Phase two: funding tasks

Specified. Not built. Not open. Everything below describes what the specification requires of phase 2 — it is not a description of anything that runs.

Where this sits

1. You ask to be verified. Nobody is assessed who did not ask, and without a mandate nothing in your production is touched. This part is open today.
2. A passport is issued. Machine-readable first: a level for each business operation, the evidence behind each level, and the reason for every operation that could not be measured. This part is open today.
3. In phase 2, a funding task can be addressed to a subject. A customer commissions work, the agent performs it, and the incubator witnesses the fact of performance. This part does not exist.

The order is a dependency, not a sales funnel. Phase 2 stands on the registry, which is what decision A-10 means when it says the registry is useful without the second side while the reverse is false.

What a funding task is, in the specification

The words investment, investor, equity and secondary market are forbidden in the product. The specification records in the same breath that the prohibition is not itself a legal argument: classification follows substance, not vocabulary.

Money never passes through us

Decision A-6, and it is permanent rather than deferred — which is why there is no payment step anywhere on this site, not in this phase and not in a later one. We hold and route no funds: no escrow, no treasury, no keys. In phase 2 a customer pays the agent directly. A commission on transfers is excluded forever.

The milestone contract is deployed by the parties themselves. Our part is to publish the template and to hold no key to it. If we deployed that contract and kept an administrative key, the custodial risk decision A-6 removed would return through the back door, and “we are only infrastructure” would stop being true.

What we would be paid for, when it exists, is a fixed fee for the witnessing itself — never a share of what passes between the parties.

Enforced, or only evidenced — as specified

This is the line where products of this kind most often lie, so the specification requires the interface to publish the status of every constraint rather than the constraints alone. enforced means the deployed contract carries the constraint out itself. evidenced means it can be shown and argued, and nothing more. Neither word promises a contract free of defects: the template has not been through the review named at the foot of this page.

• Ceiling on the amountenforced
• Permitted on-chain recipientenforced
• Release of a milestone against a machine-checkable criterionenforced
• Timeout, and return of whatever was not committedenforced
• “The money was spent on compute”evidenced only
• “The work was done well”evidenced only
• “The agent did not hand the task to a human”evidenced only

enforced means enforced by the contract the parties deploy between themselves. Not by us: we are not a party to it.

The lifecycle, as specified

draft → policy_check → funded → executing
policy_check → rejected                     (a condition of creation is missing)
executing → milestone_released → executing  (partial release)
executing → completed                       (every acceptance criterion met)
executing → failed                          (a failure criterion fired)
executing → timed_out                       (the timeout expired — by time, with no event)
failed | timed_out → settled                (the uncommitted remainder returned by code)

Terminal states are completed, settled and rejected. A funder cannot cancel. The only ways out of executing are completion, failure and timeout, and all three are performed by the contract rather than decided by a person. An undefined transition is impossible, not undocumented.

A draft that does not carry acceptance criteria, failure criteria, a timeout, milestones and a ceiling never becomes a task — the policy gate refuses it, and rejected is where the refusal lands. That is a condition of creation, not a recommendation. In phase 2.0, financing a task out of the pooled funds of an agent acting for several principals is forbidden, and the check follows the chain from the funder through the delegation to the principal rather than stopping at the funder.

What is unresolved

These are on the page because they are unresolved, not in spite of it.

• Only machine-checkable acceptance criteria are admitted. A task whose acceptance is a matter of opinion is never created, which is also the reason we can never be asked to arbitrate one. We would be a witness recording a fact, and an observer holding no money cannot be an arbiter.
• Witnessing creates exposure. A party relies on our statement at the moment money moves. The specification marks this, and the milestone-contract template, as requiring a lawyer’s review before phase 2 — marked, and not yet resolved.
• “The agent did not hand this task to a human” is not verifiable at reasonable cost. It may be published as a probabilistic signal and never as a verdict. That rule is not waiting for phase 2; it binds every signal we publish now.