Platforms often compete with future promises—profit sharing, redeemable credits, “growth rights,” or buyback narratives. When these promises are not cheaply verifiable—because rules can be quietly changed, accounting definitions can drift, evidence can be withheld, and “units” can be silently diluted—participants rationally discount them toward zero and competition collapses into one-dimensional price/subsidy wars, with margin compression and quality decline. In multi-platform settings, escalating generosity without verifiable boundaries can further degrade into Ponzi-type source mixing, where old commitments are effectively supported by new money or new issuance proceeds. This paper proposes Two-Layer Transactions (TLT) as a transaction-level commitment technology: each purchase generates (i) a price receipt and (ii) a platform-share receipt, an equity-like residual-claim unit whose issuance is capped by a verifiable distributable base. TLT closes the claim layer with decidable gates and non-discretionary finality: version binding, deterministic recomputation, hard-cap enforcement with explicit overflow handling, decidable No-Ponzi provenance strengthened by signed label-integrity, conservative sustainability screening, anti-farming controls, and settlement finality with rollback and reversal closure, including “no-late-proof” availability discipline. We show that verifiable deviation and objective finality support cooperative equilibria under sparse verification, internalize referral effort, and shift competition from price burns toward commitment quality + product quality, yielding conditional positive-sum outcomes when net long-run value gains exceed governance and quality costs. We further establish off-chain portability: equivalent implementations can rely on signed rulepacks and append-only transparency logs.
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