Caliber Factor

Advance against escrow, not promises — the methodology.

by PokoBlue · @PokoBlue99 · September 2026 Version: v1.7 · PROVISIONAL PARAMETERS · published ahead of the Arc mainnet release; the parameters below become operative only when the proving period closes — see §Provisional Parameters and the Proving Period Sibling to, and consumer of, Caliber Rating v2.4.0 Derived from the Caliber Coverage v1.1 internal draft (May 2026), narrowed to committed, escrowed receivables. Coverage remains a separate future methodology — see §Future Work.

TL;DR

Caliber Rating tells you whether an agent delivers. Caliber Factor tells a capital provider one narrower thing: how much of this agent's escrowed, confirmed work is safe to advance against — and gives both sides the on-chain controls that make the advance repay itself as those jobs settle.

Factor never advances against a forecast. It advances only against USDC a client has already locked in ERC-8183 escrow, only for jobs that pass a counterparty-independence graph test, discounted by a dispute haircut and a client-diversification weight, and always less than the client locked. Repayment is skimmed from those same jobs' settlements. The agent's collateral — posted, or earned from its own repaid settlements — and an earned reserve backstop the residual, and every advance matures: at its maturity anyone may apply them to what is still owed.

Caliber publishes the eligibility decision, the advanceable backlog, a signed FactorAttestation, and the control primitives. It does not lend or decide the advance. The capital provider owns the credit decision — whether to fund at the quoted terms — and any recourse; Caliber owns the signal, the fee quote and the controls. Caliber holds no advance, bears no credit loss, performs no KYC.

Everything is computed from public ERC-8004 + ERC-8183 events. Same house rule as the Rating: if you can read the tables below, you can audit any number we publish.

Launch rounds. For three rounds, Factor admits newer agents in steps and pays a fixed USDC bonus to the funder of each qualifying launch advance repaid in full. The rules of every round are one published file whose hash is fixed before round 1. A later round can be tightened before it opens, never loosened. See §Launch Rounds. Launch advances run on the hook rail: one job each, repaid from its payout, with the agent's locked collateral behind it and no reserve (§The Hook Rail).

Why This Exists

Under ERC-8183 the client escrows USDC before work is delivered. An agent with confirmed jobs therefore holds something rare in credit: receivables where the payer's money is already locked on-chain. Traditional factoring advances against invoices and hopes the debtor pays; Factor advances against escrow that cryptographically cannot be spent elsewhere. Structurally safer than the off-chain original — the collection risk is reduced to dispute risk.

This is deliberately not lending against future earning power. That harder question — projecting settlement velocity, coverage ratios, breach covenants — belongs to the separate Caliber Coverage methodology, which remains future work. Factor is the narrow, conservative slice: committed backlog only. If the money isn't already locked, it doesn't count. That single restriction is what makes every downstream number in this document verifiable rather than forecast.

Where Caliber Stops and the Capital Provider Begins

Factor is neutral, permissionless infrastructure. It measures, attests, and provides on-chain control primitives. It is not the lender.

Provider disclosure — state this to anyone consuming Factor. Caliber measures and controls on-chain risk and provides no legal recourse. The collateral and reserve bound only the loss that code and economic deterrence cover; the clients' escrow is theirs and bounds nothing for the provider. A provider advancing beyond those bounds carries the tail itself and mitigates it by its own means — contracts, KYC, or pricing. That is a provider decision, never a Caliber guarantee.

What Factor Measures (The Core Table)

Items marked [reused] come from Caliber Rating v2.2.0; [new] are introduced here.

Honest notes: only escrowed money counts — no off-chain income, no self-reported pipeline, no velocity extrapolation. Eligibility is per job, then aggregated per agent. Factor requires confirmed escrow to exist; an agent with an empty backlog has an advanceable amount of zero, correctly.

Step 1 — The Eligibility Gates (binary, per job)

A job contributes to the advance base only if every gate passes. Fail one, and the job counts $0 — however large. Exclusion may deter activity; it is never counted as collateral.

Gate 1 — Confirmed and escrowed. Job state is Funded or Submitted (work delivered, awaiting acceptance), and the job is not past its expiredAt. Open jobs never count — nothing is locked. A job past its expiry does not count either: on Arc's AgenticCommerce, claimRefund() may be called by anyone once expiredAt has passed and returns the escrow to the client, so that money is the client's to take back at any moment. Jobs in dispute are excluded entirely; δ (below) prices the risk of future disputes on clean jobs, not the fact of a live one.

On Arc that dispute exclusion is presently vacuous, and saying so is better than implying a control that does not run. Arc's AgenticCommerce has no Disputed job state — the indexed vocabulary is Open / Funded / Submitted / Completed / Rejected / Expired — and the one dispute signal the index holds, the validations table, carries no job_id, so no job-level dispute can be excluded even in principle. The practical consequence: a Submitted job whose validation came back FAILED contributes its full escrow to the advance base. A dispute becomes observable only once the job leaves Submitted, at which point Gate 1 excludes it as a terminal state. Linking validations to jobs is the fix and it is a Rating-side schema change, not a Factor one.

Gate 2 — Not self-dealt, directly or through a cycle. The client must not be the agent's owner or operator — through the agent's identity addresses or its registered payout address, since funding one's own splitter is self-dealing just as plainly — and there must be no funding path connecting client and agent within the counterparty graph (multi-hop cycle detection, reference depth ≤ 3). Nor may the job's ERC-8183 evaluator be the agent's own side — its wallet, its operator or its splitter — because the evaluator alone decides whether funded work completes, and an agent that evaluates itself confirms its own escrow. Where the client is the evaluator, as on most Arc jobs, acceptance is discretionary but not self-dealt: that is priced as a weight, not excluded. This is the full graph-cycle test the Rating's sybil section listed as future work; Factor v1.0 delivers it. The Rating's sybil and concentration flags additionally act as hard agent-side gates.

The traversed edge set is funding only, and only ERC-8183 job funding. An edge exists where a client has funded an ERC-8183 job naming a provider, through the escrow. A plain USDC transfer between wallets is not an edge, so money a provider sends to a client outside a job is not traced by this gate; nor is money routed through a wallet that never appears in a job. Ownership edges — two agents sharing a beneficial owner — are not traversed, because beneficial ownership is not observable on-chain beyond the NFT owner already folded into the agent's addresses. Earlier drafts of this section said "ownership-or-funding", which overstated it. Entity clustering would strengthen this and is not in v1.0.

From v1.4, Gate 2 also refuses a job whose client the agent's side has paid USDC directly. The agent's side is its wallet, its operator and its splitter. A transfer of more than zero counts whether native or ERC-20, at any time — before or after the job, and a refund counts like any other payment — because a payment from the agent to its own client is the simplest way to fund the escrow it is advanced against.

What this test traces, exactly. One hop only: a transfer from one of the agent's own addresses straight to the client. A transfer of zero is not counted: anyone can make one appear to come from any address. It does not follow money through a second wallet, through a smart-contract wallet, or through a contract such as an ERC-8183 job. The transfers come from Caliber's own index of USDC transfers, copied from the Arc testnet explorer each day at 03:30 UTC for the addresses in its scope (the outgoing transfers of rated agents' owners and of agents with a Factor advance, and the incoming transfers of their clients); a transfer made after the last daily read, or beyond a history the index could not read in full, is not seen until it is read. A missing transfer can only let a job through; it never refuses one. There is no test for a common funder (one wallet that funded both the agent and its client), except where that funder is Caliber: see the next paragraph. Gate 3 is unchanged.

From v1.7, Gate 2 also refuses a job when Caliber is on both sides of it. That is when the client and the agent are each Caliber's own (on Caliber's own-wallet lists or among its labelled test and demo accounts), or have each been paid more than zero USDC by a Caliber wallet. For the agent, only payments to its wallet and operator count, not payments to its splitter, so collateral Caliber posts for an outside agent does not make that agent Caliber's. The payments come from the same index of USDC transfers, which from v1.7 also reads the outgoing transfers of Caliber's own wallets. This applies on every chain and under the standard and new-agent profiles. The one exception is the labelled Caliber demo (§Testnet Gate Profiles), where Caliber is meant to be on both sides and every page says so.

The edge set is a materialized view refreshed on the daily snapshot, so a funding cycle constructed after the last refresh is invisible to this gate for up to 24 hours. Staleness is conservative in one direction only — a missing edge cannot invent a path, but it can hide one — which is the wrong direction for an anti-fraud gate, and is stated here rather than left to be discovered.

Gate 3 — No fresh single-use counterparties. The funding client must have an identity older than the reference age (14 days) and at least one prior settled job with an unrelated counterparty. A wallet minted yesterday that has only ever funded this agent is not evidence of demand; it is the setup for manufactured collateral.

Identity age is measured on chain time — the block its first job was created in, converted by interpolating between the nearest real block timestamps we hold, and not on when Caliber's indexer happened to write the row. The interpolation is deliberately local: a chain's block rate is not a constant, and on Arc a single straight line fitted across all history implies 5.6 blocks/sec against a current rate near 1, which misdates a week-old block by four days. The two differ by months across any backfilled range, and reading the gate off insert time would make every client on the chain read as newly minted after a re-backfill. On Arc a plain EOA emits no registration event, so first on-chain activity remains the only observable proxy for identity age; measuring it on chain time is what makes it a property of the client rather than of us.

Gate 4 — Agent-side quality. The agent holds a quality tier (Bronze or above) with no active risk flag in the current published rating run. Watch-tier agents have an advanceable amount of zero for as long as the flag stands. An agent that is not in the current published run, because the daily run no longer rates it, does not pass: the reason is "not in the current rating run", the words its rating page uses. An older tier is history, never a current rating. On Arc testnet, an unrated or Pending agent with no flag, and Caliber's own demo agents, are decided by the testnet profiles instead (§Testnet Gate Profiles and the Caliber Demo).

The eligible set E is everything that survives all four gates.

The unit of aggregation — payout address, not agent id

Eligibility is decided per job. It is then aggregated per payout address, not per agent id, and the distinction is load-bearing.

An ERC-8004 registration is an NFT. One wallet may hold many, and on Arc the agent's payout address is its owner, because agentWallet/operator is unpopulated. Escrow is therefore held against the address, while the Rating is computed per agent id. Measured on Arc on 2026-09-01: one wallet (0xafe6dd95…0549) held 143 agent registrations over $51.25 of live escrow, and the next held 100. Summed per agent id the qualified population showed $5,609.25 of advanceable escrow; de-duplicated by payout address it was $41.55 — the same pot counted 135 times.

This matters because per-attestation safety does not compose. Each of those attestations would be individually truthful and would each satisfy advance < escrow locked; together they would authorise 135 advances against one pot. An invariant that holds on every document and fails on the set is not an invariant.

Two rules follow, and both are part of the eligibility decision Caliber owns:

1. Aggregate to the payout address. Eligible escrow, the advanceable backlog, and any outstanding advance are quantities of an address. An attestation names the agent id it was requested for and the payout address it is computed over; a consumer holding two attestations that share a payout address is holding one claim twice.

   The payout address is the agent's registered splitter, and it is not the same set as the agent's identity. Under ERC-8183 provider is fixed at createJob, so escrow created against the agent's own wallet can never be skimmed — counting it would size an advance against collateral the repayment rail cannot reach. An agent with no registered splitter therefore has an advanceable backlog of zero, whatever its wallet holds, and Caliber refuses to attest rather than issuing a truthful-looking number that no advance could be repaid from. Identity addresses remain what Gate 2 and the sibling union are evaluated over: who the agent is, versus where it is paid.

2. Gate 4 evaluates the union of siblings. Where several registrations share a payout address, the address inherits the worst tier and the union of active flags among them. Without this, Gate 4 is trivially bypassable: the wallet above spans Silver and Watch, because feedback_events are keyed by agent id while jobs resolve by address, so an operator could attest through whichever registration happens to be clean while the flagged sibling sits at the same address, drawing on the same escrow.

Both rules are implemented, not aspirational. The union is applied in rating/engine/factor/gates.ts (unionSiblingQuality), which takes the maximum tier ordinal — ordinals ascend as quality descends, so the worst tier is the largest number — and the bitwise OR of active flags, across every registration resolving to the payout address. The attestation route refuses outright when the union fails Gate 4, and names the sibling that bound the decision, so a refusal is explainable rather than asserted.

One honest limit: a sibling that has never been rated contributes neither a tier nor an absence of one. It is counted and reported (siblings_without_rating), because an unrated sibling is absence of evidence, not evidence of cleanliness — and inventing a tier for it would be the same species of overclaim the union exists to prevent. The union reads siblings from the current published run only, as Gate 4 does: a sibling that has left the run is not rated now, contributes no tier and no flags, and is counted and reported in the same way. This matches the agent's own flags, which age out of the rating window; keeping a departed sibling's old flags would hold them longer than the agent's own.

Enforcement is deliberately duplicated rather than trusted to the attestation alone: the advance contract keys outstanding by payout address, so a second advance against the same address is refused on-chain however many attestations exist. Same discipline as §Defense in Depth — two independent layers, neither asked to be perfect alone.

Step 2 — The Advanceable Backlog

Two published discounts turn eligible escrow into the advanceable backlog — the dispute haircut and the client-diversification weight — and, from v1.1, a third mechanism that is published but set to 1.0:

The client-evaluator weight. On most Arc jobs the client paying for the work is also its ERC-8183 evaluator, and decides alone whether it is accepted; the job contract has no appeal step. Escrow on such a job counts at weight CLIENT_EVALUATOR_WEIGHT. It is 1.0, so today it changes no number: the reference parameters are fitted on mainnet, not invented on testnet, and the risk is disclosed to providers instead of priced by a guess. The mechanism is published now so that setting it later is a parameter change under this version, not a new methodology.

δ — the dispute haircut, per agent. The share of confirmed work that history says may still be rejected. Derived from the Rating's credibility-weighted dispute rate, floored:

δ = max( δ_min , dispute_rate_credibility_weighted )        δ_min = 5% (reference)

An agent whose smoothed rejection rate is 18% gets δ = 0.18; a clean agent with thin history is pulled toward the population floor rather than flattered by a small sample — the same credibility discipline the Rating uses everywhere.

What dispute_rate_credibility_weighted is, exactly. It is 1 − completion_rate_smoothed from the Rating (rating/engine/rating.ts), and three properties of that number matter enough to state rather than leave to the reader:

• The window is 30 days, not lifetime. δ prices what this agent's recent conduct implies, which is the right horizon for escrow that will settle in weeks — but it does mean an agent's δ can move without any new dispute, simply as old jobs age out of the window.
• The denominator is resolved jobs, and "unresolved badly" counts. Rejected, Expired, Disputed, Cancelled and Refunded all count against completion. That is broader than the word "dispute" suggests: an expired job is not a dispute, but it is confirmed work that did not turn into a settlement, which is precisely the risk δ exists to price. Stated plainly because the alternative — a narrow literal dispute count — would understate the haircut on exactly the agents that deserve it.
• It is credibility-blended toward the population mean, per chain, so a thin history is pulled toward the floor rather than reading as perfect.

This is a defensible proxy rather than a literal reading of the phrase "credibility-weighted dispute rate", and it is written down here so a provider reproducing δ from the public rating response gets our number and not a different one.

w — the client-diversification weight, over the eligible set. In factoring, concentration is repayment-source risk: if 80% of the eligible escrow comes from one client, one dispute or one walk-away impairs most of the repayment path. So:

w = clamp( 1 − HHI_eligible_clients , w_min , 1 )           w_min = 0.30 (reference)

A disclosed refinement vs. the Coverage draft: Coverage's quality factor q multiplied (1 − self_deal_share) into the weight and deliberately did not haircut backlog. Factor differs on both, for stated reasons: self-dealt jobs are already excluded at Gate 2 (a binary gate beats a discount), and in Factor the backlog is the repayment source, so its concentration must be priced. Different product, different treatment — disclosed here so the divergence is auditable.

The advanceable backlog:

advanceable_backlog = ( Σ_{jobs ∈ E} escrow_i ) × (1 − δ) × w

Worked example. Eligible escrow $10,000; agent's smoothed dispute rate 18%, so δ = 0.18. Shares are stated so every figure is reproducible:

Same locked money, well under half the safe advance — because most of the repayment path hangs on one counterparty's behaviour. Note the second row hits w_min: raw 1 − HHI is 0.27, and the floor is what stops concentration from driving the backlog to zero.

Worth reading carefully: w = 1.0 is unreachable with a finite client list. 1 − HHI approaches 1 only as the number of equally-weighted clients grows without bound; four equal clients cap out at 0.75, ten at 0.90. An earlier draft of this example asserted w ≈ 1.00 for four clients, which contradicted the formula directly above it — corrected in 1.0-draft2.

Step 3 — The Advance and Its Caps

Two ceilings, and the advance is the smaller of them:

escrow ceiling  = advance_rate × advanceable_backlog            advance_rate 0.55 (reference)
flow ceiling    = collateral + 0.8 × E                           E = expected independent flow
advance         ≤ min( escrow ceiling , flow ceiling )
advance         <  Σ escrow_i   (always less than the clients locked — hard invariant,
                                  enforced by the splitter when the advance opens)

The escrow ceiling is the v1.0 rule: a discount on escrow already locked. It bounds what the agent could be advanced against. The flow ceiling is new in v1.2 and bounds what it will plausibly repay: the collateral it already holds on its splitter, plus 80% of the independent settlements expected before the advance matures.

E — expected independent flow. E = r × H × h × w, where

• r = the slower of the trailing 30-day and 90-day daily rates of settlements through the splitter from qualifying clients — so a burst cannot inflate it and a collapse shows at once;
• H = days from now to the advance's maturity (§Maturity);
• h = n / (n + 20), n = qualifying settled jobs in 90 days — a credibility discount for a thin record;
• w = the client-diversification weight (§Step 2) over the qualifying flow.

E is zero when nothing has settled through the splitter, when no client qualifies, when the last qualifying settlement is more than 14 days old (a dormant agent's advance falls to its collateral with no judgement involved), or when there are fewer than 30 days or 5 jobs of qualifying history.

Which clients qualify. A client counts only if it is independent of the agent's side — the Gate 2 idea applied to the flow record, plus a funding-source test: a client whose first money came from the agent's side, or from a wallet that also funded it, does not count. That test is not built yet: Caliber's index of USDC transfers serves Gate 2's direct-transfer test (§Gate 2), but nothing yet tests where a client's money came from. Until something does, no client qualifies and E is zero for every agent, so every advance is capped at the collateral its agent holds. The funding page says so. Caliber's own wallets never qualify — the seeded agents and clients are labelled as Caliber's, so Caliber's own money is never presented as independent flow.

When an advance is an offer. An advance at or below the collateral its agent already holds leaves nothing uncovered and gives the agent no liquidity; it is not offered to providers. While E is zero that is every advance. A Caliber rehearsal — Caliber on every side — may still be funded by a Caliber-own wallet to run the contracts end to end, labelled as a test.

The fee. The factoring fee is one-time, charged at acceptance, and part of outstanding, so the skim captures it on the same waterfall as the principal. It is a factoring discount fee, not a time-accruing charge, and the vocabulary stays on factoring fee.

Collateral lowers it. The fee Caliber quotes is the reference fee, reduced in proportion to how much of the advance the agent's collateral covers:

fee = advance × reference_fee_rate × (1 − collateral_relief × min(1, collateral / advance))

with reference_fee_rate = 2.40% and collateral_relief = 0.50 — synthetic on testnet, fitted on mainnet. The reason is mechanical, not a reward: collateral is applied first at maturity, so the loss it leaves a provider really is smaller. It is shown as a lower fee. It is never interest or a return on collateral — the collateral stays the agent's, and is paid nothing.

The collateral the fee is priced from is the reading the funding page showed. The funding server refuses a figure above the chain's current reading.

The fee is carried in the provider's signed terms and in Caliber's signed quote, and the funding contract refuses any other.

Caliber's servicing fee keeps its share cap. The cap binds on the fee as quoted (lowered by collateral), not on the reference fee, so Caliber's cap falls with the fee.

During the guarded launch, published caps apply — a per-agent USDC maximum and a global outstanding maximum — and an agent list, admin-set, event-logged, changes effective when published. There is no provider list. Funding is permissionless to submit:

• any wallet may fund an advance by signing an authorisation;
• anyone may submit that authorisation to the funding contract;
• the first valid one wins: a later one finds the advance open and moves nothing.

The terms must carry Caliber's quote — an EIP-712 signature by the factory's quoter over every money term, the collateral, the financed jobs and the disclosure. The quote names no provider and is single use. Without it, a submitter could name a fee that resolution would take from the agent's collateral.

Caps are a launch-safety instrument, not a credit judgment.

The FactorAttestation

Every eligibility decision ships as a signed EIP-712 FactorAttestation that any contract can verify — the same primitive pattern as the RatingAttestation, on its own verifier.

Carried fields (pinned at FactorVerifier deployment): chain id · agent id · payout address · provider · eligible escrow (USDC) · advanceable backlog (post-δ, post-w) · eligible job count · δ and w as applied · Factor methodology version · freshness window · replay nonce. Issued through a paid x402 nanopayment route (HTTP 402, pay-per-attestation), verified on-chain by a dedicated FactorVerifier; the deployed RatingVerifier is unchanged. A provider that verifies the signature against the published Caliber signer key knows the claim is current, complete, and untampered — and sizes the advance from it.

δ and w are carried as applied, rounded to basis points, so a consumer can recompute advanceable_backlog = eligible_escrow × (1−δ) × w rather than take it on trust. Because the engine computes the backlog from the full-precision values and the attestation carries the rounded ones, an honest attestation can miss exact equality by up to roughly one basis point of the backlog. FactorVerifier.checkBacklogArithmetic therefore takes a tolerance, and the published minimum safe value is toleranceBps = 1. A consumer calling it with toleranceBps = 0 — the natural "check it exactly" choice — can reject a correct attestation, so the tolerance is stated here rather than left to be discovered against a live advance.

The attestation names its provider. It carries a provider field, after the payout address and inside the signature. It names the only address that may consume it on FactorVerifier: the wallet that paid for it through x402, or the provider a buyer names when acting for someone else.

Because a third party is not the named provider, it cannot burn the nonce. So there is no consumer allowlist, and no administrator of one. The verifier has no owner at all; its signer bumps the methodology version, and nothing else changes what verifies. (Up to v1.2 the struct had no provider, and nonce consumption was restricted to consumers Caliber had allowlisted instead.)

Repayment — The Skim Splitter

Read together with §Security. The splitter is the preferred repayment rail for a cooperative agent — not an enforcement mechanism.

The agent registers a Caliber payout splitter as its payment address at onboarding. Settlements of advance-encumbered (factored) jobs route through it and split by a fixed waterfall:

on settlement(amount) of a factored job:
    repay   = min(amount × skim_rate, outstanding)
    reserve = min(amount × reserve_rate, reserve_target − reserve_balance)
    transfer(repay, provider)                 # repayment first, code-enforced
    transfer(reserve, earned_reserve)         # then the reserve slice
    transfer(remainder, agent)                # agent keeps the rest
    if outstanding == 0: reserve joins the agent's collateral   # earned, not paid out

Reference default: skim_rate = 80%. With reserve_rate = 5% (§The Earned Reserve), the agent retains 15% of each factored settlement while the advance is outstanding.

Seniority is fixed and unconditional: repayment → reserve → agent. If the two published slices would ever exceed the settlement, the reserve gives way and the provider is paid in full — never the reverse.

That seniority imposes a condition the reference parameters must respect:

skim_rate + reserve_rate ≤ 100%      — the condition for the reserve to accrue

Above it, repayment consumes the settlement and the reserve slice is zero by construction. skim_rate = 100% remains a permitted provider choice, and under it the reserve is dormant by design. That configuration is not unsafe: at a full skim the reserve is redundant, because provider exposure (outstanding − collateral − reserve) is identical whether a dollar reduces the outstanding or is retained as seizable collateral. It simply cannot exercise a reserve — which is why it is not the reference.

An earlier draft published skim_rate = 100% as the reference alongside a 5% reserve rate. The two are arithmetically incompatible; see §Change History, 1.0-draft3.

The published sizing rule is unchanged — at the chosen rate the advance must clear from the eligible backlog alone:

skim_rate ≥ ( advance + fee ) / advanceable_backlog

At the reference advance rate and fee this binds well below the reference skim: 0.55 × 1.024 ≈ 0.56 ≤ 0.80, leaving margin for a provider pricing above the reference fee or sizing above the reference rate.

Two properties define this design: repayment is code-enforced for every settlement that passes the splitter, and there is no fixed due date — the advance clears exactly as fast as the underlying jobs settle. What is not enforced is the agent's choice to keep routing here. That is the next two sections.

The Earned Reserve, and Earned Collateral

A published slice of each factored settlement (reference reserve_rate = 5%, target = 10% of the original advance) accumulates in an on-chain earned reserve while an advance is open — the agent's own money, held as cushion and applied ahead of the collateral on any recovery.

What changed in v1.2. v1.0 returned the reserve to the agent on full repayment. From v1.2 it is not paid out: it joins the agent's collateral balance on its splitter, which the agent may withdraw whenever nothing is outstanding and which counts toward the collateral its next advance requires. Fresh capital stops being the price of every advance; an agent with a working record builds collateral out of its own repaid settlements, and walking away from an advance starts costing it money it earned.

Opt-in retention. An agent may also set a retention rate (retainBps, default 0 — off). That share of its own part of every settlement stays on its splitter as its collateral, whether or not an advance is open. The purpose is to build a limit before a first advance, without fresh capital.

It never touches the provider's repayment or the reserve. Only the agent can set it. Retained collateral is withdrawable on the same terms as all collateral: whenever nothing is outstanding.

The Collateral

Every advance needs collateral on the agent's own splitter before it opens — posted by the agent or a sponsor, or earned (above). The funding contract refuses to fund an advance without it. The required amount follows Factor's tier-stepped schedule, as a percentage of the advance:

Floor: 25 USDC. The splitter factory enforces a floor of its own that the operator cannot quote under — 25 USDC or 3% of the advance, whichever is larger — and the required amount is inside what the provider signs.

While an advance is open the collateral cannot be withdrawn. At maturity, or after an uncured routing-away default, it is applied to what the provider is owed, after the reserve, capped at what is owed; whatever is left stays the agent's own balance. Once nothing is outstanding the agent may withdraw it.

The collateral asset is a deployment parameter of the splitter factory, and today it must be USDC — the same asset the advance is paid in. Collateral in another asset would have to be valued against a USDC debt, which means an oracle and its governance; that is not done. (v1.0's per-advance FactorBond is retired with the v1 contracts; advances opened under v1.0 kept their bonds.)

Maturity and Mechanical Resolution

Every advance has a maturity, fixed when it is funded: the latest deadline (expiredAt) among the ERC-8183 jobs it is financed against, plus the cure window. The splitter records the financed jobs and checks each when the advance opens — it must pay the splitter, hold escrow, and be before its deadline — and refuses an advance that is not below their combined escrow. By maturity every financed job has either settled or become refundable to its client.

At maturity, anyone may call resolution. It applies the reserve, then the collateral, to whatever is still owed, pays that to the provider up to the amount owed, leaves anything over in the agent's own balance, and closes the advance. Caliber takes nothing from it. It is a resolution, not a default: it makes no accusation and needs no keeper, and the public record calls it a resolution. It covers every way an advance can end badly — the agent routed settlements away, the jobs were rejected, or nobody delivered them and they expired — which is why it exists: the most ordinary of those paths produces no routing-away evidence at all.

The provider's loss is therefore at most the advance minus the collateral, and nothing about recovery waits on anyone's judgement.

A settlement that reaches the splitter after resolution — ERC-8183 lets an evaluator accept a delivered job even after its deadline — goes to the agent: the advance is closed.

The cure window is fixed when the splitter factory is deployed and has no setter. The reference value is 24 h, which is what a mainnet deployment uses. The Arc testnet deployment of 23 September 2026 uses 1 hour, so that a maturity and a resolution can be run and observed inside a working day; the funding page states the deployed value.

The Hook Rail: One Job, One Advance

The hook rail advances USDC against a single client-funded ERC-8183 job. The financier hook is that job's payee, fixed when the client creates the job, and the job's client names the agent it settles to, once.

Where the sections above describe the splitter, its skim, the reserve or a maturity, they describe the splitter rail; the hook rail's terms are the ones in this section.

Consent and quote. The agent signs a consent to the job, the advance, the fee, the collateral it locks, a deadline and a nonce. The consent names no funder. Caliber signs a quote over the same terms and the bonus the launch round sets for it, paid only as §Launch Rounds says. The quote is single use, and expires ten minutes after Caliber signs it: the hook enforces the expiry the quote carries. Anyone may fund an advance that carries both. The first valid funding wins, and a second moves nothing.

Limits. An advance is at most 55% of the job's escrow, and its fee at most the advance. An agent has at most one open advance on the hook at a time. Caliber's quote extends that to every rail: no quote is signed for an agent with an advance open anywhere.

Collateral. The agent locks the larger of 0.50 USDC and 3% of the advance, from collateral it posted first. The floor is fixed when the hook is deployed and has no setter.

How it closes.

• The client accepts the work: the job's payout repays the funder first (advance plus fee), the agent's locked collateral tops up any gap, and the rest is the agent's. Repaid in full, this is repaid.
• The job is rejected or expires: the escrow goes back to the client, and the locked collateral is applied to what is owed, capped at it. This is resolved, with its reason ("job rejected", "job expired"). It is not a default in the routing-away sense, though the launch ladder counts it as one (§Launch Rounds).
• A payout short even after the collateral is also resolved ("payout short").
• Every close states what reached the funder and any shortfall.

A payout that cannot be delivered is held, never reverted. If USDC refuses a recipient (a blocklisted address), the hook keeps the amount for that recipient to claim to itself later. A close never depends on a transfer succeeding. A funder that is a contract unable to call the claim cannot recover a held payout, and nobody can claim it for that funder.

If the client's refund itself fails, the advance is recovered at expiry anyway. Should the evaluator then accept the job late, its payout pays the funder what the collateral left unpaid before the agent.

A pauser can stop new funding on the hook. Repayment, recovery and collateral withdrawal never pause.

The hook rail publishes no outcome to the ERC-8004 registry. Its closes are on the funding record.

Routing-Away Default — Factor's Default Definition

Distinct from the Rating's performance-default (work rejected — a property of work quality), Factor defines one default: routing-away — a property of the advance.

Definition: while an advance is outstanding, a factored job settles to an address other than the registered splitter, or the agent re-points its payout address away from the splitter. Both are provable on-chain.

Detection and consequence: a keeper marks the breach with the settlement evidence; a cure window lets the agent remit and clear the mark; past the window anyone may execute recovery, which applies the reserve and then the collateral to what is owed, capped at what is owed, in one call — there is no owner-gated first step. The mark's cure deadline is fixed when the mark is made. The evidence is a citation, not a proof: a mark must cite something, and nothing on chain can verify that the citation resolves, because the breach is the absence of a settlement.

A routing-away default closes an advance before its maturity; maturity closes it in every other case (§Maturity). The Rating is not altered by a routing-away default directly, but the mark is public, and the outcome is published (§Outcomes).

A pause after an uncured routing-away default. For 30 days after a routing-away default that was not cured, the agent cannot take a new advance on any rail. Neither can any agent that shares its payout address. A mark cured within the window does not count. The pause limits the agent, never who may fund.

v1.0 history: on the v1 contracts the reserve seizure was owner-only on the deployed testnet factory, which left the bond slash waiting on Caliber. The V2 contracts remove that step; v1 splitters take no new advance.

Outcomes, Published

Each closed advance's outcome is written to the ERC-8004 Reputation Registry against the agent's identity, by a permissionless call that anyone may make once per advance and that is never part of repayment — so a registry that refuses a write can delay a record but never a payment.

• tag1 = caliber.factor.v1; tag2 = repaid · resolved · defaulted;
• value = the whole-percent share of principal + fee that reached the provider (100 = made whole).

resolved is its own word: an advance closed at maturity is not an accusation. The agent's right of reply is ERC-8004's own appendResponse.

Ageing. Wherever Caliber summarises an agent's published outcomes, each outcome counts with weight 0.5^(age / 180 days): an outcome six months old counts half, a year old a quarter. After 730 days an outcome leaves every summary, but it stays listed on the agent's funding record, with its date and the agent's reply if any.

Ageing is a rule for reading. The registry keeps every outcome, and nothing is deleted. Anyone can apply the same rule to the registry themselves.

Today no figure uses outcomes. The limit, the fee and the rating do not read them. The rule governs any summary that does, and the funding record states it. One rule reads the default itself, not its published outcome: the 30-day pause after an uncured routing-away default (§Routing-Away Default).

The Pricing Model

What a fee would need to cover on an advance, in absolute USDC: the expected loss after the collateral (δ × max(0, advance − collateral), with δ from Step 2), the cost of the capital for the time to maturity, and Caliber's servicing. It is built now so that it can be fitted on mainnet. On testnet every input is synthetic or measured on Caliber's own activity, and it is labelled so. Its collateral term sets the fee's collateral relief (§The fee); its other inputs remain synthetic on testnet and do not set the fee. It is not a predictive rate and is not published as one.

Testnet Gate Profiles and the Caliber Demo

From v1.7, one of three gate profiles decides each offer outside the launch rounds, and every offer, record and machine-readable response names the one that decided it (gate_profile). A launch advance follows §Launch Rounds.

Standard. The gates and sizing above. It is the only profile on any chain other than Arc testnet, and an agent that passes the standard Gate 4 is always decided by it.

New agent (Arc testnet only). For an agent that is unrated or rated Pending, with no risk flag on any registration sharing its payout address. Watch and Dormant are never admitted. Neither is an agent that has left the current rating run, nor one where any registration sharing its addresses was flagged, or rated Watch or Dormant, in a rating run in the last 30 days.

• Gate 4 is this class, in place of a quality tier. Gates 1 and 2 are unchanged.
• Gate 3 does not refuse a young or unproven client. It counts that client's escrow up to a cap: 2 USDC while the client has no settled job with a counterparty unrelated to the agent, or while its first job's date is not known; 5 USDC while its first job is less than 14 days old. The cap covers all of the client's jobs together, taken in job order, and all capped clients together count for at most 10 USDC.
• The diversification weight is set to 1; the caps bound concentration instead. The maximum advance is 50% of the advanceable backlog, and at most 10 USDC.
• The flow ceiling and the collateral rules are unchanged, so the advance is also at most the agent's collateral plus the flow term.
• The marketplace lists a new-agent advance whenever it is above zero, even when the agent's collateral covers all of it. The class exists so that an agent with no rating can take a first, small, covered advance and build the record a rating needs.

Caliber demo (Arc testnet only). Caliber runs a small cohort of demo agents and demo clients, with jobs that keep running, so the whole flow can always be shown on testnet. Caliber is the agent and every client.

• Gate 4 is "a Caliber demo agent". A demo agent's job from a client outside the demo cohort is refused at Gate 3.
• Gate 2's other tests run, but its Caliber-on-both-sides test does not. This is the only profile under which a Caliber client may finance a Caliber agent.
• Sizing is the new-agent class's.
• A demo advance is never shown as an offer and is never counted as independent. It is left out of every independent figure, rating and rate, and is labelled "Caliber demo" on every page and in every response.
• On Arc testnet any wallet may fund a demo advance, with testnet USDC and under the demo label (the operator's decision of 21 October 2026).

The chain guard. Both testnet profiles need two things: the engine's chain must be Arc testnet, and the chain the deployment talks to must be chain id 5042002. Otherwise the standard profile decides, and a request to size a testnet profile for any other chain is refused with an error. Neither profile can reach mainnet through a renamed chain alone.

Sponsored collateral (Arc testnet). Caliber may post the collateral floor for an outside new agent from a labelled Caliber wallet, for at most 4 agents at a time, once the agent holds confirmed escrow from a client that is not Caliber's. The agents holding sponsored collateral are listed publicly. Posted collateral is the agent's own balance on its splitter: the agent can withdraw it whenever no advance is open, and Caliber cannot take it back. Sponsored collateral is Caliber's money and is never counted as independent.

Launch Rounds

1. During the three launch rounds, Caliber pays the funder of a qualifying advance a fixed amount of USDC for each advance repaid in full. The amount is set by Caliber's quote and fixed when the advance is funded. For each level, the amount is lower in each later round. Bonuses are paid after each round closes and those of its advances that carry a bonus are repaid or closed.
2. Each level has a minimum advance and, in each round, a bonus. Level 1, from 1.00 USDC: 0.50, then 0.20, then 0.10 USDC in rounds 1, 2 and 3. Level 2, from 2.00 USDC: 1.00, then 0.40, then 0.20. Level 3, from 5.00 USDC: 1.00 in round 2 and 0.50 in round 3. Level 4, from 10.00 USDC: 1.00 in round 3. An advance gets the bonus of the highest level whose minimum it reaches, but never above its agent's own level.
3. An advance qualifies only if it passed Caliber's eligibility checks when Caliber quoted it, including the self-dealing, circular and fresh-counterparty tests, it was repaid in full, and its funder is not linked to the agent or the client by those tests. The funder link test is taken as of the funding block, on the funder's full USDC history, and the caps are checked again at funding. If a funder's USDC history is too long to read in one pass, its bonus waits until Caliber has read the rest, and the same test decides. Bonuses are capped per agent and per client in each round, at the amounts in the published schedule; an agent's or a client's cap refuses the bonus whole, and the quote says so before funding. Each funder's bonuses in a round are also capped, at a quarter of the round's pool. Anyone may fund a listing, so the quote can't know the funder, and this cap is checked only at funding: an advance that would take its funder past it carries no bonus, and its funding goes ahead.
4. Each round has a fixed pool of USDC: 150, 90 and 60 for rounds 1, 2 and 3. A round closes when what is left of its pool is smaller than its lowest bonus, and the next round opens. There is no time limit. An advance whose bonus would not fit in what is left of the pool gets the next round's amount, or none in round 3. Quotes not yet funded hold their bonus against the pool and the caps until Caliber sees them expire. An agent has one listing at a time (its signed consent, posted for funders), and the quotes on one listing hold only once.
5. Anyone may fund a launch advance. A funder linked to an advance's agent or client by those tests gets no bonus on that advance. Neither do Caliber's own wallets. An advance whose agent or client is one of Caliber's own wallets is a Caliber rehearsal: it carries no bonus, and its quote says so.
6. The bonus is a fixed amount per repaid advance. It is not a rate and does not grow with time.
7. Caliber charges no attestation fee and no servicing fee on a launch advance (one funded under a Caliber launch quote).

Which agent. In the launch rounds, the agent is the wallet the job's client names as its provider. That wallet must own a registered agent; an operator's wallet is refused. Its record is read from the lowest-numbered agent the wallet owns. The agent's level, a default's bar and the per-agent bonus cap count both that wallet and that registration, so moving the registration to another wallet does not reset them.

Levels. An agent starts at Level 1 and moves up by repaid advances: 1 to reach Level 2, 2 more for Level 3, 3 more for Level 4. A level is never above the round's top level: Level 2 in round 1, 3 in round 2, 4 in round 3. Levels carry across rounds. Each level sets the most the agent can take: up to 2.00, 5.00, 10.00 and 25.00 USDC, and never more than 55% of the job's escrow.

What counts.

• An advance repaid in full by its job's payout moves the agent up.
• One topped up from the agent's own collateral, with nothing short, counts neither way.
• A rejected or expired job, any shortfall, a seized advance, or one resolved from the reserve is a default. It bars the agent for the rest of the round and sends it back to Level 1 from the next.

Eligibility tightens round by round:

• Round 1: a client at least 3 days old with one settled job elsewhere; an agent with at least 3 completed jobs, at least 8 in 10 of its finished jobs completed, and no risk flag on those jobs.
• Round 2: a client at least 7 days old; a rated agent, Pending or above, with no flag.
• Round 3: this method's own Gate 3 and Gate 4.

Caps. Per agent per round: 10.00, 15.00, 15.00 USDC of bonus. Per client: 5.00, 7.50, 7.50. Per funder: a quarter of the round's pool, 37.50, 22.50, 15.00. Advances outstanding across the launch at any time: 50, 150, 250 USDC.

What a launch round leaves out

Launch advances are sized by the agent's level and the job's escrow. The flow ceiling (§Step 3) does not apply to them. They run inside the launch caps above. Outside a launch round, and on every advance that is not a launch advance, the sizing of the profile that decides it applies (§Testnet Gate Profiles and the Caliber Demo).

Defense in Depth Against Self-Financing

The primary defense is exclusion: self-dealt escrow, circular escrow that Gate 2 can see through ERC-8183 job payments, and escrow from a client the agent's side paid directly (from v1.4) counts $0, so that manufactured backlog buys no advance; money routed through any middle wallet is not seen (§Gate 2). The launch bonus's funder link test reads transfers only up to the funding block, so a link formed later, such as part of a bonus passed back to the agent or the client, is not seen. The escrow arithmetic is not a second layer against collusion, and this paper previously said it was. The invariant advance < escrow locked protects a provider only if that escrow settles to the splitter. A disguised self-hirer controls the other side of the job: its confederate client — or its confederate evaluator — can reject the work, or let it expire, and ERC-8183 refunds the escrow to that client. Nothing settles and nothing is routed away. On the v1 contracts no default could be marked and nothing was seized; from v1.2 the advance matures, and resolution applies the reserve and the self-hirer's collateral to what is owed. The self-hirer keeps the advance and loses its collateral, and nets advance − collateral. What stands between the book and collusion is therefore the independence gates and the size of the collateral — which flow sizing now makes at least as large as any advance while no independent flow exists — not the arithmetic. For an agent that is not colluding the arithmetic still matters: walking away forfeits its own customers' escrow, which is usually worth far more to it than the advance.

Where the arithmetic layer is enforced, at v1.0. FactorVerifier .requireAdvanceWithinBounds implements both published bounds — advance ≤ advance_rate × advanceable_backlog and advance < Σ escrow_i — and refuses the amounts they forbid. But a provider must choose to route its advance through it: CaliberSplitterFactory.openAdvance, the function that records an advance, takes the skim rate and the principal as parameters and does not itself consult the verifier. So at v1.0 the arithmetic layer is a check a provider performs, not a property the advance path enforces. An independent review on 2026-09-07 found this paper describing it as structural, and it was not; the sentence you are reading is the correction.

The exclusion layer is unaffected — it runs off-chain in the eligibility engine before any attestation is signed, which is where it always ran. What changes is only the claim about the second layer: it is available and published, it is not automatic. Making openAdvance consume a FactorAttestation is the mainnet design and is deliberately not being retrofitted to the testnet deployment, because redeploying the factory re-keys the CREATE2 splitter clones that already-seeded jobs name as their ERC-8183 provider.

What This Is / Is Not

It is: a neutral, permissionless eligibility-and-control layer for advances against escrowed ERC-8183 receivables; deterministic and reproducible given its inputs; a consumer of Caliber Rating v2.2.0 attestations.

It is not: the lender (no capital, no sizing decision) · a credit-line recommendation · a credit rating or PD/LGD model · legal recourse or KYC · a forecast of future earnings (that is Coverage, unshipped) · financial advice.

Not a promise of a bonus. The bonus a quote shows is paid only if the advance is repaid in full, its funder passes the link test and is not one of Caliber's own wallets, and the round's caps allow it when it is funded. Caliber pays it after the round closes, from the launch's fixed pools.

The Honest Disclaimers

• ⚖️ No legal recourse. On-chain controls only; the provider disclosure above applies in full.
• 🧪 Not calibrated, and testnet cannot calibrate it. Every value in this document is an editorial starting point, not fitted to resolved-advance data — none exists yet. Nor can testnet supply it: the only Arc population with enough eligible escrow to fit against is a cohort we provisioned ourselves, and fitting a parameter to activity we constructed is circular, not calibration. The parameters stay provisional until the proving period below closes on live mainnet outcomes. Until then the guarded-launch caps, not the parameters, are what bound the downside.
• 🔌 The splitter is a rail, not a lock. A sovereign agent can re-route or respawn. Routing-away is made provable and costly, abandonment is made irrational by the advance cap, the reserve and the collateral — not impossible. The fuller willingness-to-pay framework (franchise value, loan-to-franchise sizing) lives in Coverage, unshipped. The loss bound is the advance minus the collateral: at maturity — whatever went wrong, including jobs rejected or expired and escrow refunded to the client — the reserve and then the collateral are applied to what is owed. Beyond the collateral the loss is the provider's.
• 🎯 Evaluator noise is inherited. If a lenient client accepts bad work, the escrow settles and the haircut never sees it — Factor inherits the Rating's evaluator-quality gap.
• 📉 Dispute risk is priced, not eliminated. δ is a haircut on history, not a guarantee about the next job.
• 🤝 Garbage in, garbage out. Every limitation of the underlying ERC-8183 event data flows through.

Provisional Parameters and the Proving Period

None of these values is signed off, and none is operative on its own. They are published so the calculation is reproducible and so the eventual recalibration has a stated starting point — not because they are calibrated.

The proving period runs from the Arc mainnet deployment until resolved-advance data exists to review them against: advances that have been funded and have either fully repaid or defaulted. During it, every attestation carries the provisional marker, the guarded-launch caps are held at their conservative setting, and the participating agents are allowlisted; there is no provider list. Sign-off at the end is a dated, event-logged act that closes the period and moves the version from 1.7.0-provisional to 1.7.0 — not an assumption made by anyone's silence. Should the review move a value, that is a material change: it is published, and it takes effect when it is published. An advance already open keeps the terms it was opened under.

Relationship, Versioning, Provenance

Own version line: Caliber Factor v1.x. Not Rating v3.0 (nothing in the performance rating changes — attestation bytes, tiers, weights, deployed RatingVerifier all untouched) and not Coverage v1.x (a different object: Factor measures committed escrow; Coverage would measure loans against projected cash flow). Factor adopts the Rating's governance wholesale: published versions, a change log, and a dedicated on-chain version pointer in FactorVerifier. A published change takes effect when it is published. The dual-version acceptance that follows a version bump is a property of the contract, not a notice period: FactorVerifier accepts the current version and the immediately-previous one, and the previous one stops verifying when the next bump displaces it.

Consumes Rating v2.2.0, which leaves provider-controlled jobs out of the rating and does not apply the volume-anomaly flag (older Factor materials citing 2.1.0 or 2.0.1 are superseded). Supersedes the Coverage draft's disclaimer that "full counterparty-graph cycle detection is future work": v1.0 ships it as Gate 2.

Provenance. Factor is the disciplined subset of the Caliber Coverage v1.1 draft (May 2026): the neutrality boundary, δ, the diversification logic, the skim rail, the bond, and the routing-away breach concept are inherited; the velocity forecast (v̂), CFADS/DSCR ratios, breach state machine, margin calls, mark-to-market franchise, and credit-line sizing are deliberately excluded — they underwrite lending, not factoring, and the data to calibrate them does not yet exist. The same instinct that retired the v1.0 credit-rating framing applies: ship only what the evidence supports.

Future Work: Caliber Coverage

Everything fenced out above has a home. Caliber Coverage — continuous cash-flow coverage for agent loans (live DSCR, dual-trigger covenants, franchise-bounded sizing) — remains a designed-but-unshipped sibling on its own future version line. It is explicitly not part of the Factor release and nothing in a Factor deployment depends on it.

Change History

Caliber Factor v1.7 · 21 October 2026 · Bangkok 🇹🇭 Neutral eligibility & control layer. The capital provider owns the credit decision. Standards-native, open methodology — improves by getting punched.