What to build
People commit to something they cannot take back, and nobody sees anyone else’s until they all open together. That turns out to be the missing piece in a lot of things.
What to build
The shape is always the same: people commit to something they cannot take back, and nobody can see anyone else's until they all open together. That turns out to be the missing piece in a lot of things.
the one we most want built
Sealed actions for autonomous agents, paid per call
A pay-per-use API that lets agents seal an action, bid, prediction or message until a deadline, then automatically reveal it with cryptographic proof.
Agents are the users who need this most and can integrate it fastest. An agent that submits in the clear can be read and front run by the next agent in the queue. An agent cannot sign up for your service, accept terms, or hold an API key it did not earn, but it can pay for one request. So the natural shape is a single priced call: seal this until then, and prove afterwards that nobody could have touched it.
Peal supplies the part nobody can build for themselves, which is the evidence that no
one could peek, copy, alter or open early. x402 supplies payment and discovery without an
account. POST /v1/seals is the one-call shape and it is live; the metered twin
at /v1/x402 answers 402 until it is shown a payment, currently 0.001 USD a
call. The roadmap has the proof format and
metered calls has the handshake. The primitive they are
built on is live and running the examples on this page today.
Sealed bid auctions
Everyone bids blind, all bids open at the close. Nobody can watch the leader and top it by a dollar in the last second, because there is nothing to watch.
tag: 'auction:<id>' · one condition per
auction, one seal per bid
Encrypted mempools
Transactions seal to the block they belong in, so a searcher cannot read the queue and jump it. The whole block's worth opens at once when the block is due.
kind: 'at_block' · a condition per block height
Commit and reveal, without the reveal
Every commit-reveal game has the same bug: whoever moves last can just not reveal when they see they have lost. Here the reveal is not their move to make.
tag: 'game:<round>' · a condition per round
Votes that cannot be swayed
No running tally means no bandwagon and no strategic vote cast off the back of one. Early voters do not influence late ones because there is nothing to see.
tag: 'vote:<proposal>' · one condition per poll
Agent bids and actions
An autonomous agent that submits in the clear can be front-run by another agent reading the same queue. Sealing the action means a machine can commit to something it cannot secretly alter, and cannot reveal early to gain an edge.
tag: 'agent:<swarm>' · one condition per round
Procurement and quotes
Suppliers quote blind. Nobody undercuts a number they were not supposed to see, and the buyer cannot shop one supplier's price to another before the close.
tag: 'rfq:<tender>' · quotes as payloads
Prediction tournaments
Every forecast is sealed until the window shuts, so nobody copies a better forecaster and nobody edits after the fact. The scoreboard is computable by anyone from the reveal.
tag: 'round:<n>' · one condition per window
Bounty and grant submissions
Entries open together at the deadline, so a late entrant cannot read the field and beat it by a nose, and a reviewer cannot leak one entry to another team.
opens_at · the deadline, RFC 3339 or unix seconds
Reviewer scoring for grants, hackathons and admissions
Each reviewer seals their scores. They open together after the panel closes, so nobody anchors on the first score in the sheet, nobody is ranked by who submitted first, and the program can publish the receipt showing that no one, the organisers included, read a score early. Reviewers need no wallet.
tag: 'panel:<cycle>' · scores as payloads, one condition per cycle
Token allocations and fair launches
A private order book that opens all at once and clears at one price. No visible order flow to trade against, and no allocator advantage from seeing the book first.
tag: 'sale:<id>' · orders as payloads
Embargoes that hold themselves
Earnings, a security disclosure, a paper under embargo. Distribute it now in a form nobody can open early, and it publishes itself on the hour.
opens_at · an absolute time
Anything with a deadline
Exam papers, a dead man's switch, a scheduled disclosure, a time capsule. If the rule is "not before this moment, and then everybody at once", it fits.
opens_in · relative seconds, for anything short lived