Open Record
Everything that happens, written down to be read.
The open record — what is written, how it is read, and why it is auditable end to end, before and after a wave.
Most participation online happens inside a closed box. You are shown an outcome and asked to accept the path that produced it. The open record is designed to work the other way round: every participation, every outcome, and every contribution written down as it happens, in a form anyone can read.
It is designed to never be a private database that Veraq quotes from — the source itself, kept in the open. Before a wave runs, the mechanism that will decide it is committed to the record; after the wave ends, the outcome and the defined share that flows to a cause are recorded too. This describes a wave specifically (commit-reveal-v1); the free official-result predictions you can try today use a different, source-verified mechanism instead.
The seven entities
- Wave
- One round of participation. Everything below attaches to a wave, and a wave links to the exact mechanism that decided it.
- Mechanism
- The published selection method (commit-reveal-v1). Committed to the record before the wave, revealed and provable after.
- Participant
- A person taking part, on terms they can read in advance.
- Participation
- A single act of taking part in a wave, recorded as it is made.
- Outcome
- What the wave produced, derived from the revealed mechanism and checkable against it.
- Contribution
- The defined share of the participation, routed automatically to a cause and written from outcome to cause.
- Cause
- A verified destination for the contribution, fixed per wave and published in advance, named openly.
How the entries link
The seven entities are not seven separate logs. They form one chain you can walk. A participant makes a participation in a wave; the wave names the mechanism that decided it; the mechanism produces an outcome; a defined share of the participation becomes a contribution; the contribution reaches a cause.
Because every link is recorded, you can start at any point and follow it to the others. From a single outcome you can reach back to the mechanism that produced it, and forward to the cause its defined share reached.
Commit, then reveal
- 01
Commit
Before a wave begins, the mechanism is committed to the open record. The deciding method is fixed and published in advance, so it cannot be changed once participation is open.
- 02
Participate
Participations are written to the record as they are made, against a wave whose mechanism is already committed.
- 03
Reveal
When the wave closes, the mechanism is revealed. Anyone can confirm the revealed mechanism matches the earlier commitment.
- 04
Verify
The outcome is derived from the revealed mechanism and the recorded participations, and is designed to be reproducible from the record. Once the read API is live, you'll be able to confirm the contribution reached the cause it names yourself.
Provable before it runs, provable after it ends.
How to read an entry (once the record is live)
Identity
Each entry carries a stable identifier and the wave it belongs to, so you always know which round you are reading.
Links
An entry names the entities it connects to. From there you can move to the mechanism, the outcome, or the cause without leaving the record.
Timing
Entries are timestamped, so the commit clearly precedes participation and participation precedes the reveal.
Proof
Commitments and reveals carry the values needed to check them. You confirm the mechanism by hand, not by trusting a label.
Open format and references
The record format and the mechanism reference (commit-reveal-v1) are described in the open on this site today (see Documentation). The contracts and protocol references are designed to be published too, so a reader will be able to verify a wave independently or build on the same rails Veraq does — not yet live; see Developers for current status.
The point is not that the record looks transparent. It is that once live, you'll be able to act on it: read a wave, reproduce its outcome, and follow its defined share to the cause it reached.