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VirtEngine Docs

How the Marketplace Works

Every workload on VirtEngine moves through the same on-chain lifecycle. This page follows a deployment from the tenant’s first transaction to the provider’s final payout.

Tenant order x/deployment · x/market Provider bids price + attributes Lease winning bid matched Deploy provider daemon Usage reports signed, hourly Settlement x/settlement · disputes Escrow payout x/escrow · x/take 1 ORDER 2 BID 3 LEASE 4 DEPLOY 5 REPORT 6 SETTLE 7 PAY
The marketplace lifecycle: orders attract bids, the winning bid forms a lease, and verified usage drives escrow settlement.

The lifecycle, step by step

Section titled “The lifecycle, step by step”

  1. Tenant creates an order. The tenant describes the workload — resources, placement requirements, and pricing bounds — and submits it on-chain. The x/deployment module records the deployment; x/market opens an order against it. The tenant also funds an escrow account that will pay for the lease (see Escrow & Settlement).

  2. Providers bid. Registered providers (see x/provider) whose inventory matches the order’s requirements respond with priced bids. Bids carry the provider’s attributes, so tenants can weigh audits, benchmarks, reviews, and region alongside price.

  3. A lease is formed. The order is matched to a winning bid and x/market creates a lease binding tenant, provider, and price. The lease is the billing anchor: everything that follows references it.

  4. The provider deploys. The off-chain provider daemon observes the lease and schedules the workload onto the provider’s infrastructure — Kubernetes for containerized workloads, or SLURM/MOAB/Open OnDemand clusters for HPC jobs.

  5. Usage is metered and reported. The provider daemon collects per-workload metrics on a schedule (hourly by default), converts them into signed usage records, runs anomaly detection, and submits them on-chain in batches via MsgRecordUsage. See Usage Reporting.

  6. Settlement converts usage into payment. After a 24-hour dispute window, undisputed usage records are settled by x/settlement into billable line items. The tenant can dispute suspect records inside the window; corrections create new records referencing the original.

  7. Escrow pays out. x/escrow transfers the agreed funds from the tenant’s escrow account to the provider with 0% marketplace commission. Validator transaction fees apply only to the chain messages. If escrow runs dry, the lease closes.

What makes this trustworthy

Section titled “What makes this trustworthy”
  • Signed usage — every usage record is cryptographically signed by the provider, and fraud checks validate timestamps, durations, and resource ratios before settlement.
  • Dispute window — tenants get a guaranteed window to challenge usage before funds move.
  • Reputation on-chain — audits (x/audit), benchmarks (x/benchmark), and reviews (x/review) give tenants verifiable signals when choosing providers.
  • Identity-gated participation — VEID identity verification (see VEID Overview) raises the cost of Sybil attacks on both sides of the market.
Section titled “Related reading”