# How Earnings Work

Understand how you earn money by contributing compute

## Overview

When your device runs as a Fabric node, it automatically picks up and executes jobs from the network. You earn money for each successfully completed job.

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## Earning Flow

**Your device goes online:** After enrollment, your node connects to the Fabric backend  
**Jobs are assigned:** When a matching job is available, it's sent to your device  
**Execution:** Your device runs the workload in a sandboxed environment  
**Verification:** On completion, a Proof of Execution is generated  
**Credit:** Your account is credited for the completed job

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## Workload Types

Your device can earn from various workload types:

- **Audio Processing:** Speech transcription, language detection  
- **Image Processing:** Image classification, object detection  
- **Web Crawling:** Website crawling for AI assistants  
- **ML Pipeline Jobs:** Model training, preprocessing, inference  
- **Compute Workloads:** Scientific computing, simulations

Earnings vary by workload type and complexity.

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## Viewing Your Earnings

Open the Fabric Agent on your device  
Go to the Dashboard tab  
View your current balance and earnings history  
Or log in to fabric.carmel.so to see:

- Total lifetime earnings  
- Pending balance  
- Payout history  
- Per-job breakdown

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## Requesting a Payout

Once your balance reaches the minimum threshold:

Go to fabric.carmel.so  
Navigate to Settings → Payouts  
Click "Request Payout"  
If first time: Complete Stripe Connect onboarding  
Payout is initiated  
**Stripe Connect onboarding includes:**

- Verifying your identity  
- Connecting a bank account  
- Tax information (for US providers)

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## Payout Timing

- Payouts are processed via Stripe Connect  
- Typical transfer time: 2-5 business days  
- Timing depends on your bank and country

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## Factors Affecting Earnings

**Hardware capabilities:**
- Faster hardware completes more jobs  
- GPUs can handle inference/training workloads  
- More RAM allows larger jobs

**Uptime:**
- Nodes that are online more often get more jobs  
- Use the daemon/service to run 24/7

**Network demand:**
- Earnings vary based on job availability  
- More enterprises using Fabric = more jobs

**Job matching:**
- Jobs are matched based on hardware requirements  
- Having a GPU opens access to more job types

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## Tax Considerations

Earnings from Fabric may be taxable income. You are responsible for:

- Reporting earnings to tax authorities  
- Paying applicable taxes  
- Maintaining records of payouts

Stripe provides tax documents (1099 in the US) for earnings above certain thresholds.

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## Privacy

Your identity is protected:

- Enterprises only see an anonymized node ID  
- Your personal information is never shared with job submitters  
- The backend tracks device IDs internally for payment purposes only