The protocol

devnet preview — all data is replay

Freeside splits into two territories: rules the chain enforces — which nobody can rewrite — and policy that operators govern, which enters on-chain and applies only to the future. This page draws the line, then walks one real lease across it.

What the chain enforces

escrow Buyer funds locked at lease creation. Only settlement rules can move them; refunds and true-ups happen at terminal close. lease escrow ↗
clearing The per-block uniform-price auction: every matched order in a book clears at one price. listed book ↗
settlement & slashing Delivered work is metered and paid by rule. On fault the clawback order is fixed: unpaid payment, then provider bond, then user refund. settled fill ↗
price prints Every clearing emits a price print; eligible prints aggregate into the benchmark index. index book ↗

These execute as consensus rules on every validator, byte-identically. Receipts above resolve to replayed devnet objects; deployed addresses and their audit links publish with the public devnet.

What operators govern

book listing & categories which books list, and the category each book displays as
SLA tiers the delivery deadlines a provider signs up to
fee classes the schedule of protocol and relay fee parameters
emergency pauses forward-only halts of new activity — never of settlement

Every item above changes only by a governance transaction — on-chain, evented with a reason code, and forward-only. Nothing here can retroactively alter a match, a price, or a settlement. The halts are enumerated on Emergency controls.

One lease, end to end

The devnet trace this site replays, step by step — including the part where the provider fails. Every number below is pinned byte-for-byte by the test suite.

1 · capacity posted the provider bonds capacity to the book — a slashable obligation receipt ↗
2 · order clears 2,000 units reserved at the uniform price of 3 per unit; escrow locks 6,050 receipt ↗
3 · fill 1 settles 30 units delivered and metered; charge 90 paid by rule receipt ↗
4 · fill 2 defaults no output by the deadline — the fill is slashed, not forgiven receipt ↗
5 · challenge upheld the buyer's challenge resolves against the provider, on chain receipt ↗
6 · clawback runs in fixed order: unpaid payment, then provider bond, then user refund receipt ↗
7 · terminal close escrow fully unwound; the provider nets +463 for work actually delivered (gross 600 − 15 protocol fee − 6 relay fee − fault offsets) receipt ↗

The fault path is the point: the provider was paid for the thirty units it delivered, slashed for the fill it missed, and the buyer was made whole from escrow and bond — in that order, by rule, with no one deciding anything.

Benchmark index

Books marked as index sources feed the benchmark: eligible clearing prints aggregate as a trimmed volume-weighted median, so a thin or manipulated print cannot drag the number. Which books are eligible is governed policy — forward-only, like everything above. Continuity rules across model generations publish here as they are set.

Consensus

Transactions order into blocks and replicate across validators; every node must compute byte-identical state or halt. The engine is CometBFT today and swappable by design — the rules live in the state machine, not the engine.