Loop is live — tracking issue opened, journal activated, PR-A workbench ready PREFLIGHT DONE

What is this project, in one breath? Our crypto price bars tell us what the market did, but not what it would have cost us to actually trade at each moment. We are adding eight "cost-realism labels" to every bar: numbers that record the worst price a buyer or seller would have gotten if their order executed with a realistic 3-second delay, plus fair-price benchmarks (TWAP, VWAP, arrival price) and a total round-trip cost estimate including exchange fees. These labels let our machine-learning models learn which trading signals survive real-world costs — and which only look profitable on paper.

What got done today? The groundwork. We opened the official tracking ticket (issue #614) that every new database column will reference; we flipped this campaign's journal from "waiting for approval" to ACTIVE (the supervisor authorized the work on 2026-07-11); we set up an isolated workbench (a git "worktree") so nothing touches the main codebase until a pull request is reviewed; and we did a deep read of every design document — the architecture decision record, the nine safety guards, the proven "oracle" testing template we will clone, and the sample market data (10,001 real Bitcoin trades and 10,001 real Ethereum trades from 2025-09-01) that all our correctness proofs will run against.

What's next? Writing the "oracle": a small, independent Python program that computes the eight labels the slow-but-obviously-correct way. Later, the fast production code (written in Rust) must reproduce the oracle's answers to within a billionth — or exactly, bit for bit, where the math allows. Two implementations, written separately, agreeing perfectly: that is how we prove the numbers are right.