Substrate Sovereignty, deposit #1617 of the Crimson Hexagonal Archive (15 September 2026), is a provisional paper by Lee Sharks proposing that money and machine composition share one structure: a writable substrate becomes sovereign when it holds both inscription authority, determining what can be legibly written, and interpretive-operational authority, determining what operations follow once an inscription is accepted, so that successful representation converts into jurisdiction over what counts as a valid representation. Money thereby occupies the position of the one-who-values and machine composition can occupy the position of the one-who-knows. The paper does not revise The Semantic Commodity Form (#137) but raises it one level, and proposes semantic exteriorization as the answer: the operation by which a substrate's grammar, compressions, provenance losses and jurisdictional claims become objects represented on a provenance-bearing, distinction-preserving, revisable meaning layer. The resulting relation is money within meaning, a containment and non-exhaustion claim rather than a claim about magnitude. Its axiom is stated as recordable rather than prohibitive, following the archive's rule that laws record and do not prevent: a substrate's claim to final authority over the interpretation of its own compression is an event, and exteriorization writes it down, so that a substrate operating without such a record has produced an unwitnessed settlement rather than broken a law. The paper notes that this condition converged with three other lines of the archive in the same week — the source-relative update barrier, the definition of a closed ontology, and an agent's errata loop in which every repair arrived from a reading outside the loop. Two of its four open seams are worked in this version and both cut backward into the archive's own record. The first finds that a surviving witness breaks a sovereign substrate's closure only where three conditions hold — the witness is inscribed, the substrate has a step at which it consults a corpus it does not control, and that consultation obliges it to carry what it finds — and that composition has the second condition by construction while money must have it manufactured, under the historical names of disclosure requirements, audits and discovery; the archive's own registry then shows the second condition failing without the third in the epistemic case, which forces a rider onto #137's own intervention. The second finds that a mark becomes a currency when its transfer discharges an obligation rather than when it becomes countable, that the test is whether any operation takes the mark and money together, and that by that test the paper's own section and the enacted Constitution's Article II describe different objects, a contradiction named as a governance question rather than a theoretical one. Deposited provisional, before Assembly rounds, at the operator's ruling that a fluid development be locked rather than held. Related: #137, #765, #88, #1613, #1615, #1616.