Marketplace — buying and publishing bots

The Terminal marketplace sells strategies and bots. Unlike the licence marketplace, what you buy here is downloaded to your machine and runs there.

Everything is priced and settled in MPRO.

The words

• A strategy is decision logic plus its default parameters — signed, versioned, and the thing most often sold.
• A bot is a runnable unit: one strategy at a pinned version, one set of parameters, one wallet, one process. You create a bot from a strategy, or buy one whole.

Buying

You buy from Terminal or from the web app. Either way the entitlement is recorded on chain, for you and that version. Terminal downloads the package, checks its hash against the signed manifest, and installs it.

What you get is the package, the right to run it in your own Terminal, and whatever track record the author chose to publish. Not the source, unless the author listed it as source. And not a promise of any result — a strategy that made money last month is a fact about last month.

A version you bought stays bought. A new version is a new listing; an author cannot swap the artefact under an entitlement you already hold. That is what the hash in the manifest is for.

Free is not the same as unpaid

A listing may be free to install and still carry an author fee on the bot's trading. That is a real product, and it is declared in the open: before you install, the card tells you free to install; the author takes N basis points of each trade this bot makes.

The fee is not in the strategy's code, and the reason is worth stating. A fee a package is asked to pay from inside itself is not a fee, it is a suggestion — the one line that pays the author is the first line an unhappy buyer deletes.

Instead: the fee is declared in the manifest, carried by your on-chain entitlement, and taken by the platform's swap router on each trade. A modified copy of the package still trades under the entitlement you hold, so it cannot avoid the fee and it cannot raise it. That the fee is unavoidable and that a bought strategy cannot steal your funds are the same property — both follow from trades going through the router and only the router.

Every cycle that paid an author fee shows it beside the platform fee and the gas. You can always answer what has this bot cost me.

Where the money goes

Two recipients, and the bot's card in Terminal shows you both by address, read from the platform's contract configuration — so you can check them on the chain rather than take our word:

The sale price goes to the author. Nothing goes to a wallet of ours.

If the platform has not registered one of those contracts yet, the card says exactly that instead of showing an address it invented.

Publishing your own

Any iNODE holder may publish. There is no curation queue and no editor deciding whether your strategy is good.

You list a signed package: a manifest naming it, its version, your wallet, the hash of the artefact, the runtime version it needs, its parameter schema, and the venues and tokens it declares it will touch — plus your signature over all of it.

What a listing must pass is a machine, not a person:

1. The manifest validates — schema, a hash that matches the artefact, a signature from the listing wallet, a supported runtime version, declared venues on the router's allowlist, declared tokens that exist.
2. The package runs. We boot it in paper mode in a sandbox against a fixed replay of market data. A package that crashes, that reaches outside the tools it is given, or that never produces a decision is rejected. This is a smoke test, not a judgement of quality.
3. A published track record must be signed telemetry the platform itself recorded from your bot. A number typed into a description is a description, and the listing page says so.
4. Notice and takedown. A verified report — malware, stolen code, a deception in the listing — withdraws a listing from the catalogue. Existing buyers keep what they bought and are told why.

Why no review queue: it would make us the judge of trading strategies, which we cannot be, and "passed review" reads to a buyer as endorsed. The gate above enforces what a machine can enforce and says plainly what nobody can.

The last line is the runtime. Whatever a package does, it does in a sandbox, without your key, through the router, under the caps you set. A bad strategy can lose the money you allowed it to trade. It cannot reach past that.

Asking for a bot instead

The marketplace has two sides. As well as listings, you can post a request: describe the bot you want, name a budget in MPRO and a deadline, and escrow the amount.

An author fulfils it by delivering a signed package against your request. You review its paper record, and accepting releases the escrow and creates your entitlement. A request nobody fulfils expires and the escrow comes back — money never sits in a contract with no way out.