How does Joule enable Kinesis Network?

Global, Pay-per-the-Second Billing

First, our platform provides a fully-managed, serverless compute cloud, with billing based on highly granular metering—down to the millisecond. For instance, if a customer’s workload runs for 2.32 seconds on a crowdsourced hardware and 4.19 seconds on a datacenter hardware, we meter usage down to the millisecond and compensate suppliers precisely for the time their hardware is utilized. Given the scale of some workloads, this often involves thousands of globally distributed machines. The coin’s primary utility is to facilitate these global micropayments instantly and frictionlessly.

Fungible Nature

Our product architecture is fully serverless, meaning applications run across a dynamic "cloud" rather than on specific, dedicated machines (as some other adjacent projects require). If a hardware instance goes down, our managed services detect the issue and immediately failover the workload to a healthy machine (that’s already warmed up and ready to go), ensuring seamless continuity of service from customers' POV. This fungible nature of underlying hardware (where any machine can replace another) makes the coin essential for compensating the owners of this continuously shifting, diverse hardware network.

Tight Integration with the Protocol

Furthermore, the coin is tightly coupled with the Kinesis protocol. At its core, the protocol enables the exchange of CPU/GPU time for JOULE coins in a trustless environment. All of our managed services (such as heartbeat monitoring, failover, capacity management, conversion of customer payments from USD to JOULE, load balancing, etc.) are built on top of this protocol. While managed services building on the protocol could theoretically operate without a coin, the protocol itself cannot, as the coin underpins its functionality.

Staking

A global trustless ecosystem requires financially motivated actors. Staking requirements work as security deposits, ensuring that all actors bring their A game or else they pay fines with their staked Joule coins.