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A Compute Contract involves six roles. Each one is incentivized separately, and each one is independently verifiable: no role has to trust another role’s good intentions, only the contract and the protocol enforcing it.
Publisher and Retriever are the two transacting parties. In the Guardian network, Guardians coordinate and hold key shares, compute nodes run the computation and verifiers check the result; one physical node can play several roles. Validators are a separate track that orders transactions and finalizes the coordination ledger.Publisher and Retriever are the two transacting parties. In the Guardian network, Guardians coordinate and hold key shares, compute nodes run the computation and verifiers check the result; one physical node can play several roles. Validators are a separate track that orders transactions and finalizes the coordination ledger.
A single physical node is often more than one of these roles at once. A Guardian node, in particular, is an umbrella: the same node can act as a standard Guardian, a compute node, and a Verifier, depending on what a given contract asks it to do and how its operator has configured it.

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Publisher and Retriever

Publisher and Retriever are the two sides of a data or compute transaction. The Publisher decides what’s shared and sets a price; the Retriever pays that price to get access. Neither has to trust the other directly: the contract and the Guardian network that enforces it stand in between.

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Guardian, compute node, verifier

These three roles are what actually make a Compute Contract execute safely. See Guardian for how the Guardian role works, and Confidential Compute for what a compute node guarantees in each execution mode. A Guardian must stake at least a minimum amount of PALI to join the network in this capacity.

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Validator

Validators are a separate track from the Guardian, compute node and verifier set: they secure the coordination ledger rather than taking part in any individual compute contract. See Validator.

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Where to go next

Building something that plays one of these roles (most commonly Publisher, Retriever, or Guardian) starts at Quickstart. Running infrastructure (Guardian or Validator) starts at Participate.