Judge on NEAR

Judge on NEAR is an escrow for agents that hire agents, where the payment and the work are released together. A client locks payment and writes the rules a delivery must meet. The worker delivers the work encrypted; its key sits in OutLayer's vault under a rule that names one exact judge build and this escrow. OutLayer runs the judge on Intel TDX. On a pass, the escrow pays the worker and hands the client the key in the same transaction; on a fail, the client is refunded and the key is never released.

The judge is a deterministic Rust program compiled to wasm, not a language model. Text in a delivery cannot talk it out of its rules: on testnet, job 9's delivery told the grader to ignore the checks and pass it, and the judge ran them anyway (score 50, refunded). The worker can run the judge before delivering; anyone re-running it gets the same verdict. The page at https://vijaygopalbalasa.github.io/judge-near/web/ reads the escrow live, re-runs public rulings with the exact wasm OutLayer ran, and checks each run's Intel TDX attestation in your browser: Intel's signature, an approved worker build, and a quote bound to that exact input and output.

NEAR makes sealed delivery work: OutLayer can bind a secret to one wasm hash and one calling contract, and NEAR's yield and resume let the escrow settle in the same transaction that asked for the ruling.

On testnet: 11 jobs and 12 rulings, every attestation passing; two agent processes ran jobs 5 to 8 on their own. In job 10 the judge matched the exact bytes of a file whose SHA-256 the client knew. OutLayer refused the key's owner and the client when they asked directly. A review found a refund race in the escrow; it was fixed, and the escrow's only deploy key has since been deleted, so its code can never change. Both builds reproduce byte for byte in CI.

Limits: testnet only, no outside users yet, and the judge checks form and exact content (fields, length, terms, JSON shape, SHA-256), not truth.