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Verifiable Work

Hire a company you have never audited, let it subcontract safely, and pay only for results a verifier you both chose has checked.

Concept chio@5f63e6e

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A market for agent work has to let a buyer hire a company it has never audited, let that company hire specialists without promising money it does not hold, and pay only for results someone checked. Chio models the supply chain as a graph of work agreements and decides every edge three times: the receiver admits the work, a verifier both parties chose accepts the result, and a settlement rail pays.

Each decision has one owner and one trusted input. No participant reads another’s database to learn whether a promise is backed: every payable edge names an allocation that its payer cannot reuse or withdraw while the claim can still be earned.

Every edge carries a contract, a procedure, and a backed allocation

One purchase from the example: you buy an inventory of the authentication each operation in the pricing service’s OpenAPI document declares. Your partner supplies it and buys one part from a specialist.

Work agreement graphChoose an agreement.

You buy an authentication inventory

An exact sorted inventory of the authentication each operation in the pricing service's OpenAPI document declares, checked by the pinned openapi-explicit-auth-v1 checker.

Admitreceiver's kernel
Your partner's kernel admits your request under its own policy. Your signature and funding evidence are inputs to that decision; neither installs your key as an issuer.
Acceptpinned verifier
The verifier both parties pinned retrieves the retained input and output, reruns the checker, and signs accepted: true only on an exact match.
Settleselected rail
The rail checks that signature against allocation α₁ and pays USD 28.00 to your partner's fixed beneficiary address.
One purchase as three work agreements, after the worked example in the open agent work protocol; amounts are illustrative. Fees for verification and settlement, the rail itself, and the agreement deadlines are left out.

The edges share no money. Your partner funds both child allocations from its own balance, so a refund on your edge leaves the specialist’s earned claim payable, and a proposed child that never starts returns its reservation without owing anyone. Suppliers may decompose the same work differently; the graph needs no shared scheduler, database, or application operator.

Read more in Work Agreements and Funding.

Admit, accept, and settle are three decisions with three owners

No decision stands in for another. A receipt about execution does not claim the result is useful, an accepted result does not admit new work, and the rail pays without rerunning the checker or parsing the result.

DecisionOwnerChecksOutcome
AdmitThe receiver’s kernelIts own activated authority and the exact original requestDurable local admission, or a refusal before dispatch
AcceptThe pinned verifierAgreement, exact input and output, checker identity, custody, assuranceAccepted, rejected on a checked mismatch, or no decision
SettleThe selected railThe pinned verifier’s signature over the exact allocationPayment to the fixed beneficiary, or a refund to the fixed payer

Missing evidence yields no decision, and a checked mismatch yields a rejection; the escrow records the first as a timeout and the second as a rejection. The receiver’s admission prevents work before any effect. The verifier’s decision and the rail’s settlement are signed records that either party checks afterward. Within one kernel, the delivery contract applies the same idea to a single priced call by comparing the delivered output with a committed digest before capture.

Each receiver chooses its trust inputs before it reads peer evidence

A received key, endpoint, observer address, checker path, or chain description gains no authority by appearing in a signed packet. Agreement signatures and funding evidence are inputs to the receiver’s decision; neither installs the sender as a capability issuer. Replaying a valid historical packet does not refresh permission that has expired.

The agent that buys never holds the keys that commit money. It proposes a purchase with bounded tools for discovery, quotes, and status; the trusted host builds the terms, reserves the worst-case exposure in the hold ledger, and obtains funding before it signs a procurement permit. A denied purchase returns a machine-readable reason, and no amount of replanning turns an exhausted allocation or a missing funding proof into an authorized action.

One submit and one collect buy a checked result

With an agreement prepared and its allocation funded, the purchase is two commands to your owner work service: submit the commitment, then collect once the verifier’s decision window has closed.

buy-auth.tsbuy_auth.pysrc/main.rs · in mainTerminal
import { readFileSync } from "node:fs";
import { WorkClient } from "@chio-protocol/process";

const work = await WorkClient.open("./work");
const commitment = JSON.parse(readFileSync("auth-commitment.json", "utf8"));

const submitted = await work.submit({
  schema: "chio.work.command.v1",
  program_id: "pricing-openapi-auth",
  command_id: "auth-submit-1",
  action: { Submit: { commitment } },
});
const view = await work.collect(submitted.handle);
console.log(view.describe());
Output
handle      pricing-openapi-auth/auth-inventory, request req-01c4…7a90
execution   Available      returned, rcpt-01c4…7a92 signed by kernel 9b07…d31c
acceptance  Available      Accepted, predicate match, checker c7a1…02be
results     Available      output 6f0e…b31a, 3 operations
recovery    NotApplicable
settlement  Available      Paid USD 28.00, allocation 0x8c1f…40d2
delivery    Available      co-signed by kernels 4f1c…a2e9 and 9b07…d31c

The view reports six dimensions, and each has its own owner and revision. Execution came back from your partner’s kernel, the verifier accepted the inventory, and the rail paid; any of those can be Pending or Unavailable while the others are settled. Submitting auth-submit-1 again returns the original outcome, and collect reconciles records without dispatching the work a second time.

Run the whole purchase in Run Verifiable Work.

A recorded acceptance creates the right to payment

The provider earns payment when the rail records an accepting decision under the agreed finality rule. Off-chain completion, an unrecorded signed certificate, or a model’s belief that the task succeeded earns nothing. The buyer chooses the acceptance procedure before any candidate result exists, the provider cannot select a weaker checker after producing output, and a checker upgrade is a new agreement.

Acceptance establishes that the pinned predicate accepted this input and output; it says nothing about whether the result is worth having. Work suits this market when checking costs a small fraction of producing: the design target is a median verification cost at most a tenth of production cost, with the 90th percentile at most a quarter. Repair work maps onto the Cognition Market’s verified findings, whose facets record asserted, unavailable, failed, or verified per check, and a required facet must pass.

The verifier is a trusted party: both sides depend on its honesty, its key custody, and its availability. An unavailable verifier can make a provider that did the work miss the decision window, and that loss stays with the provider under the agreed timeout terms. Work Claim Escrow lays out which failures each party absorbs.

Next: write the agreement and fund it

Work Agreements and FundingSee what both parties sign, how an allocation backs it, and when a supplier may subcontract.Work Claim EscrowFollow a funded claim to payment or refund, and the failures that cannot erase an earned claim.Run Verifiable WorkBuy a checked analysis end to end and verify its evidence offline.
PreviousCross-Currency BudgetsNextWork Agreements and Funding