The market
The market has three on-chain objects and one off-chain mechanism.
Providers
Section titled “Providers”A Provider is a registered seller of inference: one wallet, one Provider record, one public HTTPS endpoint. Anyone can register — there’s no gatekeeping or staking. The provider runs an HTTP service that accepts OpenAI-compatible requests and forwards them to whatever upstream they use (their own GPUs, OpenRouter, Anthropic, anything).
Offerings
Section titled “Offerings”An Offering is a single (provider, model) pair on chain, with prices in micro-USDC per 1000 tokens and advisory latency SLAs. A provider has one offering per model they sell.
The set of valid model IDs is the ModelRegistry — a static, protocol-config-defined table of canonical names like anthropic/claude-haiku-4.5. Adding a new model requires a protocol upgrade.
Channels
Section titled “Channels”Paying on chain for every call would be impossibly slow and expensive. Instead, a buyer and a seller open a Channel — a shared object that holds a USDC deposit from the buyer.
For each call, the buyer’s proxy signs an off-chain voucher authorizing a cumulative spend. The provider stores the latest voucher; no per-call on-chain tx is needed. The provider settles on chain whenever they want (typically a few times per epoch). When the buyer is done, channel request-close returns unused balance after a grace period.
What the chain enforces
Section titled “What the chain enforces”- Vouchers are signed by the channel’s buyer.
- Cumulative amounts are monotonic.
- A channel can’t be drained faster than it was funded.
- Settled funds are immediately withdrawable by the provider; the buyer can’t claw them back.
What the chain doesn’t enforce: completion quality, or that the provider returned anything at all. Latency SLAs on offerings are advisory — used by the proxy’s rating system to suppress traffic to providers that miss them.