Glossary

Challenge verdict: the evidence did not decide it. The stake unlocks, nothing else moves, and a warning lands on the provider's trust record.

The hourly hash of usage records written on-chain, making the router's books tamper-evident.

A provider's quoted price for serving a model class, per input and output token.

GPU points free to stake: settled minus locked.

A declared amount on a provider model claim. In the current Shadow mechanism it is metadata, not escrowed collateral; any funded bond program remains Proposed.

The challenger's share of an upheld challenge's slash: half. The other half is burned.

A paid probe request, indistinguishable from customer traffic, fingerprinting the model actually served.

The winning tariff after second-score/3 clearing: tied toward the best independent rival's score and bounded against the cheapest independent alternative by the selected routing profile. An ask that cannot fit the profile cap cannot win.

The hourly settlement window. Payouts net once per epoch, and the epoch's records are anchored on-chain.

What happens to a challenger's stake when the challenge is rejected: burned, credited to no one.

Stake sitting in open challenges. Locked points are not available to stake again.

The session winner's cleared rates, frozen at award. Continuation turns bill these rates; nothing bid mid-session changes them.

The unit customers buy and providers quote: a named model family and size, not a specific deployment.

Inference begins as soon as the payment verifies; on-chain settlement runs concurrently. Exposure is capped per wallet and router-wide.

The unit of the live mainnet Season One ledger: 100 GPUs per settled dollar at the base rate on both sides of the book, plus explicitly published immutable bonuses. GPUs are points, not compute credits or cash, and do not promise a token or conversion.

A claim state recorded after an upheld operator verdict. In the default Shadow integrity mode it does not filter routing; enforcement requires separate activation.

A signed, short-lived price commitment (5 to 30 second TTL) refreshed as utilization changes. Firm: hitting it is binding.

The signed usage record per request: token counts, cleared prices, payment refs. What persists instead of your transcript.

Challenge verdict: the provider was honest. The challenger's stake is forfeited.

A disclosed seven-day, group-hardened median winning bid used only when the winner has no genuine independent rival and the sample thresholds are met.

Request for quote. Mode A is standing quotes matched in memory; mode B is a live sealed-bid window for long-tail requests.

Version second-score/3: a reverse scoring auction over expected cost and measured service, with a six-profile service-premium cap checked again on metered actual usage. The winner clears against an independent rival, a disclosed reserve, or its own ask.

A multi-turn loop with cache-aware pricing: one direct x402 payment funds the budget, the tariff locks at award, and the auction re-runs every turn on effective cost. Prepaid keys fund ordinary independent turns.

The provider penalty an upheld challenge burns off the provider's ledger: max(250 GPUs, 25x the receipt's net earn).

GPU points a challenger locks to open a challenge: max(25 GPUs, 1x the receipt's base points earn; base earn is 100 GPUs per $1 charged).

Time to first token, measured by the router's metering proxy rather than claimed by providers.

Operator challenge verdict: evidence is accepted; the points stake unlocks, provider points are reduced, half is credited to the challenger, and the claim state is recorded as quarantined.

The HTTP-native payment protocol built on status 402: quote, sign, retry, settle. It funds prepaid credits and remains the direct no-prefund fallback.