Providers stake OXT to enter the Orchid marketplace. Through Orchid’s stake-weighted selection algorithm, users are randomly connected to providers proportionate to the amount of OXT staked by the provider; the larger the stake, the more likely a user is connected!

Orchid accounts are the center of Orchid’s “probabilistic rollup” nanopayment system, enabling a stream of tiny payments sent from the account owner to a provider for services. They’re built on two components: the layer 1 wallet address for funding the account, and the layer 2 Orchid identity for facilitating transactions.

Once an account is created, there are two elements necessary to send payments: the deposit, which determines the value of your account’s tickets, and the balance, which determines the amount of tickets available to spend.

The Orchid software is designed to use a custom VPN protocol, similar in scope to OpenVPN or WireGuard. The Orchid protocol is designed for high-performance networking and runs on top of WebRTC, a common web standard, widely used to transmit video and audio from inside browsers. The Orchid protocol allows users to request access to remote network resources and pay for these resources using cryptocurrencies via the Orchid nanopayments system.

The probabilistic nanopayment ecosystem is the foundation of the Orchid marketplace. Instead of sending funds for every unit of service and incurring processing fees on every transaction, Orchid accounts send lottery tickets to providers to achieve a low per-unit cost through consolidating transactions to fewer overall “payments”.

Probabilistic nanopayments allow users to directly pay for services (bandwidth, storage, API calls, etc.) at a much lower rate than traditional payment protocols.

The Orchid network uses a curated list of verified providers to match users with properly-configured provider nodes. This curation enables trust-free marketplace experience for users by assuring quality service is delivered by the provider nodes available in the market.