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c0mpute.offer/v1

Protocol requirement.

An offer is a provider's binding quote for one specific job, and it is where the v2 direction's central architectural claim gets cashed out:

The offer is signed by the provider and selected by the buyer. Nothing in between decides.

A gateway may collect offers on a buyer's behalf. An indexer may have suggested which providers to ask. Neither can manufacture an offer, and neither gets to pick.

Example

A real verified vector — signer seed 0x77 × 32, hash blake3:9e9151a1d682f3c60fb596b92dad5757be890f476cf979dbe8c924228494393f.

{
  "v": 1,
  "type": "c0mpute.offer/v1",
  "signer": "did:c0mpute:z6MkswFb62xmEDrqnknM3TP112AiH6A5YETp7gc2Qz4Wqkar",
  "payload": {
    "job": "blake3:4a4323c24e72bb676e575acb33051450e930e499b7b68d6a41ad7d47f5551b35",
    "price": { "amount": "0.042", "currency": "USD" },
    "expectedDurationMs": 12000,
    "startBefore": "2026-09-06T16:02:00.000Z",
    "expiresAt": "2026-09-06T16:00:10.000Z",
    "capabilityAdvert": "blake3:cecfc7a08527ee50ab8945bb636afc940b5afff48a50cdfbcdee501edbebd2c2",
    "coordinator": false
  },
  "sig": "z3J1bxFxvwCni6Hg6PHHas1wLCGLWNn1YrZNSNb4dH8nvQJFWg85FgqKeAYMkD1JTUVhhmHGBHuxrjrdunS1p8pfD"
}

Fields

field required
job yes the job id being bid on
price yes binding, unlike an advert's indicative rate
expectedDurationMs yes must be > 0
startBefore yes the provider commits to starting by this instant
expiresAt yes quote void after this; must be ≤ startBefore
capabilityAdvert no the advert this quote is backed by, by hash
coordinator no willing to coordinate a multi-provider job; default false

The checks a buyer must not skip

Three constraints where accepting a failing offer is simply a bug, not a policy choice:

  1. Right job. The offer's job matches the manifest's id.
  2. Within the cap. price ≤ economics.maxPrice, compared by value. Lexically "0.042" > "0.10"; numerically it is not. A string comparison here would reject good offers and accept "0.9" against a "0.10" cap.
  3. Fits the deadline. startBefore + expectedDurationMs ≤ deadline.

Currencies must match. There is no exchange rate at the protocol layer, so a cross-currency comparison is an error, never a silent false — the protocol must not guess a rate, and a buyer that meant to accept another currency should say so.

Everything else — reputation, latency, provider diversity, jurisdiction, prior experience, validation cost — is policy, and lives in the scheduler rather than here. That is the split: this page defines what makes an offer valid, not what makes it the best one.

Offers go stale by construction

A quote is a promise about capacity the provider has now. Letting it linger means bidding on hardware that is already busy, so expiresAt must not be later than startBefore: a quote you can still accept after its promised start time is not binding.

The example above has a ten-second bid window against a two-minute start commitment, which is the shape to expect for interactive work.

capabilityAdvert ties price to claims

Naming the backing advert by hash lets a buyer connect the price to the capabilities it was quoted against, and lets the eventual receipt record which claim of capacity was relied on. If a provider advertised 24 GiB of VRAM, quoted against that advert, and then failed the job, the record shows all three facts without anyone having to be believed.

coordinator is per-job, never a role

A multi-provider workload — distributed inference, say — needs one participant to coordinate. A provider signals willingness per offer.

The coordinator elected for one job has no authority over any other job. That is the whole difference between an ephemeral coordinator and a control plane, and it is why the flag lives on an individual offer rather than in a provider's advert or in a registry somewhere.

Reference

node/crates/c0mpute-envelope/src/offer.rs.