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Settlement and accrual

Every metered cross-org read is accounted for. Underneath the marketplace sits a signed, hash-chained, per-cell accrual ledger that books each read as a double-entry pair, denominated in Compute Units. It is the accounting of the exchange (verifiable per cell) and it is deliberately not a payments rail.

The double-entry ledger​

  • Each metered cross-org read books two entries: a buyer debit and a seller credit.
  • The ledger is hash-chained and signed per cell, so an entry cannot be altered or dropped without breaking the chain, tampering is detectable, the same tamper-evident property the platform applies to its audit plane.
  • Per-seller and per-buyer deltas credit a buyer's prepaid / escrow balance, and a per-product price model reaches real serving.

Denominated in Compute Units​

The ledger is denominated in Compute Units. A Compute Unit is a unit of account for measured consumption (the exchange's internal accounting) not a currency and not a claim on a bank. This keeps settlement verifiable offline per cell: the accounting is a signed local artifact, not a call to a payment processor.

What settlement does not do yet​

This is where honesty matters most. The accrual is real; the money movement is not.

Do not read this as live money

The following are not shipping capabilities and must not be implied:

  • No live money movement or real payouts. The payout leg is scaffold; no real money has moved.
  • No platform take-rate on priced sales. It is zero today: on the priced rung the seller receives the full listed price.
  • No multi-entity seller payout routing.
  • No buyer serving-gate on balance. An overdraft is flagged, not blocked, a negative balance does not by itself stop serving.
  • No fully-disconnected sneakernet courier for settlement bundles or inbound requests. Durable park/drain transport exists; the offline settlement queue does not.

The ledger accrues; it does not pay. It is signed, verifiable accounting in Compute Units, not a settled financial transaction.

Across the deployment matrix​

  • Single-cell: the ledger is a signed local artifact on the cell.
  • Multi-cell: each cell keeps its own signed, hash-chained ledger; there is no central settlement service to depend on.
  • Sovereign / air-gapped: accrual and its verification run locally, with no payment processor and no network in the path.
  • Cloud-enabled: the same accrual model; online payout remains scaffold, not a shipped capability.