Haven Cipher Foundry has no upgrade path — it is built once, at this level.

The Federation's most closely guarded secret isn't a weapon — it's a manufacturing process. Deep inside Haven station, master cryptographers cut raw trade crystals along quantum lattice lines that only the Federation's proprietary algorithms can calculate. The chips encode a unique transaction authentication key into their crystalline structure — physically impossible to counterfeit, and the first stage of a two-step monopoly. Raw ciphers flow directly to empire markets throughout settled space; the rest move next door to the Authenticator Foundry for hardening. The Federation controls every step. They set the price at every step. This is not an accident.