> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ostrum.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# FAQ

> The questions everyone asks

<AccordionGroup>
  <Accordion title="What do I need to get access?">
    Information. During beta, contributing is the only way in: access isn't
    for sale yet. Verified contributions earn credits, and credits are what
    you spend to ask questions. Down the road, credits will also be
    purchasable on the open market for people with budget but nothing to
    contribute. See [Accessing data](/data/access).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How do credits work?">
    Each question spends credits based on the work it takes. The LLM figures
    out the best way to answer, and every dataset it accesses on your behalf
    spends credits for that query, plus the compute to reason over it. Quick
    questions cost little, deep ones that pull from several datasets cost
    more. You earn credits by contributing, and soon you'll be able to buy
    them too.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What kind of information can I contribute?">
    Anything valuable you know first-hand. In the launch markets that means
    the terms of market-making agreements, exchange listings, and funding
    rounds you were party to: fees, structures, sizes, timing. More markets
    are coming. See [Where the data comes from](/data/contributing).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What if the market I care about doesn't exist yet?">
    Tell us. If you hold information for a market Ostrum doesn't cover yet,
    or you want to ask questions about one, just ask the LLM in the chat
    about it. You can submit that feedback right through the chat interface,
    and it feeds directly into which markets open next.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Do I have to share exact numbers?">
    You share them at intake, but they don't survive it. Exact values are
    converted to buckets and ratios at submission and the raw figures are
    destroyed. Nothing in the dataset can be traced to one deal.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What do I earn for contributing?">
    Ostrum pays what it expects is the fair value of your information
    upfront. Then, as people consume it, a portion of what they pay accrues
    to your contribution's NFT on top of that. First to supply a true fact
    earns the most; corroborators earn a smaller share. See
    [How you earn](/tokenomics/earning).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What's the NFT? Can I sell it?">
    Every accepted contribution mints a non-transferable NFT. It represents
    the information you contributed and carries a claim to a portion of what
    people pay to access it. It can't be sold or transferred: the earnings
    belong to whoever created the information, permanently.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Can anyone find out I contributed?">
    No. Ostrum doesn't know who you are in the first place: no names, no
    emails, just a crypto address. Rewards accrue to your contribution's NFT
    and pay out to the address holding it. And consumers only ever see
    aggregates over multiple contributions with bucketed values, so nothing
    served can be traced back to anyone. See
    [Privacy by architecture](/trust/privacy).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Is this just a way to monetize confidential business information?">
    No. Ostrum is a spot market for information as an asset class, and the
    launch markets in crypto deal terms are the first application, not the
    product. The roadmap runs toward domains where individuals face repeat
    players: compensation offers, rents actually paid, healthcare billing,
    insurance settlements. And what the market sells is pooled statistics.
    No individual agreement, document, or submission is ever reproduced, and
    exact figures are destroyed at intake. You remain responsible for any
    confidentiality obligations you've personally signed.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How do you know the information is real?">
    Every submission requires proof, and the verification system tests it
    against public sources, internal data, and signs of fraudulent or
    manipulated documents. Independent corroboration compounds on top of
    that over time. See [Where the data comes from](/data/contributing).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What if my information is wrong?">
    Honest error is expected and handled. Submissions get checked for
    plausibility and weighed against corroboration, and unverifiable
    outliers just don't make it into answers. Fabrication is different:
    failing verification means excision and zero earnings.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="What happens to the proof I attach?">
    It sits in a temporary cache while the verification system reviews it,
    then gets purged on verdict. The cache itself has a hard expiry as a
    backstop. Only the verdict persists.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Do you store my questions or chat history?">
    No. Your conversations stay on your device, in your browser. Ostrum
    never stores them on its servers, and queries go only to open-source
    language models running inside trusted execution environments,
    end-to-end encrypted. No AI lab sees your questions.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Why would I share knowledge I paid dearly to acquire?">
    Because it depreciates either way. Held privately, it decays toward
    worthless as the market moves. Contributed, it pays you upfront and
    keeps paying while it stays relevant. First movers earn the most, so
    waiting has negative value.
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="Who is the team?">
    Anonymous, deliberately. Privacy and decentralization are the two
    commitments Ostrum's roadmap is built around, and they apply to the
    builders too: a publicly identified team is a set of targets for bad
    actors and a pressure point for anyone seeking to censor the protocol.
    The contributors' background is in large-scale distributed systems,
    high-frequency trading, and prediction markets, the field that most
    directly shaped the thinking behind Ostrum. See
    [The team](/team).
  </Accordion>

  <Accordion title="How do I join?">
    The beta is live at [ostrum.ai](https://ostrum.ai/). If you hold
    first-hand information relevant to the launch markets, you can join as a
    founding contributor today. See [The beta](/beta).
  </Accordion>
</AccordionGroup>