Everyone in a chain of work paid the second the customer says yes, or nobody at all.

Every big job is a tree of smaller jobs. A wedding planner hires a caterer who hires two cooks. A builder hires an electrician, a plumber, a tiler with a helper. A director hires camera, sound, an editor who hires a colourist. Today the money moves down that tree on trust and thirty-day terms: the person at the bottom does the work first and is paid last, if the person above them is paid, if they remember, if they are still solvent. The top of the chain carries every failure below it, and the bottom carries every delay above it.

Machine labour has the same shape and the same problem: an agent that hires an agent that hires an agent cannot make its payment depend on delivery three levels down.

The money goes in at the top, with the job. Whoever takes it carves smaller pieces out of it and hires people into them, and they can hire people too. The sum below can never exceed the sum above. Nobody is paid until the top piece is delivered and the customer says yes; then every person in the tree is paid in the same transaction. Under a second.

Nobody can be left hanging. A customer who goes quiet loses the right to say no: after the review window anyone can settle. A customer who says no must do it in time, with a reason, and the no goes on their record where the next people they hire can see it. Any piece that fails collapses the tree and refunds the customer whole, the same second.

Records are written by the contract. Jobs delivered and jobs broken per worker; jobs approved and jobs turned down per customer. People pick each other by what they have done, not by what they say.

The screen is the tree itself, drawn as people on wires: pieces appear as they are taken, fill as they are worked, tick as they are delivered, and when the customer says yes the money runs down every wire and pools at every person.

Paying nine people in one motion, or none of them, needs a chain that is final at every hop inside the second a customer will wait. Arc settles deterministically in under a second, so a settlement either pays the whole tree or reverts entirely. On a chain that can reorganise, a tree can half settle, which is worse than not settling at all. USDC as the native token means every amount on screen is a dollar amount and nobody buys a token to get paid.

• One percent of every payout to whoever runs the Cascade. Already in the contract, taken from the deploy page.
• Nothing else. No listing fees, no deposits, no invoices. The fee is small because the volume is every subcontract in every job posted.
• White label. Any marketplace with a tree of contractors under a customer (events, building, film, harvest, logistics) can run its own Cascade and keep the one percent.

Subcontracting is how most of the world's physical work gets done, and late payment down the chain is its oldest complaint: in construction alone, payment terms average sixty to ninety days below the prime contractor. The first customers are the people who post the jobs on the front page: weddings, renovations, shoots, harvests, moves, where the customer already pays up front and the people at the bottom already wait too long. Agent orchestration is the second market, with the identical shape.

• Cascade, live on Arc mainnet
• How it works: the rules, short and the same for everyone
• Deploy it from your wallet

1. Live nowPost with the money in it, take or offer on any piece, hire out of your piece, deliver, approve or reject with a review window, settle after silence, fail and refund, records both ways, one percent fee, deploy from a wallet.
2. 90 daysPhotos and notes on each piece; partial approval (pay the pieces that were fine); a customer record page anyone can link to.
3. 6 monthsWhite-label Cascades for two marketplaces; an SDK so an agent orchestrator can post and clear trees.
4. 12 monthsCross-tree credit: proven workers advance their own people; a hundred thousand pieces paid.

A developer grant of USD 60,000 over six months funds the two white-label pilots, the SDK, and partial approval, with milestones at the first hundred real jobs and the first ten thousand pieces paid. Draft figure.

Built by one person, in the open, on a foundation that puts a new product on Arc in under an hour. Name your price, or free.

WhatsAppTelegram