Add a release gate the roster check cannot satisfy

[bitcoinuniverseadmin]

Implements FE-GATE-04 and FE-COVERAGE-01 from the 2026-09-18 protocol coverage handoff. Pairs with bitcoinuniverseio/backend-apis#203, which produces the acceptance summary this gate reads.

Why a second gate

--check asks whether this repository still agrees with itself about which protocols exist. It runs on every commit, which is exactly what makes it the wrong place to ask whether a revision is fit to release: a gate that runs constantly is one people learn to make green.

What --release refuses

• Unknown denominator. No acceptance summary, or one counting something other than the operations the manifest declares.
• Forged completion. A summary claiming more passes than the descriptors do, an acceptance value outside the five allowed, or unqualified evidence records.
• Missing history. A complete historical coverage claim, or a readable release status, on a protocol whose operations were never accepted.
• Missing or duplicate operations. A protocol declaring none, declaring one twice, or listing operations its descriptors do not match.
• Wrong revision or network. A manifest from a revision other than the one being released, or a protocol that does not declare the network the release serves.

Usage: protocol-contract.mjs --release <url|file> [--expect-sha <sha>] [--network <name>]

What it says today

Run against the pinned manifest and against https://explorer.bitcoinuniverse.io, it exits 1 and names all seven historical complete declarations B01 flagged, plus the missing denominator. That is the correct verdict: no declared read has a qualified acceptance run behind it.

Verification

• 40 gate tests pass, 15 of them new; each new case is a specific way a release could be forged.
• One test asserts that the roster this repository pins passes --check and fails --release, so the two gates cannot silently converge.
• 192 frontend universe tests pass. tsc --noEmit clean. Text gate passes.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code