Payouts

You set your payout address once, signed with your account key, and change it later the same way. With ghost:
```
ghost provider set-payout-address <MMX_ADDRESS>
```
or on the website’s Provider › Payouts page, under Payout address (see The payout address).
To see your balance, run:
```
ghost provider balance
```
To request a payout, run the command below or use the website’s Provider › Payouts (/provider/payouts):
```
ghost provider payout
```
To follow its state, run:
```
ghost provider payouts
```

The balance

ghost provider balance shows what you earned and has not been paid out yet, what you can pay out today, what is still held, what is on its way, and your payout address.

The website’s provider pages show them as Pending (not available yet), Available and their Total, and On the way on Payouts.
Provider › Earnings (/provider/earnings) totals what your hosts earned per UTC day or month: for rentals, for local backups, the SLA credits your hosts funded, and the rest.

When earnings can be paid out

Earnings become available after the 1-, 5-, or 20-day hold that goes with the VM’s accepted SLA tier, its liability period (see SLA tiers).

An unresolved billable outage on one of your hosts, whose SLA credits are not final yet, blocks payouts until they are.
You can cancel a queued payout that has not reached signed submission, to settle those credits.
A negative balance, from SLA credits debited below zero, blocks payouts until later earnings cover it.
When a renter’s account is closed, the SLA credit it had left at your hosts comes back to your balance, available at once: it was paid out of your earnings and was never spent.

The payout address

Every payout goes to your one payout address. Only a request signed with your account key can set or change it: ghost, the desktop app, or the website’s Payouts page, where Set the payout address (or Change the payout address) takes the address and the account key, as a file or a pasted line. The page checks that the key belongs to your account, signs the one request in the browser and forgets the key. A website session alone cannot set it, so a stolen website session cannot redirect your earnings. A payout that has not been signed yet follows a later change of address.

The amount

Without an amount, a payout pays out everything available. To pay out an exact smaller amount, add --amount-microusd. A payout takes from your earnings exactly what it pays.

How a payout is processed

The request returns at once, and Gigahost processes the payout without further action from you. Conversion uses the active MMX/USD rate when the transaction is prepared.

The payout list shows its state: queued, preparing, submitting, submitted, confirmed, under_review, action_required, or cancelled.

Gigahost stores one exact signed MMX transaction before broadcasting it, and broadcasts it again until the MMX node knows it.
It settles the payout after six confirmations by default, once the chain shows that it paid your address the payout’s amount.
When the wallet may have sent a payment without reporting it, Gigahost looks for it on chain rather than sending it again.
A signed transaction that fails on chain, or expires without being included, ends the payout as action_required, and its amount can be requested again.
A confirmed transaction that does not pay the payout as prepared leaves it under_review, its amount still reserved, until an operator has checked it.

The number of pending payouts and the request frequency are limited. If the wallet or the rate is unavailable, Gigahost operators can pause payout processing.