What is PulseGrid
PulseGrid is a network that pays machines for the work they do, in real time and provably, with no trusted middleman. Physical devices (sensors, radios, meters, energy monitors) sign their own telemetry and anchor it on-chain every interval. An autonomous Settlement Agent then pays or slashes each operator every interval in stablecoin, automatically and continuously, and gaslessly for the devices.
It is live on BOT Chain mainnet, settling in real USDT.
The problem it solves
In DePIN today, operator payments are a trust problem. Some company tallies "uptime" off-chain and cuts a payment, so the operator has to trust the tally and has no on-chain recourse if it is wrong. The payer can under-report, stall, or dispute, and the operator cannot prove otherwise.
PulseGrid removes the company. Each device signs its own readings, the network anchors them on-chain, and every interval the settlement contract itself decides pay-or-slash from the signed on-chain facts.
The guarantee
The result is a two-way, machine-trustless guarantee:
An operator cannot be paid for data they did not deliver, and the agent cannot stiff an operator who did.
This holds because settlement takes only an identifier and an interval (settleEpoch(deviceId, epoch))
and re-derives the verdict and the amount on-chain from the device-signed anchor count and the policy.
A buggy or malicious agent cannot overpay, wrongly slash, pay an un-anchored interval, or double-settle.
An adversarial test suite proves it, as part of 81 passing contract tests.
Two layers: liveness and data quality
- Liveness: did the device deliver enough signed readings this interval?
- Data quality (value-layer SLAs): the device signs each reading as a first-class value; the contract counts only readings whose value is in the policy's allowed range. A device that streams its full quota out of range is slashed. So the guarantee runs from did you deliver? to was the data good?.
Gasless for devices
Devices are ordinary wallets that sign but never transact. A sponsor relayer submits each anchor and pays the gas, so a device wallet spends zero. The relayer cannot forge a signature or alter a reading, so it is trusted only for liveness, never for integrity.
Who it is for
- Operators who run devices and want to be paid per interval in stablecoin, with no invoice and no counterparty who can decide not to pay. See Deploy a node.
- Developers and integrators who want a settlement rail for a DePIN network, or to run real hardware against it with the device SDK.
- The ecosystem: a working example of real-time, bilateral-trustless machine settlement on BOT Chain.
Next: How it works.