Devpost submission draft (English)
Title
ProofPay — escrow for AI work: frozen first, paid only when the output checks out
Tagline
Your money is authorized, not spent. Nine objective checks decide: pass → capture, fail → void.
Problem
Buying AI-generated content today is pay-first-and-pray: if the output has a wrong price, a fake source link, or stale data, the buyer has already paid. Refunds and disputes are slow, manual, and rare.
Solution
ProofPay wraps a PayPal AUTHORIZE/CAPTURE flow around AI generation:
- Buyer places a task (deliverable spec + data snapshot). PayPal only freezes the funds.
- An AI generates the deliverable strictly from the frozen snapshot (here: a deal brief built from a PriceScout price feed).
- Nine objective, re-runnable checks verify the output — count, length, SKU↔source binding, price, currency, freshness window (both bounds), deadline sanity, amount, dedup + version.
- 9/9 pass → capture. Any failure → void; the buyer pays $0.00 and gets the failed-item list.
AI tools used — built with AI, built for AI work
This project was built with AI tools and is a settlement layer for AI-generated work.
• Development with AI coding agents: Anthropic Claude (Claude / Claude Code) and OpenAI GPT-class models (ChatGPT / Codex) were used throughout the build as coding agents — for implementation assistance, debugging, test design, and documentation. This disclosure is made per the hackathon rules.
• Product is for AI deliverables: ProofPay wraps PayPal's AUTHORIZE / CAPTURE flow around AI generation. A buyer freezes funds first; an AI-generated deliverable (in the demo, a deal brief generated from a frozen PriceScout price snapshot) is then verified by nine objective, re-runnable checks. 9/9 pass → capture; any failure → void and the buyer pays $0.00.
• Reproducible demo generator: so judges can re-run the demo offline with no credentials, the demo's generator deterministically produces the AI deliverable from the frozen snapshot, simulating the AI output so all nine checks can be verified exactly. The payment core is real PayPal sandbox: Orders v2 (AUTHORIZE intent) + Payments v2, verified end-to-end on 2026-10-09 (authorize → capture COMPLETED; authorize → void VOIDED).
Why it matters
It turns "trust the AI" into "verify the AI" — a reusable settlement layer for agentic commerce: content shops, research briefs, data summaries, any AI deliverable that can be checked objectively before money moves.
Tech
- PayPal sandbox Orders v2 (AUTHORIZE intent) + Payments v2 (capture/void), verified end-to-end in sandbox on 2026-10-09 (capture COMPLETED; void VOIDED).
- Python stdlib demo app (order / verification / receipt pages), deterministic generator, offline checker CLI. Snapshot format reuses the PriceScout feed.
Honest scope
Gaps: live-order amount binding; cross-task uniqueness and generator-version authenticity rely on self-reported values without a trusted execution log. The demo video is a local simulation that mirrors separate sandbox API tests; no money moves on screen. We show exactly what is verified and what is not.
