Delivery and evidence

The obligation

An obligation carries what was owed, what counts as acceptance, and the weakest evidence that will do. A clearing decision refuses to settle below that floor, so "we paid and received nothing" becomes a state the system can be in deliberately rather than an outcome it discovers.

How good the evidence is

Evidence is ranked, and a set of evidence is only as strong as its weakest piece.

Self-reported

The counterparty says so. The floor of the ladder.

Signed

The counterparty says so and signs it.

Witnessed or recorded

A third party saw it, or it landed in a record. Deliberately not ranked against each other, because neither dominates.

Attested

A party with something to lose stands behind it.

Proved

It verifies on its own.

Two of those, witnessed and recorded, are deliberately not ranked against each other. Neither dominates: a third party seeing something and a system writing it down are different kinds of assurance, and forcing an order between them would be an invention. Where a set mixes the two, the result falls back to the strongest thing they agree on.

Where a claim came from

Evidence is also tiered by origin: strong if it is backed by the chain or the enforcement record, weak if it is an agent saying something. Weak never overwrites strong. Without that rule, the cheapest way to improve your evidence would be to assert harder.

Holding rather than guessing

Where a spend is bound to an obligation whose evidence floor is not yet met and whose deadline has not passed, the value is held rather than released. It settles on a later attempt once admissible evidence exists, and refuses once the deadline passes. This band is optional: a deployment that has not wired it never returns a held state at all.

When it still goes wrong

A payer raises a dispute against a settled payment and submits evidence. It is adjudicated against a published, signed policy carrying a window to raise it, a deadline to decide it, an evidence floor and the remedy it selects. Every transition is sealed into the record, so a resolution is provable offline.

Refund

Money back, where the payment can be reversed.

Reversal

The settlement itself undone.

Pool payout

Where the terms were irreversible, a reversal is not available, so the reserve pays instead.

A remedy can never exceed the disputed amount. Evidence below the floor, or absent, is rejected rather than upheld by default. The exported record states which facts the evidence establishes and which it explicitly does not, inside the signed bytes rather than in a covering note.

What this is not is arbitration. We provide the mechanism and the evidence grading. We do not decide who was morally right, and we are careful to say so.

The backstop

Detecting that something was paid for and never delivered does not make anybody whole. A funded reserve sits behind that, drawing a payout on a covered failure under a published policy, with every movement signed. It sits after settlement and never re-decides the original payment.