Understanding Roles

Confidence Level:Reliable

People or organizations participating in the retrieval market perform different roles in the overall functioning of the market. Depending on which role or roles a given participant in the market wants to play, they'll have a minimum set of components they need to operate to perform that role.

Current Roles

For now there are five high level roles in the market.

• Retrieval Client - The person who wants to retrieve content
• Retrieval Provider/Miner - The person who will host content and provide it for retrieval
• Content Provider - A person who has content they are willing to pay to make available for retrieval
• Payment Provider - A person who will provide access to a payment system (i.e the Filecoin Chain + Payment Channels) via which people can pay for retrievals
• Marketplace Provider - The person who helps everyone else find each other
  • Helping clients find content
  • Helping retrieval providers advertise their content and prices
  • Helping content providers find retrieval providers to host their content

Laid out this way, roles are actually quite similar to a traditional marketplace: buyers, sellers, distributors, payment processors, and the market itself.

Decoupling And Building Out Roles

The development roadmap for roles has two primary goals:

• Decouple existing roles so that people can participate in the market while running way fewer retrieval market components, significantly lowering the barrier to entry
• Build out roles where the existing feature set is limited or missing.

Multiple Roles

Roles are helpful to distinguish high level functions in the retrieval market. However, just like in any market, an individual or organization may actually perform multiple roles. As an example, a MarketPlace Provider, usually a larger entity with likely lots of computer power, may also make an ideal Payments Provider.