Problem Statement
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are fundamental to modern cloud, SaaS, API, and web3 infrastructure contracts. Organizations pay substantial premiums for service availability guarantees, typically measured in uptime percentages such as 99.9% ("three nines") or 99.99% ("four nines").
Despite their commercial prevalence, traditional SLA enforcement mechanisms suffer from structural deficiencies that favor providers over customers.
The Flaws of Traditional SLAs
1. Provider-Controlled Telemetry
In almost all conventional cloud agreements, uptime measurement is conducted internally by the provider's own observability stack or public status dashboard. When outages occur:
- Providers often define downtime narrowly (e.g., total failure of all availability zones rather than customer-experienced error spikes or latency degradation).
- Customers bear the evidentiary burden of proving the service was unavailable.
- Status dashboards frequently lag behind real-world outages or fail to report localized degradations.
2. Discretionary and Post-Hoc Compensation
Even when an outage is conceded:
- Compensation is rarely automated; customers must file manual support tickets within strict claim windows (e.g., within 30 days).
- Penalties are almost universally paid in non-fungible future service credits rather than real monetary compensation or liquid assets.
- Small and medium customers frequently forgo claims because the administrative overhead of disputing an outage exceeds the value of the credit voucher.
3. Credit and Execution Risk
A service credit from a struggling, chronically unreliable, or insolvent provider offers no real risk mitigation. If a mission-critical dependency collapses during a market event, a customer suffering downstream losses cannot recoup damages from a future service discount.
The SLASettle Solution
SLASettle replaces bilateral trust and post-incident arbitration with automated smart contracts on Stellar Soroban:
| Traditional SLA | SLASettle Protocol |
|---|---|
| Commitment | Paper contract or terms of service |
| Telemetry | Self-reported by service provider |
| Dispute Resolution | Customer support claim tickets and review |
| Compensation | Future service credits (subject to review) |
| Execution | Discretionary, manual payment |
Scope and Intentional Boundaries
SLASettle is designed specifically for objective, verifiable binary health criteria (such as HTTP endpoint availability, RPC reachability, or block production heartbeats).
It is intentionally not:
- A subjective dispute arbitration platform.
- A private or non-transparent monitoring agent.
- A guarantee against network partition anomalies between disparate internet backbones (addressed via multi-watcher geographical distribution and quorum requirements).