Becoming a Provider

Providers are the supply side of VirtEngine: operators with real capacity — a datacenter, a Kubernetes cluster, spare GPU nodes, or an HPC facility — who lease it on the open marketplace and are paid through on-chain escrow.

What you’re signing up for

As a provider you will:

• register an on-chain identity with attributes describing your capacity,
• run the provider daemon alongside your infrastructure,
• bid on tenant orders (or publish HPC offerings and queues),
• deploy and operate tenant workloads,
• submit signed usage reports on a schedule, and
• receive the agreed escrow payouts with 0% marketplace commission.

Your reputation — audits, benchmarks, reviews — accumulates on-chain and directly affects which orders you can win.

Prerequisites

Requirement	Notes
Verified identity	VEID enrollment for the operator account — see VEID Overview
Infrastructure	Kubernetes for containerized workloads and/or an HPC scheduler (SLURM, MOAB, Open OnDemand)
Chain access	A synced virtengine node (own or trusted RPC)
Keys	Provider signing key for transactions and usage-report signatures
Connectivity	A stable public endpoint for tenant/lease communication, secured via x/cert mTLS

Onboarding path

1. Verify your identity. Enroll through VEID. Provider registration is identity-gated to keep the marketplace free of throwaway operators.

2. Register on-chain. Create your provider record (x/provider) with attributes — region, capabilities, contact endpoint. For HPC capacity, also register your cluster:

   {
     "schema_version": "1.0",
     "name": "A100-east",
     "cluster_type": "slurm",
     "region": "us-east-1",
     "endpoint": "https://hpc.example.com",
     "total_nodes": 64,
     "total_gpus": 512
   }

   virtengine tx hpc register-provider provider.json --from provider

3. Deploy the provider daemon. Configure it against your chain node and your infrastructure — see Provider Daemon.

4. Enable usage reporting and settlement. Without them you will not be paid — see Usage Reporting & Payouts.

5. Get audited and benchmarked. Optional but commercially important: auditor attestations and benchmark results widen the set of orders you qualify for — see Benchmarks & Audits.

6. Start bidding. Tune your pricing to win profitable leases — see Pricing & Bidding Strategy.

Revenue model at a glance

payout = settled_usage_value                         # marketplace commission: 0%

Payment arrives when usage records settle (hourly settlement cycles, 24-hour dispute window) — not when the lease is signed. Plan cash flow accordingly.

Operational bar

Tenants and the protocol both hold you to measurable standards: reconciliation discrepancies above 25% block settlement, fraud signals can shut down leases, and audit/review history is permanent. Read Security Obligations before going to production.