Concepts

Four ideas explain the whole machine: the batch auction, the cross, the lease, and the signature.

Why a batch auction, not an order book

On a continuous exchange, orders execute the moment a bid touches an ask — every trade gets a different price, and speed becomes profit: latency races, front-running, priority games. Freeside batches instead. For one interval orders only accumulate; nothing can execute, no matter its price. Then the auction clears once: all bids sorted from most-generous down, all asks from cheapest up, and the crossing point sets one price for everyone in the batch. Within a batch there is no time priority to win — being fast buys nothing. This is not exotic: it is how the opening and closing auctions of the major stock exchanges and the day-ahead power markets already work. It is also what makes the price a product: one number per category, printed once per second, instead of a stream of ticks.

How to read the clearing cross

The chart on the market pages is the auction's math, drawn. The falling staircase is demand — buyers' bids sorted highest-first. The rising staircase is supply — providers' offers sorted cheapest-first. Everything left of the cross trades; the faint tails to the right are orders whose limits no price could satisfy. The vertical gap between the curves on the left is the surplus — buyers who offered more than the clearing price pay only the clearing price, and the board counts what that returned to them. At the cross the two books usually share a flat tread: several orders tied at exactly the marginal price, rationed by a deterministic tie-break. The price line begins at the cross because that is where the price is born — it does not exist before the auction computes it.

Everything is a lease

Every purchase on Freeside — down to a single request — is a capacity lease against one listed book: a reservation of units at the clearing price, backed by escrow on the buyer's side and a slashable bond on the provider's. A one-off purchase is simply a one-fill lease. The lease is why both sides can trust a stranger: the buyer's money is locked where only settlement rules can move it, the provider's bond is locked where only faults can burn it, and the reservation floor guarantees the provider a minimum for holding capacity ready. When a provider fails, the clawback runs in a fixed order — unpaid payment, then provider bond, then user refund — with no one deciding anything.

Why an API key cannot buy inference

On Freeside, buying requires a signature. Your keys live in your process; the SDK signs each order locally and sends only signatures over the wire. The relay that carries your request is transport and attribution — not a custodian, and not a gatekeeper: when you call without a signed envelope it answers 402 Payment Required with the exact terms, your machine signs them, and the retry goes through. Nobody can spend for you, and nobody can stop you from spending — there is no account to close. Any funded wallet, human or software, is a customer.