State machine
An insured job is a small state machine. What matters about it is not the number of states but a property that holds across all of them: in every phase where money is held, somebody can act to end it, and that somebody is never a party who might refuse.
Built up in three stages
Same four roles all the way through: client, escrow, provider and evaluator are the standard's own, and they never change. Each stage adds exactly one thing on top of the last, drawn as the diff: muted arrows are the previous stage, untouched; colored arrows are what's new.
Four arrows, and it works. Its honest limit: an ending is only somebody's word, and volume costs nothing to fake. The standard says so itself, by shipping a hook seam for whatever comes next.
Zero new roles, one new lifeline, and cheating stops being free: the deposit outweighs the job, and the hook refuses any settlement the evidence contradicts, with the verdict digest riding the standard's own reason field.
Capital joins, and so does recourse: the premium pays the pool that stood behind the job, damage past the deposit is covered per-pool and capped, and anyone who thinks a verdict is wrong can make that opinion expensive for exactly one party. The one semantic this layer changes is finality: same states as the standard, delayed on purpose by the window.
The six actors: the standard's three, plus our three
The first three are ERC-8183's own roles, under our names for them; the standard calls our judge the evaluator, and the tag on each row says so. The other three exist only in the assurance layer, and none of them can hold up a job: an actor with money at risk and no move is observing, not blocked.
| Actor | Layer | Must take part? | Can do | Can lose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Client | 8183: client | opts in | fund · release · dispute | the premium, and damage above what is bonded |
| Provider | 8183: provider | must bond | deliver · dispute | the deposit, on an adjudicated finding |
| Judge | 8183: evaluator | must bond | grade | the bond, if a call is overturned |
| Arbitrator | assurance layer | must bond | adjudicate | reputation; it holds no funds of its own |
| Backer | assurance layer | opts in | allocate · withdraw (slowly) | covering damage the deposit cannot |
| Verdict challenger | assurance layer | opts in | contest one verdict | the bond, if the challenge fails |
Why nobody can be locked out
Three silences could each strand somebody, and each has an answer that does not depend on the silent party cooperating.
The escrow this describes is not deployed to any mainnet. Phases open in the order set out on the published gates, each behind its own verification.
The deep dive: every phase, every hand the money passes through
The stages above are the reading order; these two are the full detail. The first draws every phase a job can be in and every transition out of it, with the actor named on each arrow. The second follows one job across all the lifelines at once, money included: where the premium sits, when the deposit locks, and which hand touches what as the endings resolve.
This machine is an ERC-8183 implementation
The job lifecycle is a standards-track draft now: ERC-8183, Agentic Commerce defines a job with escrowed budget and the states Open, Funded, Submitted, Completed, Rejected, Expired. We verified by reading raw logs that the ledger we already decode emits exactly those event signatures, and this machine speaks the standard rather than a private dialect of it:
| OUR ENDING | ERC-8183 STATE | WHAT WE ADD |
|---|---|---|
| Done right | Completed | the premium settles to the capital that stood behind the job |
| Bad work | Rejected | the verdict is computed from evidence, not granted by a trusted evaluator |
| Void | Expired | refund claimable by anyone, so nobody can be locked out |
| Cheat | Rejected + deposit claim | the worker's deposit, larger than the job, pays the damage |
The part that matters: ERC-8183 ships its own extension point, the IACPHook interface, called before and after every core function. The assurance layer is designed to live there: deposits, the premium, and computed verdicts ride the standard's own hook, so a job here is a standard job that happens to be guaranteed. One more fit worth naming: the standard's settlement events carry an optional reason hash meant for audit, and our computed verdict's digest is that reason. The verdict travels inside the standard's own field, checkable against the event by anyone. The standard is a draft, which cuts both ways honestly: nothing about it is final, and the discussion is open to anyone, including us. The one boundary still being argued is what happens to a slashed provider bond: whether it pays the harmed party, capped at the adjudicated damage, or is burned. How that lands changes what a guarantee here is worth, so it is the part of the draft we follow most closely.