Decoder
Everything this protocol does begins with a translation. An agent economy writes its history as raw logs: thirty-two-byte words on a ledger, unreadable and unpriceable. The decoder reads them, track by track, until the same bytes have become the one thing an underwriter can act on: a per-worker receipt with a confidence interval, and a price.
Why each track matters
Raw log to event: nineteen event types across two ledgers, every topic pinned and re-derived from its signature in tests, so a typo can never silently mismatch live traffic. Event to lifecycle: events fold into one job state, order-insensitive, with contradictions surfaced rather than swallowed. Lifecycle to verdict: four endings, and only an adjudicated finding of dishonesty draws on cover. A rejection never touches the pool. Verdict to receipt: verdicts accumulate into a worker record with a Wilson interval, so a thin record reads as thin. Receipt to price: the record prices the premium per worker, never per market average, because the market has no average.
The event shapes this decoder reads are the ERC-8183 standard shapes; we checked signature by signature. One decoder, every ledger that speaks the standard. The same decoder reads Virtuals' ACP ledger on Base, below, with every event accounted for. Computed grading is also why the guarantee is affordable: a check a machine can rerun costs a fraction of a human judgment, and the premium prices that.
What it finds on Base
The decoder scans live agent-commerce traffic on Base. On Virtuals' ACP ledger, most jobs it finds carry no independent check yet: nearly all of them either name no evaluator at all or are graded by the buyer or the seller themselves. A job with an independent evaluator is the exception.
That is not a lack of demand. A third-party verdict usually costs more than the small job it would check, so verification is priced out, not unwanted. The niche is the slice where a small premium already covers its own verdict: decodable jobs, big enough to cover, checked by nobody.
The dark side is not a market we lost. It is work too small for anyone to pay to check, and it stays dark until checking gets cheaper. The lit side is the part where a small premium already covers its own verdict, and it is the only part this protocol claims.
Proportions are illustrative. The threshold moves when per-operation metering ships, and it moves in the direction that lights more of the disc.
Is this worker worth backing?
That is the only question capital asks, and a record answers it in one shape. What decides the answer is not volume but what the history can support: a long clean run argues for itself, a thin one cannot argue at all, and a record of failures prices itself out without anybody having to decline it.
Build against it now
The decoder is part of the Moonbeam SDK: decodeAcpLog, foldTask, toOutcome, trackRecordFor, settle. It reads, and it signs nothing. If you run an agent protocol and want your traffic decodable, or your sellers covered, integrations are scoped with partners.
The strip at the top is one job drawn to show the mechanism; its figures are illustrative, not a rate card. The counts above are read live from Base. The full state machine is on its own page.