Load Guardrails is open infrastructure. Any qualified freight broker, 3PL, or logistics platform can run loads on it. Unbroker is the first; it won't be the last. Your commercial model stays yours. What changes is that vetting, visibility, and settlement become properties of the record rather than work your team does by hand.
Before you can tender a load to a carrier, the carrier has to clear four gates. The decision is deny-by-default: reject on any hard failure, route to review on any soft flag, and only an approved carrier can be tendered.
| Gate | Checks | On failure |
|---|---|---|
| Authority 49 U.S.C. 13902 · SAFER / L&I | Active, authorized for property, entity type is carrier, no out-of-service order, MCS-150 recency | Reject. A carrier holding only broker authority is flagged as double-broker risk. |
| Insurance 49 CFR 387.9 · ACORD 25 | Active auto liability ≥ $1,000,000 and active cargo ≥ $100,000, effective today, evidenced by certificate | Reject, with every reason listed: expired, under limit, no active policy. |
| Packet | W-9, certificate of insurance, signed broker-carrier agreement, authority letter; voided check collected for remittance | Reject until complete. |
| Fraud flags | Authority under 180 days, free-mail domain, no phone on file; identity triangulation across MC, name, phone, email domain, address | Review. No tender until cleared by a person. |
| Carrier | Decision | Reason | Tender |
|---|---|---|---|
| Branville Trucking LLC · usdot:1593734 | Approve | Authority active 800 days, $1M auto + $100k cargo active, full packet | open |
| Redline Expedite | Reject | Auto liability expired day 900 | closed |
| Ghost Logistics | Reject | Entity is a broker, not a carrier (double-broker risk) | closed |
| Brand New Freight | Review | Authority 40 days old; free-email domain | closed |
Example output from the broker vetting gate. Each decision is written to the broker's own field, append-only.
The infrastructure ensures every participant is who they say they are, every event is recorded once, and every settlement executes as specified. What you charge, how you structure fees, and how you run your business remain entirely within your domain.
The broker slice holds the shipper, the carrier, and your margin. The shipper reads its cost; the carrier reads its rate. Your margin is a line on the record for the parties entitled to it, not a secret and not a public number.
Your margin settles at settled from escrow the shipper funded before pickup. No quick-pay program to run, no factoring to arrange for carriers, no collections.
The broker-carrier agreement is a signed record between your address and the carrier's: insurance requirements, cargo liability, payment terms, versioned as it changes.
Unbroker runs on Load Guardrails as usdot:2020202B. It publishes its fee instead of hiding a margin. It drops the non-solicitation clause. And when a shipper and a carrier it introduced want to go direct, it gives seven days' notice and steps aside.
Industry pain: non-solicitation clauses and litigated "back-solicitation" because the broker owns the relationship. On Load Guardrails the relationship is an address and access is a grant. Switching to direct is a novation written to the load with all three consents: the broker's margin claim ends, optionally with a buyout term, and a shipper-to-carrier direct grant is issued. A first-class, consented, recorded operation instead of a lawsuit.
Nothing forces you to adopt Unbroker's terms. The novation is a capability of the record; whether and how you offer it is your commercial decision. What you can't do is hide the margin from the parties entitled to see it, or re-broker a bound load.
Integrating Load Guardrails doesn't mean replacing your TMS. The node exposes a small contract: read a load as the party you are, create one, and advance its state. Every call is gated by the same deny-by-default policy the parties are.
| Call | Who may call it | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| GET /load?id=… | Any party on the load | Returns the load as the caller: status, the caller's entitled sections only, the deed history, the settlement ledger |
| POST /load | Shipper, broker | Creates a load under the caller's authority; returns its address in state created |
| POST /load/advance?id=…&to=… | The party that owns that transition | Advances the deed if the policy allows; otherwise 403 and nothing is written |
| From → to | Shipper | Carrier | Receiver | Broker |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| created → funded | allowed | denied | denied | denied |
| funded → accepted | denied | allowed | denied | denied |
| accepted → picked_up | denied | allowed | denied | denied |
| picked_up → in_transit | denied | allowed | denied | denied |
| in_transit → delivered | denied | denied | allowed | denied |
| delivered → settled | system, after both releases clear | |||
The brokered lifecycle replaces the EDI 204 / 990 / 214 / 210 / 997 loop: tender, accept, track, invoice, and acknowledge are transitions on one object rather than messages to reconcile. Documentation and per-entity credentials are published ahead of launch; the read side of the node is running today.
B) or forwarder (F) authority. It becomes your address.Brokers, 3PLs, and platforms: get on the interest list and we'll share the integration contract and the vetting configuration ahead of launch.
Join the interest list