04 — H2: Tracker-authoritative token and work-unit accounting

What to build

Stop trusting node-reported usage for billing. The tracker already proxies responses — use tracker-observed response data and request limits to cap billable tokens, and compute work units from the route it constructed, not node declarations.

Code refs:

packages/tracker/meshnet_tracker/server.py — node_work from route construction (~1776–1782, ~1781–1782)
packages/tracker/meshnet_tracker/server.py — streaming token/chunk billing (~1890–1921)
packages/tracker/meshnet_tracker/server.py — non-streaming _usage_total_tokens (~1938–1943)
packages/tracker/meshnet_tracker/billing.py — charge_request node_work split (~104–151)

Accounting fraud = inflating tokens or shard span. Per ADR-0018 §5.

Test-first

Red: mock upstream returns inflated usage.total_tokens in body but tracker bills that value — test expects the tracker to cap billable tokens from observed stream chunks or request bounds.
Red: node registers false shard_end; billing uses tracker route span, not registration field alone.
Green: authoritative counters; ignore node-reported work units on charge path.

Acceptance criteria

Streaming token count uses tracker-observed chunks/tokens; upstream usage.total_tokens can only lower or match that observed count, never inflate it
Non-streaming token count caps upstream usage.total_tokens by tracker-known request bounds (max_tokens, and prompt estimate if available); exact tokenizer-backed counts are deferred unless already available locally
Work units = tracker-computed layer span per hop at route build time (~1781–1782)
Nodes cannot increase payout by lying about shard range mid-request
Integration test: malicious node metadata does not inflate charge_request shares

ADR links

ADR-0018 §5

Blocked by

02-a2-unified-auth-boundary.md

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