Why Miner Account Transfer Market Matters

Secure trading tool

Spex Miner Account Transfer Market is not only a marketplace to help increase liquidity among Storage Providers, but also a useful functional tool to provide solid security solutions for SPs to implement trustless account trading.

There exists a security risk when Storage Providers agree to transfer their accounts off-chain. Specifically, there is a potential threat of malicious acts due to the separation of beneficiary address availability and owner address ownership, in other words, the beneficiary address and owner address could be sent to two different parties respectively. The scenario could be as follows:

After Sender A first broadcasts the message of transferring account ownership, while this transaction is waiting in the mempool to be packed, Sender A immediately makes another transaction with a higher gas fee to transfer the beneficiary address to a different entity. At this point, the first account ownership transfer has not yet been completed and the ownership still belongs to A. As such, A is still able to conduct that transaction. And the second transaction (the beneficiary address transaction) will be prioritized for processing since it has a higher gas fee and is made around the same time. Therefore, there will be a fraud loss to the receiver/buyer, since the account has no control over the beneficiary which means no control over money in the account. Therefore, there will be a problem of trust. Both seller and buyer won’t be willing to be the first ones to send their property first since they need to make the trust assumption and hope the counterparty won't breach the contract.

The atomicity, security, and trustlessness built into the SPex platform provide robust protections against such exploitation.

The atomicity feature of SPex ensures that transactions will only execute when all terms are met to protect the interests of both trading parties. This means that Sender A has to confirm the completion of transferring both the account ownership and beneficiary before the money paid by the Receiver can be transferred to Sender A.

Moreover, with atomicity, Sender A does not have to worry that the Receiver will fail to pay the amount after gaining control of the account. Atomic transactions guarantee that either all steps will complete successfully or the entire transaction will revert. There is no possibility of the Receiver obtaining the account ownership without paying the required amount.

The key benefits of atomicity are:

1) It prevents partial completion of transactions where one party gains value while the other does not. Both parties either gain value simultaneously or no changes are made.

2) It provides security assurances to both trading parties as there are no concerns of exploitation or unfair gains. All terms of the agreement must be fulfilled for any transfers or payments to take effect.

3) It simplifies the transfer process as there is no need to build in fail-safes or refund mechanisms to handle scenarios where only parts of a transaction are completed. Atomic all-or-nothing execution avoids these complications.

In summary, the atomicity mechanism on SPex ensures the security and fairness of all off-chain account transfers between Storage Providers. When transactions can either fully complete or wholly revert, trust between participants is enhanced, and the likelihood of malicious actions is minimized.

SPex as a necessary platform provides risk mitigation to SPs while they conduct any transferring of accounts either privately or publicly.

Optimize SPs Capital efficiency

The 180-day lock-up period for Filecoin storage provider rewards ensures long-term network alignment but reduces capital efficiency, especially when computing power drops to zero though part of the reward remains locked. SPex resolves this by allowing storage providers to trade accounts with those willing to bear the time cost, unlocking rewards immediately.

Based on our preliminary findings, 484 accounts have run out of computing power but are still waiting for rewards to be unlocked, bringing the total to as much as 591,591 FIL.

Each account has an average of 1,227 FIL locked and this is increasing as the Filecoin ecosystem grows.

With SPex, it can be easily solved. SPs can utilize this marketplace to trade their accounts and receive their reward immediately without waiting.

Again, with the atomicity, the transfer will be secured, the buyer will be sure that the account and money will be distributed to them, and the seller will receive the payment immediately after selling. Moreover, the seller will utilize this payment that the original may receive months after to reinvest right now, optimizing the capital efficiency and increasing the market vitality and liquidity.

Solve ID Abuse

Since creating an account/ID is free, ID abuse has emerged as a serious problem. A large number of abused account creations burdens the entire network by increasing the cost of creating IDs for later participants.

Research shows that 516,000 Miner IDs have been created but only 3,800 are active. Actual ID usage is a mere 0.7%. ID creation abuse continues, with the actual usage of only 2% for the past two months (125 active Miner IDs out of 6,000 newly created).

SPex provides better utilization of SP resources and avoids network burden from ID overuse by effectively recycling idle IDs to keep the network healthy. Moreover, it provides new SPs the opportunity to choose an account ID they prefer.

Special Accounts Selection

The SPex Miner Account Market allows SPs to realize the monetary value of special or reputable IDs. Especially when new SPs join, they may wish to obtain a meaningful or reputable ID. SPex provides a marketplace for them to acquire special IDs, such as f066666, f088888, or even very old 4-digit IDs that demonstrate scarcity value. These special IDs are like NFTs that SPs can trade, or even bid on when later the auction market launches.

Summary

Overall, the Miner account market provides the atomicity to enable the secure and trustless online miner properties transfer. Moreover providing the liquidity solution, SPex optimizes SPs' capital efficiency. Recycling IDs will also help solve the abuse ID creation issue. Last, the market grants the special IDs scarcity value, allowing the trade of special IDs as NFT.