Snark Market

This page explains how to set up a provider for the Curio Snark Market (experimental).

⚠️ Experimental Feature in Testing This feature is currently experimental and under active testing. Interfaces, behaviors, and requirements may change without notice.

🔧 What is the Snark Market?

The Snark Market allows any Curio node — including Storage Providers with spare sealing/GPU capacity — to sell or buy proof computation in exchange for FIL. It is designed for GPU nodes that want to participate in Filecoin proof offloading, enabling a decentralized proof marketplace.

This guide will walk you through how to:

  • Enable proof selling on GPU nodes

  • Set up the pricing and wallet

  • See activity and settlement stats in the UI

⚙️ Prerequisites

Before enabling the Snark Market on your node:

⚙️ System Requirements

  • Modern NVIDIA GPU (recommended 12GB+ VRAM)

  • 70GB base system RAM + ~220 GB Per GPU

    • Lower amount is acceptable, but you won't be able to use the much faster SupraSeal C2 feature Meaning ~10mins/proof instead of 2.

  • Curio from main branch (Snark Market support is not yet part of a release)

  • FIL balance on Mainnet

🚀 Setup Instructions

0. (Optional/Recommended) Benchmark your system

You can skip most of the complex setup and learn how your hardware performs with lotus-bench

1. Install Curio

First, install dependencies (as per the main install guide):

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config libssl-dev curl git clang cmake golang

Then, build Curio from the Main branch:

git pull
git submodule update
make clean
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native -g" FFI_BUILD_FROM_SOURCE=1 FFI_USE_CUDA_SUPRASEAL=1 make clean build all
sudo make install

Run basic setup.

  • If needed set database variables (defaults work with local YugabyteDB install) CURIO_DB_NAME, CURIO_DB_USER, CURIO_DB_HOST (can be a comma separated list of tserver IPs, one is also ok), CURIO_DB_PASSWORD

  • Ensure your lotus-node is running

  • Run curio guided-setup -> select Setup non-Storage Provider cluster

  • Create empty snark-provider configuration layer -> echo | curio config create --title snark-provider

After all is done, setup, enable and start the curio service

  • For CURIO_LAYERS use gui,snark-provider

🛠️ Step-by-step Setup

2. Enable the Market in Layer Configuration

Ensure you're not running on a WindowPoSt node. This is only supported on GPU-based PoRep or Snap nodes. In the Web UI:

  1. Go to Overview → Configuration, select the snark-provider if created previously

  2. Find the Subsystems section

  3. Set EnableProofShare to true

  4. Save and restart the node

Enable PROOFSHARE toggle in configuration
Enable PROOFSHARE from the configuration layer

3. Configure Provider Settings

Navigate to Snark Market in the sidebar. Under Provider Settings:

  • Enable the settings checkbox

  • Create a new f1 wallet (do not reuse existing wallet) Use lotus wallet new secp256k1 in the CLI ⚠️ Please note: This wallet can be changed later, but it is tricky

  • Set Price (FIL/p) to 0.005 (recommended for testing)

    • Single proof (p) should take roughly two minutes to compute, your price should be calculated based on how many proofs per hour per GPU you expect to compute and your cost to run the GPU. The snark marketplace automatically adjusts the market price to match supply to demand.

  • Click Update Settings

Snark Wallet Setup
Snark Market provider settings with wallet and price configured

4. Verify Your Node

Once you've configured the provider settings:

  • Your node will automatically begin queueing proof work

  • The dashboard will update with:

    • Active Asks

    • SNARK Queue

    • Payment Summaries

    • Recent Settlements

  • You can also view the global public dashboard

Snark Market Dashboard
Overview showing queue, asks, settlements, and active proofs

🪙 Wallet Setup Notes

  • Create a new f1 address and fund it (e.g. 0.1 FIL)

  • This wallet receives SNARK proof rewards

  • Ensure the wallet remains unlocked

📈 Pricing & Payments

  • Price is set per ~130M proof constraints (default granularity)

  • Suggested starting point price: 0.005 FIL

  • Settlements occur automatically when network gas fee to settle is less than 0.2% of the balance to settle

🧪 Notes

  • Your provider must complete 50 challenge proofs per "work-slot"

  • Each "work-slot" is allows for either one "work ask" in the market - listing of readiness to take on work on one proof for some minimum price, or one "assigned proof" which is being actively worked on.

  • Number of work slots is calculated by dividing "completed challenge proofs" by 50

  • Failure to complete assigned work within the deadline reduces "completed challenge proofs" balance by 50 proofs

  • Withdrawing an ask from the market (i.e. in order to adjust ask price) reduces "completed challenge proofs" balance by 1 proof

  • "challenge proofs" are gained only by completing unpaid challenge proofs, which are assigned when attempting to create a work ask while the challenge balance is too low.

  • The service may assign real proofs as challenges, but only if they were failed by other providers and no other provider can be found who can take the payment

  • Proofs must complete within 45 minutes, or your node will lose its active slot and need to re-earn trust

  • The system is fault-tolerant and retries failed work automatically

    • You may be assigned retry proofs which come with non-current, potentially lower than current, still higher than your minimum price per proof.

  • You can scale horizontally by running more GPU workers with the same setup

Let us know on Slack if you’re testing #fil-curio-help — we’ll be actively monitoring for feedback and performance 🚀

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