Catallax - A Protocol for Pseudonymous Contract Work Economies

This site explains an open protocol called Catallax which is intended to facilitate uncensorable, decentralized labor markets and permissionless payments.

Anybody on Earth can participate in Catallax and nobody can be stopped from doing so by anyone. Those who choose to participate in Catallax do so as one of the following roles, depending on their goals:

Patron: Creates tasks to be worked, finalizes agreements with Arbiters, funds escrows and assigns Free Agents.
Arbiter: Advertises as an escrow agent, accepts tasks, judges outcomes of work and pays Free Agents or refunds Patrons.
Free Agent: Applies for available tasks, delivers work and gets paid.

Arbiter advertisements, Task postings and their eventual resolutions are posted on the Nostr protocol while payments are handled via Cashu ecash and Lightning.
Thanks to Cashu-based wallets and Nostr’s permissionless identity creation, anyone (namedoxxed or nym) can participate in the Catallax economy without conforming to KYC or AML nor first having a Bitcion or Lightning wallet configured.

All you need is a web browser.

Rather than involving blockchains, smart contracts or complicated oracles and voting systems, the Catallax protocol relies on lindy technology: trust and reputation.

Protocols over Platforms

Catallax is a protocol, not a platform. This site acts as a schelling point to coordinate and explain the system, but doesn’t provide the service itself nor does the author take any fees from anyone running the protocol. It’s up to market actors to participate and run infrastructure according to their needs.

Because the network is built on top of Nostr, Catallax inherits Nostr’s censorship-resistance. As long as you can find a relay (or run your own), you can participate in the economy. Neither individual users nor particular tasks or work categories can be unilaterally prohibited by any central authority.
Speech is guaranteed by open protocols, but reach is not.

How it Works

Arbiters advertise themselves, including what type of work they are proficient at judging, their fee, and any terms and conditions.
Patrons create task proposals with detailed descriptions of what they want done and how much the gig pays.
Patrons finalize tasks by funding the escrow

By “fund the escrow” we just mean “send bitcoin or ecash to the Arbiter’s wallet”. Remember, we’re keeping the base layer simple.

Free Agents can apply for tasks and discuss with the Patron
The Patron assigns a Free Agent to a task
Free Agents get to work. When done, they submit the final product to the Arbiter for this gig
The Arbiter judges the work. If it meets the requirement, the Free Agent is paid. If not, the money is refunded to the Patron.

For more details, see How it Works.

Value-for-Value for Real

Principles

Fully decentralized from the beginning

The author of this protocol is deeply distrustful of defacto centralization, where a nominally open protocol is implemented in one instance with overly-opinionated defaults hardcoded in such that viable alternatives never arise.
To avoid that, we will endeavour to:

Provide a relay + client package as a dead-simple binary for easy deployment by anyone.
- The maintainers of this site might run an instance to help bootstrap, but it should be trivial for anyone else to do the same.
Optionally include a Cashu mint in the above.
Optionally include GrapeRank WoT in the above.

Pseudonymity and user-proficiency spectrum respected

The protocol runs over nostr, but we will strive to hide these technicaliities at first
- The ideal implementation will include simple onboarding such that a non-Nostr-user who just wants to participate in Catallax can get a Nostr identity and Cashu wallet right away via a Catallax client.
- For the user who wants to explore the rest of Nostr, off-ramps should be provided to usher them into the rest of the ecosystem.
Any person, whether they have a lightning wallet and bitcoin-awarness/interest or not should be able to participate economically (thanks to NIP-60).
The above, taken all together, imply that fully pseudonymous interaction will be feasible.
Thought will be given to Tor compatibility as appropriate.

Trust and Reputation

TODO: Discussion of GrapeRank
TODO: List all the known places where bad actors could do bad things and their mitigations (spoiler alert: it’s mostly the Arbiter who can scam people, and we’ve already capitulated that Arbiter trust will be paramount. Pick your Arbiter well and appreciate that their fee is your safety!)
Game theorists and red-teamers are invited to help plug these holes

Catallax will be built on Catallax

To every extent possible, once an MVP is ready and as budget allows, work on Catallax relay implementations, clients, Cashu integrations and GrapeRank integrations will be advertised as Catallax tasks for others to pick up!

Current Status

Catallax is in active development!

See the links below for more detail, but briefly:

An initial relay implementation was briefly live
An initial proof-of-concept UI was briefly live
Lightning/Cashu integration is unstarted
GrapeRank integration is unstarted
Friendly deployment packaging is unstarted

A public roadmap will be provided on this site (see below).

TODO for this site:

Create a github project and display its tasks here via api integration (Public roadmap)
Include citations from the literature that inspired this project
include easy “follow me on nostr” link
Fill out mentions of GrapeRank above
write more on the importance of pseudonymity?

Questions Being Explored

Should the cashu mint be with the relay/“instance” or the escrow arbiter?
is Cashu a fallback from lighting, or the only option?
can a patron choose a different mint or have to use the arbiter’s (or relay’s…) mint?

Catallax is an open protocol that enables pseudonymous contract work economies

Patrons broadcast paid gigs
Free Agents work jobs anonymously
Arbiters hold funds in escrow and judge outcomes.

Everyone wins.