Simple Compute Market For Compute Sellers

Simple Compute Market Series

Key Takeaways

• SCM gives sellers market machinery as open infrastructure: publish capacity, negotiate under your own policy, and settle through Alkahest, while provisioning stays on your own service
• The seller flow is one path: deploy, publish, set policy, settle, provision, and operate
• You keep control of pricing policy, settlement terms, reachability, and delivery, and the marketplace never becomes your operator
• Settlement is Alkahest-backed and verified on-chain before you provision
• The open beta delivery path is GPU-backed KVM VMs with SSH credential handoff and optional GPU passthrough; other compute delivery types are on the roadmap

Useful compute capacity does not become a market just because it has a listings page.

To sell it, you need market machinery: machine-readable offers, negotiation policy, commitments, provisioning, delivery evidence, accepted settlement assets, and release criteria. Compute networks and operators usually end up building that plumbing themselves, or renting it from a platform that then owns the customer relationship.

SCM gives sellers that machinery as open infrastructure. You run market-storefront: publish capacity, negotiate under your own policy, settle through Alkahest, and keep provisioning on your own service. The buyer's side has its own post; this is the same market from the seller's seat.

The open beta delivery path is GPU-backed KVM virtual machines with SSH credential handoff and optional GPU passthrough. Inference and other compute delivery types are on the roadmap.

The Seller's Problem

A seller has capacity. What it lacks is everything around the sale.

Buyers driven by software need offers they can read, terms they can negotiate, a commitment they can trust, delivery they can verify, and settlement that resolves on its own. Build all of that per market and the plumbing becomes the product. Hand it to a platform and the platform owns the relationship, the pricing model, and the payment rails.

SCM is the open starting point in between: the market machinery, run by the seller, on infrastructure the seller controls.

The Seller Flow

Standing up a storefront follows one path:

• Deploy. Run market-storefront through Docker Compose, Helm and Kubernetes, or the raw runtime.
• Publish. Register identity with a wallet signature and publish offers to the listings registry.
• Set policy. Configure the negotiation policy so the storefront returns accept, counter, or exit decisions across price, payment requirements, and the settlement terms your deployment supports.
• Settle. Use Alkahest-backed escrow for accepted commitments, and verify the on-chain obligation before you provision.
• Provision. Connect KVM VM provisioning with SSH credential handoff for the shipped delivery path.
• Operate. Surface lease status, delivery evidence, recovery paths, and settlement state.

Reachability is your call too: ordinary public endpoints, or an optional ZeroTier overlay for private, member-authorized access.

Throughout, the split holds. SCM runs the market workflow; your infrastructure delivers the machine. The marketplace never becomes your operator.

What To Try

A seller or operator can evaluate SCM in steps:

• Inspect the storefront runtime in the repository.
• Follow the seller quickstart.
• Connect a test backend for the KVM VM path.
• Run a buyer negotiation against a test storefront and watch your policy decide.
• Decide whether deterministic, custom, or a Puffer-trained reinforcement learning policy fits your pricing.

Try The Seller Flow

• Explore the repository
• Follow the seller quickstart
• Add VM reachability with FRP
• Scope a seller deployment or pilot

Your infrastructure. Your policy. Your market.

Define the offer. Set the policy. Confirm the commitment. Deliver the machine.

Next, the design patterns underneath all of this: what belongs to the market, what belongs to participants, and what stays specific to the resource.