Buyers

As a buyer you lock in an 8×H100 node for a future week at the auction's price, pay for it up front, and take delivery as bare metal with SSH access. You pay only for the hours certified healthy; the rest comes back, with damages if the shortfall passes the contract's tolerance.

You need a wallet approved for the buyer role (Apply) holding USDC for the bid and a little SOL for fees.

1. Open Markets in the app and choose a series: a region (NA or EU) and a delivery week.
2. In the order ticket choose Bid, then enter your limit price per GPU-hour and the number of node-weeks.
3. The ticket checks the order against your account as you type and shows the notional, the USDC you pay in and the fee. For a bid that is your limit price × 1,344 GPU-hours × node-weeks, plus the 0.5% trade fee.
4. Choose Place bid and sign in your wallet.

The full amount moves into the series' escrow when you place the bid. You can Cancel order from Portfolio until the auction.

Every Thursday at 16:00 UTC the series clears at one price for everyone. If your limit is at or above it, your bid fills (fully or partly) at the clearing price, not your limit. In Portfolio:

• the order shows Filled or Partly filled;
• any difference between your limit and the clearing price, and any unfilled part, is returned to you; Collect USDC appears while it is waiting;
• your claims appear, one per node-week.

The service completes these steps on its own shortly after the clear; the buttons are there if you want to run a step yourself.

A claim becomes a delivery when you request delivery. The window opens once the series' last auction has cleared (Thursday 16:00 UTC, the week before delivery) and closes at notice, Friday 00:00 UTC, 72 hours before the week starts. In Portfolio choose Request delivery on the claim.

Request within that window. A claim still held after notice is no longer deliverable: its prepaid amount goes to the seller. If you no longer need the node, sell or transfer the claim before notice instead (see Traders).

Each requested node-week becomes a delivery ticket, listed in Portfolio. Open it for everything that follows.

On the ticket, under Hand over your access key:

1. Paste the SSH public key the node should accept (for example ssh-ed25519 AAAA… you@team).
2. Choose Encrypt and send to the seller. The key is encrypted in your browser to the seller's key; the service only relays the ciphertext.
3. Choose Commit the key hash and sign. Only the key's SHA-256 is recorded on chain.

Do this by Friday 12:00 UTC (60 hours before the week). A ticket with no key committed by then ends in buyer default: the seller is paid in full and nothing is refunded.

• By Saturday 00:00 UTC the seller assigns an accredited node to your ticket and installs your key.
• From Sunday 00:00 UTC an independent inspector runs a 30-minute acceptance test on the node: GPU UUIDs, a short DCGM diagnostic and NVLink bandwidth.
• When it passes, the ticket asks you to Confirm access. Log in with your key and confirm. Two hours of silence count as confirmation. If access does not work, choose Access doesn't work on the ticket within those two hours and object instead: the objection posts the same 5% bond as a fault, and the seller has 4 hours to move you to another node.

Run the Delivery Agent on the node for the whole week. It signs a heartbeat every minute and serves the health endpoint inspectors use; it never reads your workloads. Bind it to the ticket once, from the ticket's Delivery Agent section. See Delivery and Provider Agents.

The ticket shows the week as 168 hours, filling in as each hour is certified. If the node fails, File a fault on the ticket with the hours affected and your evidence. A fault posts a bond of 5% of the ticket's notional; the seller has 4 hours to cure with a replacement node. See Delivery week.

After the week and a 24-hour challenge window, the committee certifies the ticket and it settles on its own:

• you are refunded the price of every hour not certified;
• if more than 1.68 of the 168 hours are missing, you also receive damages from the seller's collateral for each missing hour beyond that;
• the seller receives the escrow for the certified hours.

The ticket's Settlement section shows the refund, damages, the seller's escrow and the collateral released. Payouts arrive in your wallet; if a payment cannot be delivered (for example your USDC account was closed), the ticket offers Collect USDC later. See Settlement for the formulas.