Actors

The Oyster Isolated Instance protocol involves interactions between the following set of entities:

Provider (or Operator):

The entity that provides computational resources in the network by provisioning enclaves for Users and ensuring its ongoing availability. Providers stake Tokens to prove their commitment to maintaining the enclave's operational status. The compute resources for running the enclave are currently provisioned and destroyed on-demand, so it scales practically indefinitely at no ongoing cost (apart from the control plane itself) to the operators.

User:

The entity which supplies the EIF to Providers and pays them to run it in an enclave. It may be the developer of a web service or protocol, a community member or any individual who would like to deploy an application over a cloud instance. The User can also be a smart contract like a multisig or DAO governance contract.

Users create Jobs on the Marketplace by supplying parameters like the preferred Instance Type and region, price they are willing to pay, URL of the enclave image etc. They retain sole access to manage various aspects of the Job. They are responsible for ensuring that the Escrow has a high enough token balance and that the Job pays a high enough price. Otherwise, the Operator is free to stop the Job and terminate the deployed enclave.

Auditor:

The entity who is responsible for monitoring the operational status of enclaves. Auditors are tasked with sending requests to enclaves and verifying their responses to ensure they are active and functioning correctly. They play a critical role in ensuring integrity and fault tolerance in the Oyster network.