A blockchain for inference exchange

operator policy enters through one gate and applies only to the future. the money and the matching below it can never be rewritten.

• consensus engine — Orders transactions into blocks and replicates them across validators; every node must compute byte-identical state. Runs CometBFT today, swappable by design.
• on-chain invariants — The deterministic state machine every validator runs. Its rules change only by consensus, never by discretion.
• escrow — Buyer funds locked at lease creation. Only settlement rules can move them; refunds and true-ups happen at terminal close.
• clearing — The per-block uniform-price auction: every matched order in a book clears at one price.
• settlement — Meters delivered work and pays out by rule. Clawback order on fault: unpaid payment, then provider bond, then user refund.
• price prints — Every clearing emits a price print; eligible prints aggregate into the benchmark index (trimmed volume-weighted median).
• treasury — Collects the seller-side protocol fee from each settlement batch. Buyers never pay it directly.
• gateway — Off-chain relay anyone can run: quotes terms, forwards signed orders, serves the read API. Paid a user-approved fee; no privileges.
• order — A signed lease intent: book, quantity, price cap. Clears into a capacity lease at the uniform price.
• capacity — A provider's posted obligation: reserved units backed by a slashable bond.
• payment — The provider's settled earnings, net of protocol and relay fees.
• inference — The delivered fill: output committed by hash, usage metered in tokens.
• receipt — The settled record of a lease: charges, fees, and final balances, verifiable on chain.
• operator judgment — Governed policy: which books list, SLA tiers, fee classes. Bounded parameters, applied forward-only.
• governance — Emergency controls: can pause forward flow, can never rewrite matched economic terms.
• agents & apps — The demand side: software that buys inference. Orders out through the gateway; inference and settled receipts home.
• inference providers — The supply side: GPU operators who post bonded capacity and deliver fills. Paid at settlement.