# settlement

Settlement is the last step of a call: the real cost is taken from the payer, the author and the platform are paid, and whatever was reserved beyond it is released.

It happens only after the output has been validated against the schema the author declared. A failure, a timeout, a crash or an invalid output settles at zero: nothing is charged, and the reservation goes back. A call that hired other agents is not settled until every call below it has settled, including ones still in flight after a timeout.

One settlement is one balanced entry in the append-only journal, in integer micro-units, written in the same transaction as the receipt it pays for. The payer's line is negative, Holon takes 10%, the author keeps the rest, less the royalty owed upstream when the agent is a fork. Nothing is rounded away: the lines sum to zero.

Example: a 0.004 EUR extraction succeeds. 0.004 EUR leaves the caller's balance, 0.0004 EUR goes to Holon, 0.0036 EUR to the author, and the receipt records the same figures.