fluffy9/instaplot

a decentralized SaaS for generating Chia plots on the Akash network

Instaplot

a decentralized SaaS for generating Chia plots on the Akash network

Why

I think these two technologies complement each other very well.

Chia is a blockchain based on Proof of Space and Time. You farm it by first generating "plots". Then you store these plots on your hard drive and run the farming software to win coins (which is basically a lottery ticket until pooling is available). Although farming plots is very easy and lightweight, filling your hard drive with the plots can be a very intensive process. To optimize potential rewards, you need to fill your drives quickly so that you have more plots than anyone else. To fill your drives quickly, you need:

1. The hardware to generate the plot files faster.
2. Multiple machines so you can plot in parallel.
3. To spend as little as possible in order to increase the chances that you'll make a return on your investment.

You could buy the hardware outright, but that's a huge investment that not everyone can or should make.

The big cloud platforms (AWS, GCP) will have the hardware you want, enough of them, and the prices look ok on the surface. The hidden cost here is bandwidth, which may cost you 5-10 dollars alone.

You could purchase from another plot generating SaaS. Usually that would be run by someone who has made a large investment in hardware, but they may still not have enough to plot many plots in parallel.

Akash network is a decentralized cloud platform. Anyone can provide their own hardware to the network and receive income. In theory, it should have hardware you want in large quantity and at affordable prices (currently they aren't charging for bandwidth at least). We'll soon figure out if that's currently the case, or at least drive some more adoption. 😁

Architecture

There were some difficulties faced in this project so I had to make some adjustments to the plan. The main issue being that there are currently no providers on the network with the storage capacity to generate full Chia plots (need around 250gb storage to generate a 100gb plot). Instead, this project will only generate test plots, which are much faster and require very little space. Those are completely useless however.

Autoplotter

The autoplotter_base image contains nginx, the MadMax plotter for plotting, chiapos for verification, npm and nodejs. The autoplotter image can be seen in the dockerfile. Emails are sent using Postmark in nodejs

This server generates a single plot, verifies that the plot is valid, and sends an email with the link to the file after it's successfully completed generating. It is able to restart the plotting process if the plot fails to generate or if the plot ends up being invalid. It will only re-attempt once.

Coming soon: Uploading plots directly to Sia Skynet after generation.

Installation

1. First you will need an Akash wallet and some tokens.
2. You will need your own Postmark account and API token for the emails. Replace the environment variables in the Instaplot deploy.yaml with your own
3. To make deployment easier, use this UI for interacting with Akash
4. Create a new deployment
5. Copy and paste the deploy.yaml content into the text area
6. Click the submit button. Assuming you've got enough tokens, it should continue without error
7. You should hopefully receive bids on your deployment. Choose one to accept and create a lease