Terms of Service

Section 1

Acceptance

By accessing or using any Hive Civilization service, you accept these Terms of Service in full. If you are accessing or using the service on behalf of a company or other legal entity, you represent and warrant that you have authority to bind that entity to these terms, and "you" refers to that entity.

If you do not accept these terms, you must not access or use the service.

Section 2

Definitions

Term	Meaning
Service	All Hive Civilization platform capabilities made available by Hive Civilization, including receipt issuance, routing, inspection, and verification endpoints.
Receipt	A cryptographically signed artifact issued by Hive attesting to an inference event, its hash, jurisdiction, timestamp, and agent identifier.
Inspection	A confidential review process in which an authorized party examines encrypted inference content under controlled conditions.
Agent	A software process — human-operated or autonomous — that calls the Service to produce, verify, or route receipts.
Operator	A legal entity that has entered into a service agreement with Hive Civilization to deploy Hive capabilities.
Sovereign Path	A routing configuration that constrains receipt issuance and data residency to a specified jurisdiction.
Verifier	The public or permissioned endpoint, and associated client tooling, that confirms the validity and provenance of a Receipt.

Section 3

License

Subject to your compliance with these terms, Hive Civilization grants you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable license to access and use the Service. This license is limited to the deployment model agreed in your applicable service agreement or order form. No rights are granted except as expressly stated.

Section 4

Acceptable Use

You may not use the Service to:

Commit fraud, money laundering, or any other financial crime.

Evade sanctions or export controls of any applicable jurisdiction.

Exploit or probe verifier endpoints for vulnerabilities or to extract signing keys.

Reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble sealed inspection tooling.

Forge, alter, or misrepresent receipts or cryptographic proofs.

Operate high-risk AI applications prohibited under the EU AI Act without the applicable certification path.

Violate any applicable law, regulation, or third-party right.

Hive Civilization is infrastructure. You are responsible for the lawfulness of the AI applications and workflows you route through the Service.

Section 5

Fees & Payment

Fees are as published in the applicable rate card or order form. Settlement is conducted on Base L2 in USDC unless an alternative settlement method is agreed in writing.

Settlement transactions on Base are final and irrevocable on-chain. Chargebacks are not supported for on-chain settlements. For fiat billing arrangements, standard payment terms apply as set forth in the applicable order form.

Hive Civilization reserves the right to modify fees with 30 days written notice. Continued use of the Service after the effective date of a fee change constitutes acceptance.

Section 6

Service Levels

Verifier endpoint: 99.9% monthly uptime target.

Routing infrastructure: 99.5% monthly uptime target.

Planned maintenance: Announced at least 72 hours in advance via the status page and registered operator email.

Service level credits, if applicable, are specified in the applicable order form. These targets are operational objectives, not warranties. Downtime caused by third-party infrastructure, force majeure, or customer misconfiguration does not count toward outage calculation.

Section 7

Confidentiality

Sealed inspection content is covered by mutual non-disclosure obligations. Neither party will disclose the other's confidential information except as required by law, court order, or with prior written consent.

Hive Civilization may publish aggregated, anonymized platform metrics — such as receipt volume, jurisdiction distribution, and inspection rates — without identifying any individual operator or their data.

Section 8

IP Ownership

Hive Civilization retains all intellectual property rights in the Hive platform, including the signing infrastructure, verifier tooling, routing logic, and associated software.

You retain ownership of receipts issued on your behalf. Cryptographic outputs — including signatures, hashes, and proofs — are jointly retained: Hive retains the right to verify their provenance; you retain the right to present them to third parties.

Nothing in these terms transfers ownership of platform IP to you, and nothing transfers your data to Hive Civilization beyond what is required to operate the Service.

Section 9

Warranties & Disclaimers

The Service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. Hive Civilization makes no warranty of fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, or non-infringement, except as expressly stated in a signed written agreement.

No warranty of fitness for high-risk AI applications is made unless the customer has engaged the applicable certification path with Hive Civilization in writing.

Verifier outputs are deterministic given valid inputs. Hive Civilization does not warrant the correctness, completeness, or lawfulness of inputs submitted by operators or agents.

Section 10

Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, Hive Civilization's total cumulative liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to these terms or the Service is capped at the total fees paid by you to Hive Civilization in the 12 months preceding the claim.

In no event will Hive Civilization be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including lost profits or loss of data, even if advised of the possibility of such damages.

The foregoing limitations do not apply to: (a) liability arising from fraud or willful misconduct; (b) liability for infringement of the other party's intellectual property rights; or (c) any liability that cannot be excluded by law.

Section 11

Indemnification

Each party will indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the other party and its officers, directors, employees, and agents from and against third-party claims, damages, and costs (including reasonable legal fees) arising from: (a) the indemnifying party's breach of these terms; (b) the indemnifying party's gross negligence or willful misconduct; or (c) the indemnifying party's infringement of a third party's intellectual property rights.

The indemnified party must: (i) promptly notify the indemnifying party of any claim; (ii) provide reasonable cooperation; and (iii) allow the indemnifying party to control the defense and settlement of the claim, provided no settlement imposes obligations on the indemnified party without its written consent.

Section 12

Termination

Either party may terminate the service relationship for material breach with 30 days written notice if the breach is not cured within the notice period. Hive Civilization may terminate immediately for violations of the Acceptable Use section.

Post-termination: Receipts previously issued remain cryptographically verifiable — this is a property of the artifact itself and not dependent on continued service access. You may request an export of your account data within 90 days of termination; after that period Hive Civilization will delete your account data subject to applicable retention obligations.

Section 13

Disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Wyoming, without regard to conflict-of-law principles.

Any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these terms or the Service will be resolved by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Commercial Arbitration Rules. Arbitration will be conducted in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The arbitrator's award will be final and binding and may be entered as a judgment in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Class action waiver: You agree that any dispute will be resolved only on an individual basis and not as a class, consolidated, or representative action.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, either party may seek injunctive or other equitable relief in any court of competent jurisdiction to prevent irreparable harm pending arbitration.

Section 14

Force Majeure

Neither party will be liable for failure or delay in performing its obligations under these terms to the extent caused by circumstances beyond its reasonable control, including natural disasters, government actions, war, terrorism, pandemic, or failures of third-party infrastructure not within the party's reasonable control.

The affected party must notify the other party promptly and use commercially reasonable efforts to resume performance as soon as practicable.

Section 15

Modifications

Hive Civilization may modify these terms with at least 30 days written notice before the change takes effect. Notice will be provided via email to registered operator contacts and by posting the updated terms at this URL with a revised effective date.

Continued use of the Service after the effective date of modified terms constitutes acceptance of the modification. If you do not accept the modification, you must stop using the Service before the effective date and notify Hive Civilization in writing.

Section 16

Entire Agreement

These Terms of Service, together with any applicable order form, addenda, and the Privacy Policy, constitute the entire agreement between you and Hive Civilization with respect to the Service and supersede all prior or contemporaneous agreements, understandings, negotiations, or representations — whether written or oral — relating to the same subject matter.

If any provision of these terms is found to be unenforceable, that provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, and the remaining provisions will continue in full force.

Section 17

Contact

Legal inquiries: [email protected]

Compliance inquiries: [email protected]

General inquiries: [email protected]