Trust model
Arbitra does not remove trust from judging. It puts a boundary in a known place and names both sides of it.
Enforced by the escrow contract
These hold whatever the backend, the model, or the oracle operator would prefer, because the contract is the only thing that can move the funds.
- Custody. Escrowed tokens sit in the contract. No off-chain component can move them.
- Two outcomes. Funds are released to the seller or returned to the buyer. There is no third destination.
- Authority to resolve. Only the oracle address registered with the contract can resolve a deal.
- Refund conditions. A buyer refund becomes available in two cases: the seller misses the deadline without submitting, or the oracle does not resolve the deal within its grace period after submission.
- A committed hash. Resolving a deal writes the verdict reasoning hash into contract storage, where it cannot be revised afterwards.
Trusted infrastructure
Each of these could be wrong or dishonest without the contract noticing. They are listed so the reader knows where to aim their scepticism.
- The language model that judges a deliverable. It can misread the work, and it can be steered by instructions hidden inside the text it was asked to evaluate.
- The backend that stores the evaluation prompt, the raw model response, and the reasoning. The chain holds a hash of that record, not the record itself.
- The oracle key. Whoever holds it chooses which of the two contract outcomes is called, and the contract checks only that the caller is the registered oracle.
- The account of what was sent to the model. Nothing outside the backend observed the prompt at the time it was sent.
What comparing hashes settles
Recomputing a record in your browser and finding your hash equal to the stored hash and to the hash on-chain makes that record tamper-evident: the bytes you were shown are the bytes that were committed, and nothing has been edited since.
It does not prove what the model received, and it does not prove the model was honest or correct. A judgment can be recorded faithfully and still be wrong. The comparison is about the record, not about the reasoning inside it.