01 / Produce
A producer runs deterministic work and seals a signed receipt containing the job and output commitments.
Protocol Preview
Verify useful work before designing its reward
Proof of Contribution is a Maple research and protocol track. A local deterministic prototype can produce work, reproduce it across logical verifier identities, check signed attestations, and apply a threshold. Distributed identity, adversarial networking, and economic settlement remain open production gates.
Runnable does not mean economically secure. This page separates the implemented demonstration from the distributed protocol requirements.
The Invariant
Claiming work is not the same as doing it
Most incentive schemes begin with a reward mechanism. Proof of Contribution begins with a narrower question: can another participant reproduce the claimed work and verify its evidence? Settlement should remain off until identity, quorum, liveness, and adversarial behavior are tested.
Lifecycle
The target verification lifecycle
02 / Attest
A verifier reproduces the same deterministic job and signs an attestation over the comparison result.
03 / Reach quorum
The protocol design requires a threshold of distinct valid attestations and excludes the producer from its own quorum.
04 / Settle only after validation
A future settlement backend may reward verified work only after the economic, identity, dispute, and liveness models are validated.
Open Gates
Requirements before distributed settlement
Cross-node verification
Target: a verifier checks producer signatures and reproduces deterministic work without a shared signing secret.
Reputation-weighted quorum
Target: acceptance requires a threshold of distinct attestations whose eligibility follows a published reputation rule.
Adversarial verifier handling
Target: false approvals and false failures are detectable before any economic penalty is enabled. Slashing is not a production service today.
Sybil and forgery resistance
Target: signed attestations, distinct identities, producer exclusion, and economic cost make self-reward and forged-quorum attacks harder.
Implemented Prototype
The local reproduction loop runs today
The developer preview includes an in-process demonstration over the deterministic embedded engine. Logical verifier identities reproduce the same output, sign attestations, and exercise the threshold rule. This validates receipt and quorum mechanics; it does not validate a hostile network, decentralized identity, or real-value settlement.
# Run the local deterministic reproduction prototype. cargo run -p maple-cli -- inference demo \ --prompt "maple governs accountable agents" \ --verifiers 3 --threshold 2 # Inspect the JSON report: producer receipt, verifier attestations, # threshold result, and explicit prototype settlement state.
Help turn the protocol into evidence
The next work is adversarial: heterogeneous execution, identity cost, quorum safety, liveness, dispute handling, and reproducible public test vectors.