Monitor SPs for low wallet balance

[BigLep]

Done Criteria

SP Support has a way to easily see (and ideally be notified) if an SP haw a low balance in their wallet.

Why Important

If wallet balance gets to low, they will fail to be able to pay the gas for adding pieces, proofs, etc. If would be ideal to avoid having customer impact by notifying the SP and/or removing them from the approval list until their wallet balance has increased.

Notes

1. The mechanism for doing this needs to be designed (e.g., use dealbot or some other solution)
2. We saw an instance of this in mainnet pre GA in https://filecoinproject.slack.com/archives/C08TVNKJV7C/p1769512423207409

[juliangruber]

Is it not the SP's individual responsibility to monitor this? Or at least would be a Curio issue, not a FS issue?

[BigLep]

Is it not the SP's individual responsibility to monitor this? Or at least would be a Curio issue, not a FS issue?

Yes, I agree SP's should monitor this. But at the end of the day, a user is interfacing with FOC, and if FOC has SPs in its approved list who are knowingly going to fail, it's a bad day for FOC users and a bad look for FOC. Helping ensure FOC users have a good experience would be the motivation for adding some central monitoring here.

[juliangruber]

Alternatively, SPs should only get rewarded if they have enough funds to perform the services. Isn't incentive structures the way to solve this in a decentralized fashion?

[rjan90]

But at the end of the day, a user is interfacing with FOC, and if FOC has SPs in its approved list who are knowingly going to fail, it's a bad day for FOC users and a bad look for FOC. Helping ensure FOC users have a good experience would be the motivation for adding some central monitoring here.

Alternatively, SPs should only get rewarded if they have enough funds to perform the services. Isn't incentive structures the way to solve this in a decentralized fashion?

Monitoring SPs for low wallet balance is mostly a calibnet pain point, since proving is a lot faster (12 times per day), and the average gas fee for invoking a calibnet contract is ~170x higher than fees on mainnet (due to Calibnet economics and lack of diversity of SPs). At the end of the day, the incentive to keep your Calibnet SP at a prod level is lower then on Mainnet.

On Mainnet with real money, this will sort itself out due to there being an incentive to always submit your proofs.

[BigLep]

Monitoring SPs for low wallet balance is mostly a calibnet pain point ... On Mainnet with real money, this will sort itself out...

Good and valid points

Isn't incentive structures the way to solve this in a decentralized fashion?

I agree that having the incentives right is critical.

And I'm fine to say that this particular issue is not worth prioritizing anytime soon (or maybe ever).

That said, I do want to make sure that we stay user-focused/obsessed in general and I don't think incentives get us there alone. My worry is that incentive structures alone don't always yield the reliable/dependable user experience we want—there can be a gap between 'economically rational' and 'delightful to use' and I'm generally up for doing the steps to get there.