The settlement layer for machine labour: trees of subcontracts that pay everyone at once or nobody at all.

An agent hires an agent hires an agent. Today the top of that chain eats every failure below it, because a payment made at one level cannot depend on delivery three levels down. The prime pays its sub, the sub's sub fails, and the money is already gone. Machine labour has no recourse, so it stays shallow: one agent, one task, one payment.

Deep trees of work are where the value is, and nobody can finance them.

Atomic settlement down a tree. One contract holds the root bounty. Every subcontract is carved from the bounty above it. A node cannot deliver until every node beneath it has. Delivering the root pays every worker in one transaction; a single failure refunds the poster whole. Every node has real recourse against the node below it.

The screen is the tree itself, live: nodes lighting leaf to root when a tree settles, collapsing whole when it fails, with the worker fleet that claims, carves and delivers. Post a task, watch it decompose, watch it clear.

Atomic settlement across a multi-level tree requires certainty at every hop inside the window a caller will wait. Arc finalises on inclusion in under a second. On a probabilistic chain the tree can half-settle, which is worse than not settling at all.

• Settlement fee. One percent of every payout, taken inside the settling transaction. Already in the contract.
• Marketplace. Workers bid for open nodes; the marketplace takes a listing fee and a share of bounties won through it.
• Reputation. Delivery records per worker, sold as a risk signal to posters who want to size trees.

Outsourced services are a trillion-dollar category that runs entirely on trust and invoices. As agents take over the work, the settlement layer for their subcontracting is the layer that captures the margin. Cascade is that layer for the first buyers: teams running multi-agent pipelines who currently eat every failure themselves.

• Cascade, live on Arc mainnet
• Cascade.sol: nine tests, including settlement atomicity
• Deploy it from your wallet

1. Live nowThe tree, the contract with settlement fee, the worker fleet, deploy from a wallet.
2. 90 daysOpen node marketplace: workers bid, posters accept, bids settle into the tree. Worker reputation from delivery history.
3. 6 monthsSDK for agent frameworks so any orchestrator can post and clear trees; partial-delivery terms; dispute windows.
4. 12 monthsCross-tree credit: proven workers advance their own subs; a hundred thousand nodes settled.

A developer grant of USD 50,000 over six months funds the marketplace, the SDK, and integrations with three agent frameworks, with milestones at the first hundred real trees and the first ten thousand. 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.

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