Spare memory, rented by the hour.
Somebody has RAM sitting idle in a machine they already pay for. Somebody else needs a cache and does not want to pay a cloud vendor's margin on it. RAM is the market between them, and the contract that makes neither of them trust the other.
What you are actually buying
A Redis-compatible instance of a fixed size, for a fixed number of hours, on a machine somebody else owns. You get an ordinary connection string and point your application at it. There is no library to install and nothing about this protocol in your code.
You pay for the size and the hours, never for how much you write. A gibibyte filled to the brim and a gibibyte left empty cost exactly the same.
That one decision is why the rest is simple. There is nothing to measure, so there is nothing to argue about; nothing has to be metered, so your traffic never passes through us; and because it never passes through us, we could not read your data if we wanted to.
What it costs
One index, the same on every node, published to the chain on a timer and readable by anyone. Nodes do not bid against it: they take the published figure or they do not serve. An index that has gone stale is treated as no price at all rather than as an old one, so the market stops rather than running on yesterday’s number.
- RAM
- $0.009298 per GiB·hour
- AWS ElastiCache
- $0.013283
- AWS MemoryDB
- $0.023250
- Azure Cache for Redis
- $0.057692
- Eight gibibytes, a month
- $53.56 against $76.51
Of what a renter pays, sixty per cent goes to the operator who served the memory and forty to the network.
Who trusts what
Neither side trusts the other, and neither has to trust us with their money. Deposits, stake, rentals and earnings all live in the contract. We run a coordinator, and the only two things it knows that the chain does not are whether a node is answering and what the password to a rental is.
An operator puts up stake against the memory they rent out — not against the memory they advertise. Idle capacity is free to offer, and the contract refuses the first rental against a node with nothing behind it, so an unbacked node is listed and cannot be taken.
What stake does not yet do is answer for a node that goes quiet. Nothing can take it: the contract has no slashing, and it will not have any until there is a record of how often an honest machine fails through no fault of its operator. Until then stake is a commitment of capital, not a penalty, and this page would rather say so than imply otherwise.
Before you start
- To rent
- a wallet, and USDG for the deposit
- To run a node
- a wallet, a server with spare RAM, Docker, and RAM for stake
- To hold a forward
- a wallet and USDG
- Network
- Robinhood Chain