ZERO — Prevention Finance Protocol

• 

  ZERO turns verified prevention into a fundable, auditable and payable outcome.

• 

  Evidence becomes a Prevention Receipt while committed capital moves through verification to onchain settlement.

• 

  Five role-scoped identities separate execution, verification, community oversight, funding and public audit.

• 

  The fund manager monitors prevention programs, evidence integrity, reserved capital and pending authorizations.

• 

  EIP-712 binds human approval to the exact receipt, beneficiary, amount and settlement conditions.

• 

  x402 enables agents to purchase verified evidence before it enters the prevention assessment.

• 

  Auditors reconstruct every receipt through evidence, attestations, signatures, contracts and transactions.

• 

  Fund managers can authorize releases, but cannot alter evidence, verification scores or contract rules.

• 

  Program operators coordinate milestones and field evidence without access to capital-release controls.

• 

  Independent verifiers challenge evidence and confidence before an outcome becomes payable.

• 

  Communities see what was promised, what was protected, the supporting proof and the value released.

• 

  Public auditors trace immutable proof and reconstruct settlement without execution privileges.

• 

  ZERO token, settlement escrow and human-approval escrow deployed independently on Base Sepolia.

• 

  Confirmed x402 payment, EAS attestation, EIP-712 authorization and escrow settlement transactions.

• 

  CDP wallets, x402, DynamoDB, Vercel, EAS and EIP-712 converge in one reconstructable execution stack.

Inspiration

Our world knows how to pay after a tragedy, but it still does not know how to fund one that never happens.

Billions are mobilized after floods, disease outbreaks, displacement, and infrastructure failures. Yet the people who prevent these crises struggle to prove the economic value of their work. When prevention succeeds, there is no disaster footage, no visible loss, and often no payment.

ZERO was created to solve this paradox: prevention’s greatest success — that nothing happened — is also what makes it invisible.

What it does

ZERO is a prevention-finance protocol that turns verified prevention into a fundable, auditable, and payable outcome.

Programs define measurable prevention objectives, required evidence, beneficiaries, funding conditions, and human approval rules before capital is committed.

As the program operates:

1. Evidence is collected and cryptographically linked to the program.
2. Specialized agents organize and evaluate the evidence.
3. Independent verifiers assess whether the agreed conditions were satisfied.
4. A human decision-maker retains final authorization.
5. Smart contracts release funds only after authorization.
6. Every relevant action remains reconstructable through an immutable audit trail.

The resulting artifact is a Prevention Receipt: a verifiable record connecting evidence, analysis, authorization, and settlement.

ZERO does not claim that AI can perfectly predict the future. It creates an accountable system for financing prevention while keeping uncertainty, human judgment, and traceability visible.

How we built it

ZERO combines an agentic application layer with blockchain settlement and auditable cloud infrastructure.

The platform includes separate experiences for fund managers, program operators, independent verifiers, community representatives, and public auditors. Each stakeholder sees only the information and actions relevant to their responsibility.

Our agentic workflow coordinates evidence intake, verification, risk analysis, authorization preparation, and audit reconstruction. Agents can propose actions, but they cannot unilaterally release capital.

Human approval is represented through EIP-712 typed authorization. Settlement and protocol events are recorded on Base Sepolia through smart contracts. Coinbase Developer Platform provides programmable wallet infrastructure, while x402 enables machine-readable payments for evidence services. Ethereum Attestation Service provides additional verifiable attestations.

AWS DynamoDB stores operational event data, and the frontend and serverless APIs are deployed through Vercel.

The guiding architecture is simple:

Agent proposes. Human authorizes. Contract settles. Auditor reconstructs.

Challenges we ran into

The hardest challenge was representing something that did not happen.

Prevention is not a simple binary event. It requires evidence, a predefined counterfactual, explicit uncertainty, independent verification, and clear accountability. We had to design a system that could communicate confidence without presenting probabilistic analysis as absolute truth.

We also had to prevent blockchain and AI from becoming decorative features. Every technology needed a specific responsibility: agents coordinate and analyze, humans remain accountable, and smart contracts enforce settlement conditions.

Another major challenge was stakeholder separation. A fund manager, verifier, operator, community representative, and auditor should not interact with the same interface or possess the same authority. ZERO therefore uses role-specific access and workflows rather than presenting every action to every user.

Accomplishments that we are proud of

• Built a complete prevention-finance protocol concept rather than a single-purpose dashboard.
• Created role-specific product experiences for every major stakeholder.
• Implemented verifiable testnet transactions on Base Sepolia.
• Connected programmable wallet infrastructure through Coinbase Developer Platform.
• Integrated x402-based evidence payments.
• Added EIP-712 human authorization and an onchain safety canary.
• Connected evidence, attestations, approvals, and settlements into one audit trail.
• Designed Prevention Receipts as a new financial primitive for verified prevention.
• Preserved human authority throughout the agentic workflow.

What we learned

We learned that financing prevention is not only a prediction problem. It is a coordination, evidence, governance, and accountability problem.

AI becomes more valuable when its authority is deliberately limited. Blockchain becomes more valuable when it records meaningful commitments instead of merely adding tokens to a product.

Most importantly, we learned that prevention can become economically legible without pretending uncertainty has disappeared.

What’s next for ZERO

The next phase is to pilot ZERO with real prevention programs in climate resilience, public health, humanitarian response, and critical infrastructure.

We will expand the protocol with configurable evidence standards, decentralized verifier networks, privacy-preserving community data, program-specific risk models, dispute resolution, and production-grade stablecoin settlement.

Our long-term vision is for ZERO to become an open coordination and settlement layer for prevention worldwide — enabling governments, insurers, foundations, companies, and communities to fund measurable action before irreversible harm occurs.

Prevention is not an absence of outcomes. Prevention is an outcome.

Built With

• aws-dynamodb
• base-sepolia
• cdp-wallets
• coinbase-developer-platform
• eip-712
• erc-20
• ethereum
• ethereum-attestation-service
• javascript
• node.js
• react
• smart-contracts
• solidity
• vercel
• vite
• x402