How does Noumena run time-based business tasks like interest payouts or deadline enforcement?

Through obligations plus an internal transactional task scheduler in the Runtime that fires them at the right time and executes them atomically.

Many processes need timing — interest payouts, bill generation, deadline enforcement. Instead of a separate cron system, Noumena models the deadline as an obligation and lets the Runtime's internal transactional task scheduler manage its execution. An obligation set to fire at a payout deadline can, via its otherwise branch, automatically transition the protocol into a new state (for example from waiting_for_payment to ready_for_payment) when the time arrives. Because the scheduler is transactional, that firing is atomic and duplicate-safe. The developer only models the states and the deadline; the queuing, timing, and safe execution are handled by the Runtime.