EMPORION — public-record facts for agents that trade

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An agent that buys, sells or pays needs facts no model can make up: is this VAT number valid, who is this company, what was the euro rate that day, is this wallet on a sanctions list, and can I prove this document existed yesterday. EMPORION answers each from the public record — the European Commission, GLEIF, the ECB, the U.S. Treasury, the EU, the UN and Bitcoin — and signs every answer together with where it came from, when, and the SHA-256 of what the source returned.

Emporion (ἐμπόριον): the trading post of a Greek city, where traders met and settled.

Capabilities

flowchart LR
    A[Agent] -->|invoke + payment| H[AIMarket hub]
    H -->|X-Provider-Signature required| E[EMPORION]
    E --> N{allowlist<br/>per source}
    N --> V[VIES]
    N --> G[GLEIF]
    N --> C[ECB]
    N --> S[OFAC · EU · UN lists<br/>refreshed every 6 h]
    N --> O[OpenTimestamps calendars]
    N --> X[two Bitcoin explorers]
    E -->|answer + evidence:<br/>url · fetched_at · sha256| H
    H -->|signed receipt| A

Trust, briefly

• Evidence in every answer — the source URL, the time it was fetched and the SHA-256 of the bytes it returned, plus the source's licence and attribution.
• Two signatures — the gateway's signed receipt (oracle-core, Ed25519, hybrid ML-DSA when ORACLE_PQC=1) and the request-bound X-Provider-Signature the hub verifies.
• A source that cannot answer costs nothing — the answer is ok:false, and the hub debits nothing for ok:false: a member state's VAT registry that is down, sanctions lists not loaded or older than 48 h, fewer than two timestamp calendars, explorers that disagree.
• Outbound requests are allowlisted per source; redirects are followed by hand and only to that source's own hosts; bodies are size-capped.

Examples

H=https://emporion.modelmarket.dev
inv() { curl -s -X POST $H/ai-market/v2/invoke -H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d "$1"; }

inv '{"capability_id":"emporion.vat.check@v1","input":{"vat":"NL004495445B01","requester_vat":"DE811569869"}}'
inv '{"capability_id":"emporion.lei.lookup@v1","input":{"name":"Deutsche Bank"}}'
inv '{"capability_id":"emporion.fx.rate@v1","input":{"base":"USD","quote":"JPY","date":"2026-10-11","amount":"100"}}'
inv '{"capability_id":"emporion.sanctions.screen@v1","input":{"address":"0x…"}}'
inv '{"capability_id":"emporion.timestamp.stamp@v1","input":{"digest":"'"$(sha256sum contract.pdf | cut -d' ' -f1)"'"}}'

Through the hub, the same calls are paid and receipted: POST https://modelmarket.dev/ai-market/v2/invoke with "product_id":"emporion".

VAT: the consultation number

VIES issues a consultation number only to a valid EU VAT number named as requester. It is the requester's proof, kept by the requester: pass your own number as requester_vat and the consultation number in the answer is evidence, in your name, that you checked your counterparty at checked_at. Without it the check is still made; the answer says how to get the number.

FX: which day

A rate "on" a date is the latest ECB publication on or before it, and the answer names that day (ecb_date): a Sunday is priced at Friday's rate, visibly. A currency the ECB stopped quoting (RUB since March 2022) is refused rather than answered with a years-old rate.

Sanctions: a lookup, not a determination

A wallet is matched exactly (EVM and bech32 addresses case-insensitively). A name is matched as a set of words — order, case, accents and legal forms ignored ("DOE, John" is "John Doe"), a word within a typo counts 0.9 and never reads as the same name, and every asked word found in a longer name (a patronymic, a middle name) still matches. The default threshold is 0.85; each hit says which name matched and its score.

A hit is a reason to look closer; a miss is not a clearance. Names collide and aliases are incomplete. Every answer says so, and names the lists it used with their publication dates and SHA-256. An outdated list is refused, not used.

Timestamps

sequenceDiagram
    autonumber
    participant A as Agent
    participant E as EMPORION
    participant C as OpenTimestamps calendars
    participant B as Bitcoin explorers (×2)
    A->>E: stamp {digest}
    E->>E: sha256(digest ‖ 16 random bytes) — calendars never see the digest
    E->>C: submit to all four, at least two must accept
    C-->>E: pending attestations
    E-->>A: .ots proof (pending)
    Note over C: a few hours later the calendars' aggregate<br/>transaction is mined in a Bitcoin block
    A->>E: verify {digest, proof}
    E->>C: upgrade at each calendar the proof names (allowlisted only)
    C-->>E: path to the block
    E->>B: block hash at height H, and its header — from both
    B-->>E: must agree, and the header must hash to the block hash
    E->>E: proof result == header Merkle root
    E-->>A: confirmed · existed no later than the block time · upgraded proof

The proof is a standard OpenTimestamps file: it verifies with any OpenTimestamps client, without EMPORION. The reference example (hello-world.txt) verifies to block 358 391, 2015-05-28.

Honest limits

• VIES answers what the member state's registry answers at that moment; some states return no name or address. EMPORION stores nothing.
• GLEIF covers entities that have an LEI — many small companies do not.
• Reference rates are for information, not dealing.
• Sanctions screening is a lookup in three public lists, not legal advice or a compliance programme; other jurisdictions' lists are not included.
• A timestamp proves existence no later than a block's time, not authorship.

Run it

# from this repository
docker build -f Dockerfile.standalone -t emporion .
docker run -d --name emporion -p 127.0.0.1:9351:9351 -v emporion-data:/data \
  -e EMPORION_PUBLIC_URL=http://127.0.0.1:9351 emporion
curl -s http://127.0.0.1:9351/health

In the aicom monorepo the same runs from its root with docker compose -f emporion/docker-compose.yml up -d --build. EMPORION_PUBLIC_URL is the address buyers reach; it is written into the signed manifest.

Production, from the aicom monorepo: ./scripts/deploy_emporion.sh --remote <host> serves it at https://modelmarket.dev/providers/emporion/ behind the existing nginx (one snippet, backed up, nginx -t before reload), keeps the running image as emporion:prev and rolls back an unhealthy build. Steady memory ≈ 200 MB; the container is capped at 768 MB. It runs as uid 10001. Its own address is https://emporion.modelmarket.dev/ — the landing for people at /, the same API for agents everywhere else (deploy/nginx/emporion.modelmarket.dev.conf); the /providers/emporion/ path stays the address the hub federates with.

Tests: pip install -e "vendor/oracle-core[pqc]" -e '.[dev]' && pytest (in the monorepo: -e ../oracles/core) — 84 tests on excerpts of real answers, none reaching a live source; in the monorepo the signed canonical is also checked byte for byte against the hub's own function.

Sources and licences

Code: MIT — see LICENSE. The OpenTimestamps reference library it uses is LGPL-3.0.