Operational policy
What hosts and renters should expect.
These rules keep the beta useful while payments, formal verification, and stronger multi-tenant routing are still being built.
Access
SSH key only
Images
3
GPU
MLX OK
Billing
Disabled
Host Requirements
A Mac should be stable before it accepts rentals.
| Dedicated use | The host should not be used for unrelated heavy workloads while rented. |
|---|---|
| Power and thermals | Keep the Mac plugged in, awake, ventilated, and on a stable network. |
| Installer freshness | Rerun the hosted installer after every production host-agent release. |
| Images | At minimum, the listed image should pull, clone, boot, accept the renter key, and pass SSH probe. |
| GPU status | The M3 host has passed workload-level MLX GPU matmul and tiny MLX-LM llama generation checks on all listed images. New hosts or images should stay in maintenance until they pass the same probe. |
| Maintenance | Pause rentals before updates or troubleshooting. Existing active rentals should be destroyed or handed off first. |
Renter Rules
Use the VM as an isolated, short-lived Mac environment.
| SSH | Instances use generated key files. No password is set. |
|---|---|
| Data | Do not put sensitive secrets or irreplaceable data on beta hosts. Encrypt anything sensitive before upload. |
| Lifecycle | Stop pauses the VM. Destroy permanently deletes the VM and its local disk. |
| Abuse | No spam, credential attacks, malware, scanning, denial-of-service traffic, or illegal workloads. |
| Payments | Payments are not enabled yet; rentals are beta/free and may be reset during platform work. |
Host States
A visible host is not always rentable.
| State | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Rentable | The host is heartbeating, accepting bookings, and should provision new rentals. |
| Maintenance | The host is online but intentionally paused for upgrades, validation, or troubleshooting. |
| Offline | The host has not heartbeated recently and cannot receive rentals. |