Runtime Providers

Phase I — Spawn-managed

Spawn selects known compute providers/clouds and pins deterministic environments. Best for debugging, measuring costs, and controlling early failure modes.

Phase II — Approved providers

A small set of vetted third-party providers can execute jobs. Add:

• provider identity;
• qualification benchmark;
• bond;
• reliability history;
• failover;
• deterministic image/runtime requirements;
• payment-after-finality.

Phase III — Open competitive marketplace

Qualified providers bid on explicit jobs. Selection can optimize price subject to latency/reliability/hardware/security constraints.

The marketplace should reduce costs and remove Spawn as the permanent compute bottleneck.

Critical rule

Provider competition does not replace verification. The cheapest provider still produces only a candidate computation until verification/finality accepts it.