Introduction to providers
Providers are the backbone of the Chromia ecosystem. A provider is a person or organization responsible for nodes, which are physical or virtual instances of computing power.
Chromia acquires node capacity from providers. Nodes run by providers produce blocks, thus enabling dapps to run.
The following are the roles on the network:
| Provider role | Permitted actions |
|---|---|
| Dapp Provider (DP) | Can deploy dapps and add nodes that replicates blockchains (replica) (default). |
| System Provider (SP) | Governance of the system chains. Can add node to the system cluster. |
| Node Provider (NP) | Can add block builder nodes. |
Providers together decide on events on the network. Voter sets contain the list of providers that can vote on proposals, and all the significant changes are done by voting.
A system provider can do some operations directly on the network, such as creating a cluster, but considerable changes require consensus by voting. For example, providers can upgrade a node provider to a system provider if a super-majority (greater than or equal to ⅔) of providers vote in favor of the proposal to approve it.
Providers have two types of key pairs. The first is the provider key pair, which providers use to sign transactions and proposals on the network. The second is the node key pair, which the consensus algorithm uses to sign blocks between its peers. All the nodes in the network have their unique key pair.
To manage nodes, you need to install Postchain Management Console (PMC) CLI. For information about installing PMC CLI, see Install the PMC CLI topic.