been sitting with the node architecture for a couple days now and the part that actualy clicked is how deliberately uneven it is by design....
heres the mechanic. full nodes maintain the ledger, run CometBFT consensus, verify TEE attestations and ZKML proofs, and manage payment settlement. they run on commodity hardware, no GPUs required, and never touch user data directly. inference nodes are the opposite - stateless GPU workers that actualy execute models and return results straight to users....
two roles.zero overlap.
what i think most people miss is that this split is what keeps the network decentralized at all. if every node needed a GPU, the validator set shrinks to whoever can afford that hardware. keeping full nodes on commodity machines means consensus stays open while only the inference layer demands specialized gear....
i actualy like that the heaviest compute work and the trust-critical work are handled by completely different machines. that separation feels deliberate rather than accidental....
but i wont pretend hardware heterogeneity solves decentralization by itself. GPU inference nodes still concentrate around whoever has cheap power and hardware access, even if validators dont need to....
ran a validator on commodity hardware once for a different chain and learned fast how much that lowers the barrier to actually participating.
what i still cant resolve is whether theres a minimum stake or hardware bar for inference nodes specifically, separate from whatever full nodes need to register??
