ADR-025: Marketplace and commerce scope

Status: Accepted 2026-09-23. Binding on Wave 19 (Trade).

Context and current evidence

The design corpus contains a historical branch in which Trade was a marketplace (listings, orders, custody). Nothing of it was built. Money now lives only in Billing (ADR-012), and game items are game state that never bridges to money.

Decision

• OpenVibe.Trade is informational. It covers instruments, watchlists, market observations with source timestamps, alert rules and context.
• Excluded:
• no custody;
• no order execution;
• no escrow;
• no listings between users;
• no personalised financial advice.
• The historical marketplace branch stays open as an unresolved question. Reopening it needs a new ADR covering the legal basis, Billing flows, fraud and dispute handling, and the ADR-012 classification of anything traded.

Alternatives considered

• Build a minimal marketplace: rejected, because it would bring money movement, disputes and regulatory exposure with no owner or review.

Migration consequences

None.

Rollback

Not applicable.

Acceptance tests

• No Trade endpoint accepts an order, holds value or gives personalised advice (a route-inventory test in Trade's CI).
• Stale feeds show as stale, never as invented values.