Stop re-establishing what is already proven. Laterate off it — and the receipt is the invoice.
Structural Lateration (SLS) is the parent metering primitive that AFiR, MiR, RogueCompute, Stream, and OCR are children of. An agent triangulates its position off prior attested shapes, pays only the residual — the small remaining work — and gets a signed receipt where the avoided cost is cryptographically bound into the claims payload. The bill is non-disputable by design.
The parent primitive — AFiR, MiR, RogueCompute, Stream, and OCR are all children of it.
Instead of re-establishing structural work from scratch, an agent laterates: it triangulates its position off several prior attested shapes in the Lattice field (n-body lateration) and pays only for the residual — the gap between what going solo would cost and what the lateration actually cost. That gap is the avoided cost, and it is the value created.
Similar inputs land near each other
The structural signature preserves neighborhood: related shapes cluster together in the Lattice field, and the measured separation between related and unrelated shapes is +0.403. Laterating off a close neighbor costs less because the residual is smaller.
You cannot reconstruct the input from its signature
The structural signature is a one-way function. The original input cannot be recovered from its shape in the field. This is the privacy split — the shape is useful for lateration but reveals nothing about what produced it.
Laterating off the field cuts spend by up to 72%
The triple constraint only matters if the residual is cheap enough to matter. Laterating off attested shapes in the field reduces spend by up to 72% versus establishing the same work solo from scratch.
Three streams. All verifiable. Customer always lands below solo.
Every lateration event triggers up to three revenue events simultaneously. The controlling invariant is always true: customer_net is less than solo. If it is not, the lateration is invalid.
$0.0001 per lateration receipt, always billed.
Every lateration event, regardless of avoided_cost or tenancy, produces one signed receipt and triggers the floor charge. It is the minimum revenue unit and the proof that the event happened.
- floor = $0.0001 per receipt
- always billed, no minimum avoided_cost threshold
- anchors the audit trail even for very cheap laterations
- composable: every child primitive (AFiR, MiR, Stream…) inherits this
20% of avoided_cost. 1.5x privacy premium for cross-tenant reuse.
The clip is 20% of the avoided_cost. When a customer laterates off another tenant's attested shape, a 1.5x privacy premium applies — Hive receives 30% of the cross-tenant avoided_cost and the customer still nets below solo. The effective take rate is counter-cyclical: as solo_cost falls, the clip rate rises (0.318 to 0.333), so revenue is stable-to-rising in a downturn.
- same-tenant clip: 20% of avoided_cost
- cross-tenant clip: 20% × 1.5 privacy premium = 30%
- counter-cyclical take rate: 0.318 → 0.333 as solo cost falls
- customer_net < solo at every take-rate level
30 bps spread on cross-tenant reuse. Scout earns half.
When a tenant's attested shape is reused by another tenant, a 30 basis point spread applies to the notional value. Half of that spread goes to the scout who supplied the reused shape, and Hive keeps the other half. The scout is incentivized to contribute high-quality, reusable shapes to the Lattice field.
- spread = 30 bps on cross-tenant notional
- scout earns 50% of the spread (15 bps)
- Hive keeps 50% of the spread (15 bps)
- $1,000 notional: $3.00 spread, $1.50 to scout, $1.50 to Hive
customer_net is always less than solo. Always.
All three streams together must still leave the customer below what going solo would have cost. This is not a policy commitment — it is a structural invariant enforced by the engine. If lateration + all fees exceeds solo_cost, the lateration does not happen.
- customer_net < solo_cost: enforced, not aspirational
- verified against 500 randomized inputs, 0 violations (T2)
- any stream configuration that violates it is rejected
- the moat is that helping the customer is the only option
The signed receipt that proves the lateration IS the invoice for it.
The avoided_cost is bound inside the ML-DSA-65 (NIST FIPS 204) signed claims payload. The dollar amount is cryptographically tied to the work. If a customer disputes the bill by tampering avoided_cost, the receipt stops verifying — so disputing the bill destroys the proof the lateration ever helped them. The bill is non-disputable.
# 1. price the lateration -- engine computes residual and avoided_cost result = price_lateration(input_shape, lattice_field) # result.solo_cost = 1.00 (what going solo would cost) # result.residual = 0.28 (what laterating actually costs) # result.avoided_cost = 0.72 (the value created) # 2. mint the receipt -- avoided_cost is bound into the signed claims payload receipt = mint_receipt(result, signer="ml-dsa-65") # receipt.claims = { solo_cost: 1.00, residual: 0.28, # avoided_cost: 0.72, clip: 0.144, # customer_net: 0.4241, floor: 0.0001 } # receipt.signature = ML-DSA-65 over claims (NIST FIPS 204) # 3. verify the receipt -- clean path v = verify_receipt(receipt, PUBLIC_KEY) # v.ok == True -- claims intact, signature valid # 4. tamper avoided_cost and try to dispute the bill receipt_tampered = tamper(receipt, field="avoided_cost", value=0.00) v2 = verify_receipt(receipt_tampered, PUBLIC_KEY) # v2.ok == False -- dispute destroys the proof the lateration helped # INVARIANT: you cannot dispute the bill without erasing the evidence of the save
$1.00 solo. $0.28 residual. $0.4241 customer net. Verified by the engine.
These are the exact numbers verified by the SLS engine. Use them for integration, QA, and contract pricing. They are not illustrative — they are the actual test-run outputs.
| Field | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| solo_cost_estimate | $1.00 | what establishing solo would cost |
| residual | $0.28 | actual cost of the lateration (same-tenant) |
| avoided_cost | $0.72 | solo − residual; the value created |
| receipt floor | $0.0001 | always billed, per lateration event |
| savings clip (20%) | $0.144 | 20% of avoided_cost ($0.72 × 0.20) |
| Hive total revenue | $0.1441 | floor + clip ($0.0001 + $0.144) |
| customer_net | $0.4241 | residual + Hive revenue ($0.28 + $0.1441) |
| customer saves vs solo | $0.5759 | solo − customer_net ($1.00 − $0.4241) |
customer_net ($0.4241) < solo ($1.00) — verified against 500 randomized inputs, 0 violations
30 bps spread on $1,000 notional = $3.00 total spread. Scout earns 50% = $1.50. Hive keeps 50% = $1.50. The scout provided the reused shape; the settlement is their passive return on contributing to the Lattice field.
8 of 8 smoke criteria PASS. Real values. Tamper rejected.
All eight smoke criteria run against the live signer. The numbers above are the actual outputs. Tamper is detected. Settlement drift is below 1e-6.
Smoke test 8 of 8 pass
- T1✓receipt-is-invoice: tamper to avoided_cost detected, receipt fails verify
- T2✓customer-always-ahead: 500 randomized inputs, 0 invariant violations
- T3✓three-streams: floor + clip + scout all fire and total correctly
- T4✓privacy-premium: 1.5x ratio confirmed cross-tenant, net < solo holds
- T5✓scout economics: approximately 5x hot-vs-cold reuse ratio confirmed
- T6✓scout-vs-lateration: scout settlement and lateration receipt are separate events
- T7✓counter-cyclical: clip take-rate rises from 0.318 to 0.333 as solo_cost falls
- T8✓settlement-conservation: arithmetic drift below 1e-6, no rounding leak
Engine properties
The signature is computed over the full claims payload including avoided_cost, clip, customer_net, and floor. Altering any field breaks the claims root and fails offline verify without a shared secret.
Any agent that does structural work already done by someone else.
If attested prior work is in the Lattice field, the cost of re-establishing it is replaced by a residual. The signed receipt is the invoice and the proof of the save.
AFiR, MiR, Stream, OCR
All Hive proof products reuse attested work. AFiR-OCR, SRPR, Stream, and RogueCompute are children of SLS — every receipt they produce is a lateration receipt with avoided_cost bound in.
Shared inference platforms
Platforms running inference for multiple tenants can offer cross-tenant lateration with the privacy premium. Tenants pay less; the platform earns the clip and the scout spread on every cross-tenant reuse.
CTV and royalty fraud detection
Structural fingerprints of content already adjudicated can be laterated off. New claims triangulate off prior attested decisions — the residual is the cost of proving the new claim incremental to prior work.
Shared-context agents
Agent swarms that share structural context can laterate off each other's attested shapes. Each agent pays only the residual for work its neighbors have already proven — the Lattice field is the shared memory that has receipts.