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Billing and Payment

In Greenfield, users are required to pay two different types of fees:

  • Firstly, every transaction will require gas fees to pay the Greenfield validator to write the metadata on-chain as described in Gas and Fee part.
  • Secondly, the Storage Providers (SPs) charge the users for their storage service. Such payment also happens on the Greenfield.

The storage service fee will be charged on Greenfield in a steam payment style like Superfluid.

Storage Service Fee​

There are two kinds of storage service fees in Greenfield: object storage fee and data package fee.

For storage, every object stored on Greenfield is charged at the price calculated by size, replica numbers, a base price ratio, and other parameters. Once the object is stored, the total charge of storage will be mainly only related to time and the base price.

The storage fee calculation is:

Storage Fee = sum(ChargedSize) * (PrimaryStorePrice + SecondaryStorePrice*SecondarySPNumber) * (1+Validator Tax Rate) * ReserveTime

Users are granted a free, time-based quota for downloading data, with each bucket corresponding to a set of their objects. If the quota is exceeded, users can upgrade their data package to obtain an additional quota. The price for each data package is fixed for a certain period (unless the read price has been changed and the user takes some actions to reflect the price change), during which users will only be charged based on the amount of time they spend downloading and the package price. This charging scheme remains in effect until the user modifies their data package settings.

The download quota fee calculation is:

Download Quota Fee Fee = ChargedReadQuota * ReadPrice * (1 + Validator Tax Rate) * ReserveTime

Global Virtual Group Family & Global Virtual Group​

For storage fees, it will be not streamed to storage providers directly. It will be streamed to:

  • Global Virtual Group Family's virtual funding address for data package fee and primary sp's object storage fee
  • Global Virtual Group's virtual funding address for all secondary sp's object storage fee
  • Validator tax pool for extra tax fee (e.g. 1%), which will be used for rewarding data availability challenge submitters.

When storage providers want to get their income, they can withdraw from Global Virtual Group Family and Global Virtual Group they are in. The validator tax pool cannot be controlled via any private key, and is used for challenge reward.

Payment Account​

By default, the object owner's address will be used to pay for the objects it owns. But users can also create multiple "payment accounts" and associate objects to different payment accounts to pay for storage and bandwidth.

The address format of the payment account is the same as normal accounts. It's derived by the hash of the user address and payment account index. However, the payment accounts are only logical ones and only exist in the storage payment module. Users can deposit into, withdraw from, and query the balance of payment accounts on the Greenfield blockchain, but users cannot use payment accounts to perform staking or other on-chain transactions. Payment accounts can be set as "non-refundable". Users cannot withdraw funds from such payment accounts.

Downgraded service​

Once the payment accounts run out of BNB, the objects associated with these payment accounts will suffer from a downgraded service of downloading, i.e. the download speed and connection numbers will be limited. Once the fund is transferred to the payment accounts, the service quality can be resumed right away. If the service is not resumed for a long time, it is the SPs' discretionary decision to clear the data out, in a similar way to how SPs claim to stop services to certain objects. In such a case, the data may be gone from Greenfield completely.

danger

If users fail to renew their subscription on time, there is a risk of their stored data being permanently deleted.

Trust or Shift​

In Greenfield, there is trust between the users and the SPs for data download.

Since downloading bandwidth incurs additional fees and the download journal is not completely stored on the Greenfield blockchain, SPs offer an endpoint interface for users to access detailed logs and downloaders' signatures for download billing. If the users and the SPs cannot agree on the bill, users may just select another Primary SP.

For more tech details, please refer to the stream payment module design.