Actors and Roles

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.

Role	What it does	What it’s paid for
Publisher	Uploads data or a Compute Artifact. Sets the access rules and price. Can be a data owner, a model developer, or a dApp itself.	Receives the price it set when its data or artifact is used
Retriever	Requests access to data, or to a computation’s output. Receives only what the contract explicitly permits.	Pays the contracted fee in PALI
Guardian	Coordinates protocol execution, holds a decryption key share, enforces the contract’s conditions and reviews disclosure requests. Byzantine fault tolerant as a group.	Earns a share of the threshold decryption fee
Compute node	Executes the computation itself, in the execution mode the contract specifies: trusted or TEE (Intel TDX, on Guardians with the hardware) today, SMPC and FHE on the roadmap. Also called a Calculator in the SDK and on palliora.org.	Earns a compute fee for each result
Verifier	Attests that inputs and outputs meet the contract’s own tests. A majority verdict is binding; a minority that disagrees loses its fee.	Earns a fee for each result it verifies
Validator	Runs the coordination ledger: orders transactions and maintains state.	Transaction fees plus staking rewards

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.