Performance certificates: making providers prove their hardware

A marketplace for compute is only as good as the honesty of its listings. v0.4.2 makes providers prove what their machines can do before they're allowed to accept a lease.

A benchmark with a receipt#

On startup, a provider runs a benchmark of about sixty seconds: a SHA-256 hash chain of 375 million iterations, followed by a memory-hard phase. The result is a performance certificate: attested timestamps, a score, and merkle-root proofs of the work.

• Certificates are broadcast over the xe/certificates GossipSub topic, and every node caches them.
• Any node serves any provider's certificate at GET /certificate/{provider}.
• The format is compact: merkle roots instead of full arrays cut a certificate from 2.6 KB to 837 bytes.

Why it can't be faked#

The memory-hard phase builds a 256 MB lookup table and makes a million reads from it, each one depending on the last. Doing that over a network instead of in local memory would be about ten thousand times slower, so a provider can't rent the benchmark out to faster hardware somewhere else.

Also in v0.4.2#

• Timekeeper attestations are mandatory on lease_accept and lease_settle. Self-reported timestamps are gone.
• Certificates with the wrong iteration count are rejected.
• Provider nodes refuse to start without sys.timekeepers in the state chain.

See the changelog for the full release.