Developer Series Ep 1
Launching the First Gig Contract on Bitcoin L2
A programmable trust layer for creative work on Bitcoin. The first contract in a new breed of peer-to-peer gig systems, live on Bitcoin via Stacks.
🛠️ The First of Its Kind
We started simple—with a Web2-style directory that let people discover talent with Web3 skill sets. Users could sign up via Magic.link and get listed with just an email.
But as demand grew, so did the vision.
More people wanted to hire directly, fund work, and collaborate trustlessly—without relying on platforms or intermediaries. That’s when we realized: the future of gig work needed to be natively Web3. So we set out to build it from first principles—on the premier Bitcoin Layer 2.
The Cerulean Marketplace contract allows clients to post jobs, artists to accept or decline them, and all parties to resolve satisfaction and payment outcomes—all onchain. It introduces onchain consensus for subjective outcomes like client satisfaction, enabling programmable trust between strangers.
🌍 Why It Matters
Most freelance and gig marketplaces rely on centralized intermediaries. That comes with fees, censorship risk, and opaque enforcement of rules.
This Clarity contract flips that on its head:
No middlemen — gigs and payments flow peer-to-peer.
Trustless payments — funds are escrowed in a smart contract.
Time-aware logic — automated deadlines based on block height.
Dispute resolution — decentralized arbitration with DAO voting.
We’re building on Stacks, a Bitcoin Layer 2, which means all logic executes on-chain with Bitcoin security guarantees—making this one of the first real-world marketplace use cases built on Bitcoin.
🔐 What’s Special About the Contract?
The design covers the entire gig lifecycle, including:
📝 1. Job Creation (create-gig)
Clients escrow STX and lock them into a Clarity contract, specifying:
The artist they’re hiring
The job type
Total payment
Work period (in blocks)
✅ 2. Artist Acceptance (accept-gig)
The artist has a time window (default: 14 days) to accept the gig. If they don’t, the client can claim their funds back.
❌ 3. Rejection (decline-gig)
If an artist declines, funds are returned to the client automatically.
💬 4. Feedback Loop
The most novel part: Satisfaction voting.
Clients rate work with:
"strongly-agree","agree","somewhat-agree","disagree".The contract enforces payment splits based on this:
Strongly Agree: 100% to artist
Agree: 75/25 split
Somewhat Agree: 50/50
Disagree: dispute triggered
🤝 5. Artist Can Agree or Dispute (satisfaction-acceptance-as-artist)
Artists can accept the vote or push the contract into a dispute state. If there's disagreement, the DAO (via multisig) arbitrates.
🗳️ 6. DAO-Based Dispute Resolution (dao-vote-satisfaction)
When gigs go into dispute, ZeroAuthorityDAO votes on the payout based on community governance, not centralized decision-making.
⚙️ Why Call Functions?
Calling a function here means participating in an onchain workflow. It’s not just a transaction—it’s signaling your intent, voting with your wallet, and embedding your role into a digital agreement. This contract flips normal freelance coordination into code:
Accepting a gig is a public statement, sealed onchain.
Voting satisfaction is not a “review”—it's a payment directive.
Disputes don’t rely on trust—they rely on DAO consensus.
💡 The Bigger Picture
We believe marketplaces should be programmable, not just platforms. This contract is step one toward a future and we believe you anyone, anywhere should be able to prove they did a gig and completed the task, even is the Zero Authority Protocol no longer exists - because the onchain transactions live forever.
Reputation is onchain
Payment logic is transparent
Governance is user-owned
The Cerulean contract is one of the first gig economy systems on Bitcoin Layer 2—backed by final settlement and community governance.