4. Market participants

4.1 Node Operators

Node operators are the supply-side participants who contribute physical infrastructure to the network. The protocol is designed to be hardware-agnostic within the constraints of the models being served -- from enterprise-grade GPU clusters to smaller independent operators running commodity hardware.

Node operators earn revenue through pool participation: their committed capacity serves VPI inference requests, and they receive proportional rewards from the pool’s revenue stream.

4.2 Pool Curators

Pool curators occupy a distinct supply-side role -- they do not necessarily operate hardware, but they provide the coordination intelligence that transforms raw node capacity into reliable, production-grade inference pools.

Curators are responsible for:

• Selecting and admitting nodes that meet the pool’s quality requirements.
• Configuring and maintaining pool parameters.
• Monitoring pool health and managing node failures.
• Setting competitive pricing that attracts VPI demand while compensating node operators fairly. Pricing may be automated through oracle-driven price discovery as the network matures.

As the network scales, pool curation becomes an increasingly specialized function -- curators compete on the reliability, performance, and pricing of their pools, creating a market dynamic that drives quality upward.

4.3 VPI Minters and Owners

Demand-side participants acquire VPIs to access inference capacity. The protocol serves multiple demand profiles:

Application Developers: Teams building AI-powered products that require dedicated, reliable inference endpoints. VPIs offer guaranteed capacity without the operational burden of managing infrastructure directly.

Gateways and Resellers: Intermediaries that aggregate multiple VPIs and offer downstream inference services under their own brand. Gateways abstract the Synaptika protocol behind their own API, serving as distribution channels for the network’s capacity.

Financial Participants: Investors and funds that acquire VPIs as yield-generating assets. By leasing VPIs to active consumers, financial participants earn returns on their capital allocation without operating infrastructure or consuming inference directly. This model parallels real estate investment -- acquiring productive assets (VPIs) and earning yield through utilization.