What you are agreeing to when you bid, what your deposit is actually at risk for, and what happens if delivery slips. Worth ten minutes before your first bid.

Read the tender before you bid

Every tender has a tender pack: scope, line items, commercial terms, timetable, requirements and scoring weights, with the hashes that fix them. Open it. Everything in it was published before bidding opened and cannot be changed afterwards without the hash failing, so what you read is what you will be judged against.

Check the delivery window in particular. It is how long you have per milestone, and a bid quoting more days than it allows cannot win, because the contract refuses that award. You will keep your deposit, but you will have wasted the bid.

If something is unclear, ask in the clarification round. Questions can be asked anonymously, because asking one reveals something about your approach. Answers go to every bidder, always. An answer given to one supplier and withheld from the rest is the favour sealed bidding exists to prevent.

Sealed bids

Your price is hashed with a secret derived from your wallet. The chain records that you bid and takes your deposit; it does not record what you bid. Nobody can read it: not rival bidders, not the buyer, and not the people who run this.

When bidding closes you reveal, and the contract checks your revealed price against the commitment you made earlier. This is why nobody can alter a bid after seeing the competition, including you.

Reveal, or you lose your deposit. That is the one rule worth setting a reminder for. A sealed bid you can abandon after seeing how the field looks is a free option rather than a bid, and the forfeiture is what makes it binding. Reveal and your deposit comes back whether you win or lose.

The secret is derived from a wallet signature, so the same wallet can regenerate it even if you clear your browser. The reveal file is a backup for the same thing. Keep at least one.

Unless you bid from a team account, where the file is the only route. A multisig signs with whichever owners are available, and a different set of signers produces different signature bytes, so a colleague revealing your bid would derive a different secret, which would not match what you sealed. The reveal would fail and the deposit would be forfeited. If the address you bid from is a contract, the bid page says so and the file stops being a backup: download it and put it somewhere the person who reveals can actually reach. This is a limitation of how the secret is derived, not a rule about who may bid, and it is one we intend to remove.

Open tenders

Some tenders run in the open, badged as such on the board. Your price is public the moment you place it. Rivals will see it and undercut you; you can see theirs and improve yours, as often as you like while bidding is open, without paying a second deposit.

There is no reveal step and therefore nothing to forfeit for failing to reveal. If you would rather competitors did not see your number, do not bid on an open tender.

Being chosen

Bids are scored against the weights the buyer published before bidding opened: price, delivery and quality. The scoring is arithmetic, and the memo explaining the result is published and anchored on the chain.

Read the weights before you price, because undercutting may not win. Each criterion is scored as a ratio against the best bid received, so what counts is how far apart the bids are on it rather than the weight alone. Prices cluster; delivery often does not. A bid 5% cheaper but twice as slow loses to one that is quicker, even on a rubric that weights price higher, because the price gap is worth a couple of points and the delivery gap fifteen. If you can move a lead time more easily than a price, that is usually where the tender is decided.

Your record here is worth real money, and it is worth knowing how much. The quality score is 50 + 10 for every engagement you have completed on this deployment, capped at 100, so five completed jobs is the ceiling and a sixth adds nothing. On a typical 50 / 30 / 20 rubric, holding delivery equal, that lets you price above a newcomer and still tie: about 4% with one completed job, 8% with two, 20% at the cap.

Which is the argument for taking a first job at a thin margin. It is also the reason the number that matters most early on is finishing rather than price, because until you complete one engagement you score the same 50 as a wallet created this morning, however long you have been trading. Nothing on-chain can see a reputation you earned elsewhere.

If two bids score exactly the same, the tie is settled by a fixed cascade: cheaper first, then quicker, then the lower wallet address. The outcome is one you can recompute rather than one decided on the day. The last step is arbitrary; it only comes up when two bids match exactly, which in a sealed tender you could not have arranged.

You cannot set the criteria, and no supplier can, here or in any procurement process. What you can do is question them while bidding is open, in the clarification round. Every answer goes to every bidder, so asking whether a requirement is realistic costs you nothing and occasionally gets the tender reposted. Once bids are in, the terms are fixed for everyone.

So if you lose, you can read exactly why: what each bid scored, what flags were raised, and which one was recommended. Re-hash the memo yourself and compare it with the chain. A rationale written after the fact hashes differently and fails that check. You never have to pay to see why you lost.

The evaluator recommends; it cannot award. The buyer awards, and only to the supplier the recommendation named. The contract refuses an award to anyone else, so a buyer who prefers a different bid cannot simply take it. Their only alternative is to award nobody, which returns every revealed bidder's deposit.

That is worth knowing when you price. You are bidding against the published rubric, not against the buyer's preference, and nobody can quietly substitute the second for the first after seeing what arrived.

Delivering, and getting paid

The award opens the first milestone, with its share of the price in escrow less a retention held until the end. You deliver, the buyer accepts, and it releases.

If the buyer goes quiet, you still get paid. Once the acceptance window passes, anyone can trigger the release. You cannot be held hostage by silence, which is the point of the clock.

Money released is credited, not transferred. It waits under Your payouts until you withdraw it, which is one transaction whenever suits you.

Once you have withdrawn, that panel reads "nothing owed" again: a claimed balance returns to zero and the money is in your wallet. The engagement will still say the retention was released, because it was; the balance is what is left to collect, not a record of what you were paid. The chain has the record: your withdrawal is a transaction like any other.

If a platform fee is set, you pay it, not the buyer. It is deducted from each milestone inside the escrow when that milestone is accepted, so you receive less than you quoted while the buyer pays the quoted price in full. It is charged after retention is withheld and never on the retention itself, which reaches you whole at final acceptance. The bid page says the rate before you bid and the tender's terms state it, so price it in. It is zero on this deployment, and the bid page says nothing at all when it is.

Shipping across a border? The tender page offers a proforma invoice once you have been awarded, which is the document customs and import licensing ask for before goods move. It is built from figures the tender already fixed, so the total and the milestone schedule cannot drift from what was agreed; you supply what the tender cannot know: both parties' legal names and postal addresses, the country of origin and the HS code. Your name is prefilled if you have published a profile, since that is signed by your wallet, but it stays editable, because the name a business ships under is often not the name in a directory. A wallet address identifies neither party to an import authority, so the panel says plainly when the document is still missing something customs will want. Print it to PDF from the panel. You probably do not need it: escrow already shows the buyer's funds are committed, which is what a proforma is usually asked to assert, and it can be checked on-chain rather than taken on trust.

For physical goods there is a transit allowance before that clock starts, so a buyer is not paying for a container still at sea. If they confirm receipt, the inspection window runs from arrival instead, which is sooner, so it is in their interest as well as yours.

If you are going to be late

Tell the buyer before the window closes. They can extend it, and that is the only thing anywhere that can move a delivery deadline, and it stops working the moment the deadline passes. There is a private, encrypted thread with them on the tender page for exactly this.

If the window closes with nothing delivered, either side can settle the milestone. That is the terminal step: it ends the engagement and divides the escrow, and nothing reverses it. There is a gap first: settlement is refused until the milestone's escrow job expires, which is the transit allowance plus two acceptance windows after your deadline. For a while you can neither deliver nor be settled against.

The buyer recovers what was never earned, and damages from your stake capped at what re-procuring would actually have cost them: the next-cheapest revealed bid, less what you were awarded. The rest of your stake comes back. If the runner-up was 2.95 and you were awarded 2.80, the buyer's loss is 0.15 and that is all the damages can be, however much you staked.

With one exception. That cap exists because there is a runner-up to measure against. If you won on something other than the lowest price, excessCost is zero, nothing bounds the loss, and the whole of what you staked is taken. Worth knowing when you bid above the cheapest and expect to win on delivery or record: it is a better tender to win and a worse one to fail.

The panel shows both figures before anyone presses the button, so you can see exactly what you keep. You are not stripped of everything regardless of what it cost them; the security covers the loss and the surplus is returned.

Note that a delay caused by your own supplier is not treated as an excuse anywhere in procurement, here included. Choice of manufacturer is the supplier's risk, and the assumption is that you priced it.

Building a record

Everything you do here is counted from the chain and shown on the supplier directory: tenders bid, revealed, won, engagements completed, milestones delivered and rejected, and bids sealed but never revealed.

That last number is the least flattering one you have and the one buyers will look at hardest. It is also the only evidence that someone treats a sealed bid as a free option. You can publish a company profile alongside it, signed by your wallet so nobody can write one in your name, but the counted half is not editable by anyone, including you.