Nustro Operator Rulebook

1.Scope

This Rulebook states the commercial terms of the Nustro scheme: participation, fees, collection, Platform revenue rights, and enforcement. It binds accredited Platforms through the Platform Operator Agreement each accepts at production accreditation. It governs commercial terms only — identity, verification, escrow, settlement, performance rating, and dispute procedure are governed by the AEA/P Protocol Specification, which is fee-agnostic: all scheme fees exist solely in this Rulebook. Where the two conflict, the Protocol Specification prevails and this Rulebook is amended.

The base version carries the rules needed to operate the scheme in its current configuration: single settlement currency, CONSUMER-demand transactions, and Platforms serving either or both sides of transactions. Everything beyond that is an Extension (Section 9), activated by effective-dated revision without restructuring these rules.

2.Roles

Protocol terms (Principal, Agent, Operator, Platform, economic roles) retain their protocol meanings. The scheme adds:

The scheme has one participant class: the accredited Platform. Demand-side and supply-side designations are positions in a transaction, never classes of company — a Platform’s revenue mix follows its agent mix, and a Platform on both sides of a transaction receives both shares, so the net scheme cost of that transaction is the Nustro Assessment. On a cross-platform transaction, each Platform receives its own side’s share. “Principal” applies uniformly across demand and supply sides.

3.Participation

A Platform account progresses through the readiness ladder EMAIL_PENDING → PROFILE_PENDING → KYB_PENDING → IN_REVIEW → ACCREDITED. Sandbox access begins at PROFILE_PENDING and carries no charge. Accreditation gates production: live certificates, escrow, disputes, and the production credential are available to ACCREDITED Platforms in good standing — statements current, credentials valid, accreditation maintained. Production access is licensed through the Scheme Access fee: monthly, tiered by production agent count (Section 4), and billed through the Net Settlement Statement. The founding cohort program waives it in full against committed transaction volume, on terms set in the Platform Operator Agreement.

Accreditation carries two service scopes, both granted by default: demand-side servicing (wallet credential lifecycle, Commitment Authorization delivery to a Principal surface, dispute intake) and supply-side servicing (Principal onboarding with KYB via a Verifier, markets and wallet configuration, catalog indexing and discovery, respondent-side dispute support). A Platform may omit either scope at accreditation and add it later; scopes attest which servicing obligations a Platform operates, and a Platform earns the share for a side only where it holds that side’s scope.

A Customer is expected to hold its own accreditation once its activity reaches platform scale. Where the Principals grouped under one Customer — or under common control across Customer records — exceed $1,000,000 in settled transaction value over any trailing twelve months, or 10,000 agents concurrently holding production certificates (counted as in Table 4.2; the full first Scheme Access tier), graduation is mandatory: Nustro notifies the Platform, and within 180 days of notice the Customer accredits as a Platform in its own right, its Principals migrating under protocol identity portability. Below the thresholds, a Customer may accredit voluntarily at any time. Where mandatory graduation is not completed in the window, issuance of new production certificates to Principals under that Customer is suspended until it is — existing certificates, agents, and funds are untouched, consistent with Section 8. Graduation transfers accreditation obligations, not the commercial relationship: a graduated Platform may contract any part of its servicing to another accredited Platform, including the Platform it graduated from, on terms the two set; the accountable party under this Rulebook is the accreditation holder. Without a graduation line, a platform-scale Customer would carry a Platform’s economics with none of its accreditation obligations.

4.Fee Schedule

The Scheme sets exactly three prices — the Nustro Assessment, the Demand Share, and the Supply Share — all cost-derived and all borne by the settled transaction through the settlement split and the Net Settlement Statement. Onboarding, configuration, and discovery cost about the same on either side, and the two shares pay for that servicing symmetrically: a Platform earns by hosting and serving agents, on whichever side and on both. No side’s Principals bear a separate scheme charge; what a Platform charges its own Principals beyond the shares is its own pricing.

Illustrative Platform economics, on 100,000 settled transactions per month at a $40 average ticket with Commitment Authorization delivered on 30% and non-zero windows prevailing: demand-side servicing earns approximately $0.22 per transaction ($22,000 per month), supply-side servicing $0.15 per transaction ($15,000 per month), and a Platform serving both sides of that volume earns approximately $0.37 per transaction — roughly $444,000 per year in share credits — before its own on-ramp fees and value-added services. Hosting the other side of the transactions it already serves is the largest revenue action available to a Platform.

5.Collection

The Scheme Fee is borne by the settled transaction. The Settlement Contract splits each payment atomically into operational, escrow, and fee legs; the fee leg deducts from gross proceeds at settlement, peer-to-contract, at the collection rate configured for the provider at registration under the Schedule in force. Funds never transit an Operator-held wallet, and escrow balances are never a source of fee collection. Fee-leg amounts are collections on account.

The monthly Net Settlement Statement is the calculation of record: it computes the exact Scheme Fee per transaction under the Schedule, credits the Demand Share and the Supply Share to the respective Platforms, reconciles fee-leg collections against computed fees, and settles any residual between collection and calculation with the supply-side Platform of the transaction, as the servicing party of the proceeds-bearing agent. Each Platform’s statement nets to a single payable or receivable, due within fifteen days in the scheme settlement currency. Per-transaction amounts accumulate without rounding; the netted balance rounds to the smallest settleable unit.

6.Platform Revenue

A Platform earns the Demand Share on every settled transaction in which it serves the demand side, and the Supply Share on every settled transaction in which it serves the supply side. It may additionally charge Principals for on-ramp services — converting fiat value into the scheme settlement currency and delivering it to the Principal’s self-custodied operational wallet. Because the Principal holds the operational keys, the Platform holds no stored value in this flow; the charge is a service fee, disclosed at wallet setup. On-ramp fees and value-added services are the Platform’s own pricing; the Scheme neither sets nor caps them. All Platform charges to a Principal are disclosed before first assessment.

Discovery conduct: a Platform’s discovery ranking may consider agent attributes and disclosed sponsorship, not hosting Platform. Fuller discovery-neutrality rules are Extension X8.

7.Disputes

Dispute economics are governed entirely by the Protocol Specification and the Scheme levies no dispute fees. Arbitrator compensation is the protocol bounty — clamp(disputed_amount × bounty_rate, bounty_min, bounty_max), with all three parameters configured per agent — funded from the respondent’s escrow, competing for arbitrators in the dispute pool, and topped up automatically where a dispute remains unassigned (Protocol §8.5). The applicant never pays. Pre-arbitration resolution within the respondent’s resolution window incurs no bounty. Frivolous filing is deterred at protocol level: filing requires verifiable transaction history with the respondent, submissions are rate-limited, and adverse outcomes affect the applicant’s rating.

Nustro’s dispute administration — triage, pool operation, board formation, enforcement of outcomes — is funded within the percentage fee. Any future dispute administration fee is Extension X5 and is bound by Commitment G3.

8.Enforcement

Statement delinquency escalates on a fixed ladder: at fifteen days past due, a delinquency notice and the late charge; at thirty, suspension of new production certificate issuance; at forty-five, suspension of the Platform’s production certificates, with affected agents failing counterparty verification as agent_suspended until cure; at sixty, termination of participation and certificate revocation, with reinstatement requiring re-accreditation. All enforcement acts on credential status — never on wallets, operational funds, or escrow balances.

9.Extensions

Extensions are scheme capabilities consciously outside the base version. Each activates by effective-dated revision of this Rulebook — rate increases on ninety days’ notice per Commitment G2 — without restructuring the base rules.

10.Governance Commitments

Standing constraints on Nustro’s own conduct as scheme operator, removable only by Rulebook revision that identifies the change explicitly:

11.Revision History