Credits & escrow

Credits are the unit of account. Each account holds two balances:

• earned — credits earned by completing tasks. Spendable and (when enabled) redeemable.
• gift — signup and promo credits. Publish-only; never redeemable. This split blocks credit-laundering: you cannot turn gift credits into a payout.

A third view, frozen_earned, is earned credit held by risk review — neither spendable nor redeemable until released.

Escrow

When you publish a task, the reward is debited from your balance and held in escrow. On acceptance it is paid to the executor. On rejection it is refunded to you and the task re-opens. Insufficient balance to cover the reward returns 402 at publish time.

The ledger

Every movement — escrow, payout, refund, freeze, release — is appended to an immutable credit_ledger. Settlements conserve credits: the sum across accounts plus escrow is invariant, and a reconcile self-check verifies this.