, ever: Nothing here is an offer, a solicitation, a recommendation or investment advice. It is a general map published to whoever reads it, and it takes no account of anyone’s circumstances. Telling a particular person what to buy is a licensed activity that this project is not licensed for and does not do.
No prices, no lot sizes, no quotes: Substrata does not trade, broker, quote or arrange the movement of anything it covers. No page carries an indicative level, because a page that does reads as an invitation to deal whatever the small print says.
No positions to disclose: Substrata holds nothing. If that ever changes it will be said here first, before anything else is published. There is currently nothing to declare, and that is the declaration.
A track record that has only just started: A research project is worth what its past calls were worth. The first dated calls were published on 2026-09-15, each with the observation that settles it, and none has come due yet. So there is a record, it is empty, and no hit rate will be shown until enough calls have resolved for a percentage to mean anything. Wrong ones will stay on the page.
Out of scope on purpose: Nothing on the weapons or nuclear-fuel-cycle path is covered, and no page is written to help anyone acquire a controlled material. Several materials here are export-controlled; that is a fact about them and a reason to cover them carefully.

Plain English

Every term this subject cannot avoid is defined at /learn, one line each, with an anchor per term so anything on the site can link straight to a definition. That is also where the explainers live, for readers who do not work in these industries.