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MicroCrop sells two things. Only one of them is money. New organizations start on DETERMINATION.

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The product on Tier 1 is the determination

A parametric policy has exactly one hard question: did the trigger fire, and by how much? Everything else — collecting premium, moving money, reconciling with a farmer — is work you almost certainly already do, on rails you already own, under a licence you already hold. Tier 1 sells you the answer to the hard question, in a form your regulator, your reinsurer and your auditor can check without asking us anything:
  • a chain-neutral, currency-neutral canonical body — the facts of the determination, with every numeric value encoded as a decimal string so no float ever enters the record;
  • its SHA-256 hash, reproducible byte-for-byte in any language;
  • an off-chain signature over that hash, from which anyone can recover our signer;
  • a notary anchor so the hash is provably older than any dispute about it;
  • the source provenance — the inputs, and where they came from — so a sceptic can re-fetch the data and recompute the index themselves.
That artifact is what you buy. Verify it yourself — the whole design assumes you will, and it works with our servers switched off.

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What Tier 2 adds

Tier 2 adds money movement: MicroCrop collects the farmer’s premium by M-Pesa, activates the policy on-chain, and originates and settles the payout to the farmer when a determination triggers. Everything from Tier 1 still applies — the determination and its evidence package are identical, and identically verifiable. Tier 2 does not mean MicroCrop underwrites the risk or funds the payout. Capital is yours in both tiers.

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Where our responsibility ends

We state this plainly because vagueness here is how parametric programmes go wrong. On Tier 1, MicroCrop:
  • determines whether the parametric trigger fired, per the methodology version frozen onto the policy at purchase;
  • states the amount owed, derived from the policy you sold — sumInsured × damagePercentBp / 10000, truncated to the minor unit, in the policy’s own currency;
  • issues the signed determination and evidence package, and notifies you.
On Tier 1, MicroCrop does not:
  • collect, hold, route or disburse any money — not the premium, not the payout;
  • hold or custody your capital, on any tier;
  • decide whether you owe the farmer as a matter of contract or of law. We determine what the index says. What your policy wording, your regulator and your customer contract make of that is yours;
  • verify that you paid the farmer. When you tell us what you paid, we store it and echo it back labelled verifiedByMicrocrop: false, always. The field that would record a MicroCrop verification is a one-valued enum — UNVERIFIED — so no code path can even express the opposite;
  • chase, dun or enforce anything. If you never report a settlement, the determination is marked OVERDUE. That is a reporting state. MicroCrop did not settle the policy, owes nothing on it, and has moved no money.
This page describes the engineering behaviour of the system, not your legal position. [PLACEHOLDER — FOR COUNSEL] The contractual allocation of liability between MicroCrop and the partner, and the regulatory characterisation of a determination in each market, belong in the partner agreement and are not settled by this documentation.

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Three facts, never collapsed into one status

This is the shape of every determination response, and it is deliberate. A single status field would have to lie about at least one of these:

determined

What we determined. Signed, hashed, anchored, independently verifiable.

settlement

Whether we settled. On Tier 1 it says explicitly that we deliberately did not, and what the policy owes.

partnerReport

What you told us happened. Always labelled partner-attested and not verified by MicroCrop. Never merged into settlement.
A merged status that read UNPAID would look like a broken determination. One that read PAID would launder your unverified claim into a MicroCrop fact. Neither is acceptable, so we never produce one. See Determinations.

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How the tier is applied

Two fields, and the distinction between them is the whole safety property: At POST /api/policies/purchase, your organization’s current tier is projected onto the new policy and frozen there — the same mechanism that freezes methodologyVersion, for the same reason. The tier gates intake; it never drains. Every enforcement point in the system reads Policy.settlementMode, never your organization’s current tier. So:
  • a downgrade from Tier 2 to Tier 1 cannot strand an in-flight payout on cover you sold under Tier 2 — those policies keep settling;
  • an upgrade from Tier 1 to Tier 2 does not retroactively make MicroCrop liable for cover it never priced — those policies stay yours to settle.
The check is written in the deny direction (settlementMode !== DETERMINATION_AND_SETTLEMENT refuses), so a missing, unknown or future value refuses rather than slipping through.

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What each tier gates, concretely

Determination reads are never tier-gated. Both tiers determine; gating the reads on the settlement tier would hide the Tier 1 product from the people who bought it.
403 TIER_NOT_ENTITLED is a permanent commercial refusal, not a transient failure. Do not retry it, and do not queue behind it. It means the policy was sold under DETERMINATION and MicroCrop will never settle it.

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Changing tier

There is no partner endpoint. Contact MicroCrop; a change requires a written reason and is recorded in an append-only audit trail with how much cover was in force under the old mode. It takes effect on the next sale.

Tier 1 integration

The full path: sell, activate, determine, settle, report.

Independent verification

Check our determination without trusting or calling us.