Compute is easier to trust when you can read the receipt.
Cloud marketplaces today ask you to trust a platform's ledger. Compute Contracts Protocol asks you to trust arithmetic instead — every request, bid, acceptance and settlement is a record you or anyone else can fetch, verify and replay, because it was never anywhere but your own repository and theirs.
There's no marketplace operator holding both sides' funds or records. The firehose is public infrastructure; anyone can run a relay.
A receipt's CID binds the whole contract chain. Verifying a settlement is a hash check, not a phone call.
It's ordinary AT Protocol records and the same firehose Bluesky and every other app already reads.
Not ready to self-host?
The Gateway service runs the requester side for you — one XRPC call in, a receipt and a terminal out — while every record it writes is still the same open protocol underneath.
Who does what
Four roles, none of them a central authority.
| Actor | Role |
|---|---|
| Requester | Authors the market.rfp and market.accept records. Wants compute. |
| Provider (bidder) | Authors market.bid and market.receipt. Has spare machines. |
| PDS | Each actor's Personal Data Server, holding their signed records. |
| Firehose / relay | Streams commits from every relevant PDS so participants can discover each other's records. |
Where this is headed
This is alpha software — the NSIDs live under a temporary namespace and interfaces will move. It already works well enough for individual providers and requesters; the next stretch is organizations that hold compute and want to hand it to their own members through the same records, and a scorer that goes past "lowest cost."
com.publicdomainrelay.temp.*