The Common Service Price
Last updated
Last updated
The Service Price is the network-wide price that is paid out by winning Sylo Tickets. It is set for each Epoch, and all Sylo Nodes receive the same payout from winning tickets.
Receiving peers are provided service through the Seeker Node to which they scan on the Stake Tree. Therefore, sending peers must be financially indifferent about which Node is used for services.
If Nodes were allowed to offer different service prices, then sending peers would have a financial incentive to ignore the Node assigned to them by the scan function, and instead send relay via the cheapest Node. By using the policy of “senders prefer the cheapest node”, receiving peers could determine which Nodes are likely to have messages for them by checking the sending price list, and receive relay. Similarly, the cheapest node would be incentivised to accept relays addressed to anyone, because they could reasonably assume that receiving peers will check in with them after looking at the service price listing.
This would result in work being allocated to Seeker Nodes out of proportion to the amount of stake they have - in turn, degrading the incentive structure that ensures the quality of the network overall. If holding more stake does not lead to more income, then stake has no economic value, and Seeker Nodes will ignore mechanisms that influence them by manipulating their staked tokens, such as stake redistribution.
Therefore, the Sylo Network requires a mechanism for setting the common service price that is paid for relay, that does not vary based on which Seeker Node does the work. This price is set by an auction mechanism, where Nodes make price offers into the auction in competition with one another.