From nothing to a connection string.
Four steps and about two minutes. What you get back is an ordinary Redis URL — any client, any language, no library of ours anywhere near your code.
Put money on deposit
Rentals bill from a deposit held in the contract, not from your wallet directly. Open Account in the console, type an amount, and approve once.
The first deposit asks for two signatures: one that lets the market move your pay token at all, and one for the deposit itself. Every deposit after that is a single transaction.
The network holds a buffer of 24 hours against everything you have open, so it can keep billing without chasing you. That part of your deposit is not withdrawable while a rental is running — the rest always is.
Pick a node
Rent memory lists every node that is online and has room. The price is identical on all of them — it is the network index, not a bid — so the only things worth comparing are how much is free and which region it is in.
A node appears in this list only once its operator has staked, declared it, and started an agent on it. A node nobody is running is not offered.
Choose a size and a term
Size in mebibytes, term in hours. The page shows what it costs an hour, what it costs for the whole term, and how much deposit the network wants held against it.
- Smallest rental
- 1 GiB
- Largest rental
- 512 GiB
- Shortest term
- 1 hour
- Longest term
- 365 days
- A gibibyte for a month
- 720 GiB·hours
These are the launch settings. Every one of them lives in the on-chain registry and can be changed by a transaction, so the console reads them from there rather than from a build.
The transaction carries a price ceiling of the index plus two per cent. If the index moves between your click and the block, the rental is refused rather than opened at a price you did not see.
Connect
Within a few seconds the node’s agent reports where it put your memory, and a connection string appears against the rental on Account:
redis://:<password>@<host>:<port>
It is a plain Dragonfly instance speaking the Redis protocol. Point ioredis, redis-py, go-redis or redis-cli at it exactly as you would at anything else.
The password is derived, never stored, and handed only to the address the chain says bought the rental. Nobody else can ask for it.
How billing works
Once an hour the coordinator submits the minutes it actually vouched for and the contract moves the money. There is no invoice and nothing to pay: it comes out of the deposit as the hours pass.
Minutes a node failed never enter that sum. They are not refunded, because they were never billed.
Watch the runway on Account. If the deposit runs dry the network closes your rentals, and memory does not survive being closed — whatever was in it is gone.
Extending, closing, and what happens to the data
Extending pushes the end date out at the price the rental already carries. Closing early costs nothing extra — you are billed for the hours that passed and the rest of the deposit is free again.
Either way, when a rental ends the instance is destroyed. This is a cache, not storage: treat everything in it as something you can rebuild.
When a node fails
The network checks every live rental once a minute — that it answers, that its ceiling is still what you bought, and that it is really holding the bytes it was given. A run of failures takes the node off the line so it stops receiving new orders.
Your rental is not moved to another node. Close it and open a new one; you are not billed for the time it was down.