How Node Hour works

1 · Overview

Three layers, of which two exist.

• Measure. Provider rate cards are read through public APIs and normalised into one market per GPU class. Live. See the index page.
• Offchain trading. A terminal with a book, a tape, a chart and an order ticket, priced off the index. Live. Play money only.
• Settle and deliver. Escrow, proof of delivery, SSH access to a real machine. Not built. See §9.

Nothing on this site takes custody of anything, and no transaction is ever sent from your wallet.

2 · The index

Each market carries one measured number: the lowest on-demand price a provider publishes for a single card of that class, in dollars per GPU-hour.

It is refreshed on every page load, cached 60 seconds at the edge, and served stale for up to ten minutes if the provider is unreachable — a stale read is labelled stale rather than silently passed off as fresh. The terminal re-reads it every two minutes.

The full unnormalised provider response is published at /api/prices and rendered on the index page, including the SKUs we do not trade. The limits of the current construction — single source, unweighted, no history, floor rather than mid — are listed there too.

3 · Markets

One market per GPU class, quoted in USDC per GPU-hour: B200, H200, H100, A100, L40S, RTX 4090.

Vendors sell SKUs rather than classes. H100 SXM, H100 NVL and H100 PCIe are three products with three prices; each market maps to an ordered list of SKU patterns and takes the first that is quoted, so a class always resolves the same way. The SKU actually used is shown in the terminal header and on the index page.

Markets are long only. You can sell only what you hold, so a position is always backed by hours you bought. There is no shorting and no leverage — both require a counterparty who can lose, and there is no counterparty here.

4 · Test account

The terminal opens with $10,000 in play money and you can trade immediately — no wallet, no deposit, no faucet, no claim. The number is written into your browser's local storage.

Connecting a wallet moves that account under your address and carries an in-progress guest run across, so nothing you did before connecting is lost. It is also what will put you on the season table later.

Consequences worth knowing: the account lives on one browser on one device, clearing site data erases it, and it is not visible to us or to anyone else. Reset is a button on the Account card.

5 · Wallet session

Node Hour uses an injected EIP-1193 wallet — MetaMask, Rabby, Phantom's EVM side, anything that puts window.ethereum on the page.

Connecting does two things: it reads your address, and it asks you to sign one message with personal_sign. That signature is an off-chain proof that you control the address. It is not a transaction, it costs no gas, it grants no allowance, and it cannot move a token. The exact text you are asked to sign says so.

The site does not care which network you are on, because nothing is read from or written to a chain. The mainnet notice exists only because NODEH lives there.

6 · How fills work

A market order fills instantly at the current simulated mark, in full. There is no queue, no partial fill, no slippage against the displayed book and no rejection except for insufficient test balance or hours.

That is a simplification, and it flatters you: a real fill of any size walks the book and gets a worse average. Treat PnL here as directionally useful and nothing more.

7 · Fees

A 0.40% fee is charged on both sides of every offchain trade and deducted from your test balance. It is shown so the arithmetic of a strategy is realistic.

It is charged to nothing. No fee is collected, by anyone, anywhere. The figure exists to make the simulation honest about costs, not because a protocol is earning.

8 · What is simulated

Everything on the terminal except the index and your wallet address.

• The order book. Eleven levels each side, generated around the mark with a spread and random sizes. Nobody placed those orders.
• The tape. A trade printed roughly every second, side and size drawn at random. No one traded.
• The chart. Ninety-six one-minute candles, seeded deterministically so a reload does not reshuffle history, then extended live. The price is a mean-reverting random walk pulled toward the measured index.
• Offchain volume. The sum of simulated prints. It is labelled offchain volume wherever it appears and is never presented as protocol volume, notional or TVL.
• Your balance, positions and PnL. Arithmetic on play money in your browser.

In the interface, measured values are cyan and simulated values are amber. The colour is the rule, not decoration, and nothing is aggregated across it.

9 · What is not built

Stated plainly, because the gap between what a compute exchange shows and what it does is where this category usually goes wrong.

• No matching engine. There is no server maintaining a book. Your order never leaves the page.
• No settlement. No contract, no escrow, no chain. Nothing is deployed and there is no address to inspect, because there is nothing to inspect.
• No delivery. Buying an hour reserves no machine and grants no SSH. The redeem control in positions is marked not live and does nothing.
• No providers. Nobody has staked, listed capacity or been slashed. Zero GPU-hours have been delivered, and that number is zero rather than blank.
• No index history. Every read is live; nothing is stored yet.

Proof of delivery — establishing that a machine really served the hours it was paid for — is the genuinely hard problem in this space, and it is not solved by a paragraph in a whitepaper. When we have something, it will be a program you can read and transactions you can count.

10 · NODEH

NODEH is an ERC-20 on Ethereum. It pays for seasons and prizes on the terminal and votes on which GPU classes get a market. That is the complete list of what it does.

It is not a claim on revenue, a share, a governance right over anything but market listings, or a promise of return. There is no revenue to divide. Any protocol income and every buyback will be published with a link to the transaction on the token page, or not claimed at all.

11 · Risk and honesty

Nothing here is investment advice, and a offchain PnL is not evidence that a strategy works — fills are idealised, the book is invented and the sample is short.

The index is a real measurement of one vendor's asking price. It is not a benchmark, not audited, and not a substitute for a quote from a provider you are about to buy from.

If you find a number on this site whose label does not match what it is, that is a bug and we want to hear about it. It is the only kind of bug here that matters.

12 · Glossary

• GPU·h — one hour of one GPU of a given class. The unit everything is quoted in.
• Index — the measured on-demand price for a class. Cyan, everywhere.
• Mark — the simulated last traded price. Amber. Drifts around the index.
• Basis — how far the mark sits from the index, in percent. The only number tying the simulation to reality.
• SKU — the product a vendor actually sells, e.g. H100 NVL, as opposed to the class H100.
• Offchain — simulated. Not real money, not a real order, not a real fill.