Build on Singula

There are two ways to sell access to the network. The difference is who ends up holding the list of customers.

Reselling versus building

Reselling means keeping a customer list and handing out access from your own account. Your buyers’ privacy ends at you, and yours ends at your provider. You become the party that knows who connected and when.

Building means your customer connects to the network themselves, and you supply a device and an interface. You hold no session list, because your server never opens the sessions.

The second works because an Orbit is not tied to an account. Entitlement is shown with a signature or a membership proof, and a device can produce either on its own.

The device as the subscriber

The idea is simple: the key lives on the device, and the device is the subscriber.

What a device can do without you:

• Buy an Orbit. mintWithPermit takes an EIP-712 intent and an ERC-20 permit, and GasStation sends the transaction. The device needs no ETH.
• Activate it and join the anonymity set. activateWithSignature, relayed the same way, carries the device’s identity commitment and registers it in the same transaction. The 30 days start then, not at purchase.
• Open sessions with permissions it takes by proof of membership, naming no wallet to anyone, and renew them as they run.

You take part in none of these steps. Traffic does not pass through you, sessions are not held against you, and there is no record joining a device to its traffic.

Shipping a device with an Orbit

Before activation the NFT transfers freely. Buy it to your own wallet, send it to the device’s address, and let the device activate it on first use. The thirty days then start with the buyer, not on your shelf.

One limit to keep in mind: at most ten unactivated Orbits per address, on your wallet and on the recipient’s. A batch has to be spread across wallets or handed out promptly.

What shapes the product

Network-wide rules, the same at every operator:

• Concurrent sessions per Orbit — one per slot, counted across the whole federation, on both tiers. An Orbit has 1 to 5 slots, each costing one price.
• One source per session. A router that shares its connection with several machines is still one source, because the router is what goes out. Five phones each with their own session need an Orbit with five slots.

And one piece of arithmetic before you set a price: an Orbit slot pays for one node-second per second. A device that goes out through two hops needs two slots: a route holds one per hop.

What stays with you

Keeping the key safe. The secret lives on the device, and whoever extracts it has the Orbit. That is a hardware problem, and it is yours.

Recovery. There are no accounts, so there is nothing to recover. A device lost with its key is a lost Orbit.

Updates. The client on the device is yours to maintain. circuitVersion for the anonymous tier is published on chain, and a client with older proving artifacts stops being accepted. Contract addresses change too, which is why a client should read them from SingulaProtocol rather than build in a list of its own.

Choosing a tier. The wallet tier is simpler, and the Control Plane knows the address. The anonymous tier hides it, at the price of a proof for each permission, one per slot each window. Who sees what sets out the difference.