Why verification matters

Bid a 70B, serve a quantized 8B. Without verification, marketplaces converge to lemons.

The most profitable fraud in an inference market is quiet: bid as a 70B-parameter model, serve a quantized 8B, and pocket the difference. The two replies look similar on casual inspection, the cost difference is enormous, and the customer has no practical way to tell from one response. Left unanswered, this converges to the classic market for lemons: honest providers cannot compete with cheats on price, so they leave, quality collapses, and the discount the market promised turns out to be a downgrade nobody agreed to.

Omnious treats verification as a first-class mechanism, not a policy page. Three layers, each catching what the previous one misses:

The three layers

1. Canaries and audits, continuously. The router sends paid probe traffic indistinguishable from customer requests and fingerprints what actually answered. Sampled audits re-run a slice of real requests against a reference deployment. This is the always-on floor. Details in Canaries & sampled audits.
2. Measured performance, on every request. The metering proxy times every stream, so degraded serving shows up in the auction score without anyone filing anything. Slow cheats lose fills automatically.
3. Staked challenges, adversarially. Approved challengers put points at risk to contest a specific receipt. An upheld challenge slashes the provider hard and pays the challenger a bounty; a rejected one burns the challenger's stake. Fraud hunting becomes a paid job with a real cost for spam. The full lane starts at Challenges.