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Token system
Considering how young this project is, everything on this page will probably change in the future.
The token payment and reward mechanism of DeTEE is based on the core concepts of the open market and the requirements of creating a TEE-based decentralized cloud platform:
- nodes are free to choose their price
- users are free to choose nodes based on their rating and price
- nodes are free to refuse contracts (or users)
- the cost of an enclave must be based on the amount of resources used
- enclaves can not be migrated (they are bound to the server)
- the guest can not access the host
- the host can not access the guest
One of the first conclusions after analyzing the requirements above is that designing a mechanism was that implementing payment for resource utilization is exceptionally hard. As a consequence, DeTEE currently supports only payment for resource reservation, and different models will be considered as the project grows. This means that the user will pay for the resources he reserves, not for the resources he uses. For example, if a user reserves a VM with 4 vCPUs and 5GB of memory, however the load on the VM is minimal, the user will still pay for vCPUs and 5 GBs of memory. To compensate for this, automation and orchestration tools will be offered to users.
Though nodes get paid for resource reservation, during the testnet nodes will also receive a base reward of 100 test tokens per month. This means that all nodes will receive by default 100 test tokens per month in the testnet, no matter if they sell or not.
Resource calculation
Before calculating the price per month for a VM or a container, we must define the formula to calculate the multiplier for each hardware resource that is part of the contract. To simplify the formula, we will define “units”, each class of hardware warning units based on their own multiplier.
Based on our experience when using cloud services, we decided that the price of a resource will be calculated based on the number of minutes the resource is being used. As a consequence, using a resource for 10 seconds will qualify as using that resource for 1 minute, and using the resource for 70 seconds will qualify as using the resource for 2 minutes.
A server is also free to choose the price per unit per minute for his service. This price is defined in nanotokens. The current recommended value is 20k nanotokens per unit per minute. With the current calculation, a VM with 1 vCPU, 1 GB of memory, 20 GB of storage and one public IP will cost 24.4 tokens per month.
Units
The current mechanism does not distinguish based on the quality of the hardware. In the future, you should expect to see tiers for disk and for memory.
For now, the multipliers offered for hardware are:
- 1 vCPU - offers 10 units
- 1 GB of Memory - offers 5 units
- 10 GB of Storage - offers 1 unit
- 1 public IPv4 IP - offers 10 units
VMs also have an overhead for the memory due to SNP requirements.
As such, the calculation of the total units of a VM is:
total_units = (vcpus * 10) + ((memory_mb + 256) / 200) + (disk_gb / 10) + (public_ipv4 * 10)
Price and time
The node is free to choose the price for its services, expressed in nanotokens per unit. The recommended value is 20k. Please find below calculations for a price of 10k, 20k and 40k nanotokens per unit per minute.
For this example, let's take into consideration 3 types of VMs:
- a mini VM: 1 vCPUs, 1 GBs of memory and 10GBs of storage
- a medium VM: 5 vCPUs, 10 GBs of memory and 100GBs of storage
- a big VM: 16 vCPUs, 32 GBs of memory and 400GBs of storage
For the calculation, all VMs have a dedicated public IPv4 address.
In this table you can see the rounded price in tokens per month for the these VM types:
| node price | mini VM | med vm | big VM |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10k nanoT/unit/min | ~12 T/mo | ~52 T/mo | ~160 T/mo |
| 20k nanoT/unit/min | ~24 T/mo | ~105 T/mo | ~320 T/mo |
| 40k nanoT/unit/min | ~47 T/mo | ~210 T/mo | ~641 T/mo |
Full calculation of price per month for one mini VM at a node price of 20k nanotokens:
((1 * 10) + (1256 / 200) + (10 / 10) + 10) * 20000 * 60 * 24 * 30 / 1_000_000_000 =
23.56992
As a result, a node selling 31 mini VMs for one month at a default price of 20k/unit/min will earn 730 tokens.