Pricing & Bidding Strategy

Bidding on VirtEngine is open competition: every qualified provider sees the same orders. Sustainable pricing means knowing your cost floor, your reputation premium, and the protocol’s cut.

Know your net

Marketplace settlement has 0% protocol commission. Providers receive the agreed lease amount from escrow; low validator transaction fees apply only to the on-chain messages involved:

net_revenue = bid_price × utilization × (1 − 0.04) − operating_cost

Because payment follows settled usage — hourly cycles plus a 24-hour dispute window — your effective revenue also depends on clean usage reporting. Records blocked by reconciliation discrepancies or disputes are revenue you’ve earned but can’t collect yet.

Pricing containers and VMs (bid-side)

For order-driven workloads, you respond to tenant orders with priced bids:

• Anchor to your marginal cost per resource-hour (power, amortized hardware, bandwidth, staff), not to what competitors bid this week.
• Price your attributes. Audited, well-benchmarked, well-reviewed providers legitimately clear at higher prices — that premium is the return on your reputation investment.
• Mind the escrow horizon. Long-running leases only pay while tenant escrow stays funded; a lease that closes early from an exhausted escrow account is not a defaulted debt, just ended revenue.

Pricing HPC capacity (queue-side)

HPC pricing is published rather than bid per order: you create priced queues against your registered cluster.

schema_version: "1.0"
cluster_id: "HPC-1"
name: "A100 on-demand"
resource_type: "gpu"
price_per_hour: "12.5uve"
min_duration: 3600
max_duration: 86400

virtengine tx hpc create-queue queue.yaml --from provider

Queue design levers:

• Duration bounds (min_duration/max_duration) shape which jobs land on you — short interactive sessions and multi-day batch runs have very different scheduling economics.
• Resource-type separation — separate queues for GPU vs. CPU keep your premium hardware from being consumed at commodity prices.
• Tenants submit jobs with a max_budget; jobs whose budget can’t cover your queue price at requested scale won’t route to you.

Common mistakes

Mistake	Consequence
Pricing below marginal cost to build share	Negative margin at 100% utilization — the market will happily oblige
Ignoring validator transaction fees in cost models	Small operational-cost surprise; fees are proposed at ~90% below standard networks
One queue for all HPC hardware	Premium GPUs sold at CPU prices
Overstated benchmarks	Reconciliation discrepancies; >25% blocks settlement
Counting revenue at lease signing	Cash-flow gaps; revenue arrives at settlement