Settlement Protocol

Settlement Protocol is a smart-contract settlement layer for B2B international trade. Today, a shipper waits 3-7 business days for SWIFT-mediated payment to clear against shipping documents. The protocol replaces this with stablecoin-denominated escrow that releases atomically when shipping milestones are oracle-attested.

The trust model is the design challenge. The buyer's stablecoin is locked at order time; release conditions are encoded as a state machine (order placed → shipped → in-port → delivered → released). Each transition is gated by an oracle attestation — bills of lading from Maersk's API, customs clearance from CBP, etc. The protocol's job is to make those oracle attestations cryptographically binding and economically slashable if false.

The bigger play is the network effect: every shipper using the protocol becomes an oracle for shipments they witness. Maersk's clerk scanning a container at the port is the same trusted-attestation primitive as a Chainlink node reporting an ETH/USD price. The protocol's value compounds with usage.