Lobstah Provider

Bundled provider plugin for the Lobstah distributed inference grid: an OpenAI-compatible model provider backed by a peer-to-peer pool of Apple Mac mini workers, with Ed25519-signed federated receipts as the credit/accounting layer.

Not to be confused with lobster, which is the unrelated workflow-shell agent tool. (Different ID, different concern, both very crustacean.)

What this is

• A model provider that openclaw can call like any other OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
• Under the hood, requests go to a lobstah-router running on the user's machine, which forwards to a peer worker (e.g. another Mac mini contributing compute) over the network.
• Workers sign a token-usage receipt for every request; the router validates and appends to a local ledger. Both ends accumulate a balance — earn credits by serving, spend by requesting.
• Streaming is supported (Server-Sent Events with the receipt embedded as an SSE comment line at tail).
• Strictly opt-in for both contributing and consuming. A worker only advertises itself when explicitly told to. A router only pulls peers from a tracker when the user explicitly syncs.

Architecture

                          (opt-in advertise)
worker  ──signed announce──► tracker  ◄──signed announce── worker
                              │
                              │ (opt-in sync)
                              ▼
                            peers.json
                              │
openclaw ──/v1/chat/...──► lobstah-router ──forwards──► picked worker
                              │                              │
                              │  ◄────signed receipt─────────┤
                              ▼                              ▼
                          local ledger                   local ledger

Setup (local-only, no tracker)

1. Build:

   pnpm install
   pnpm --filter "@lobstah/*" -r build
   

2. Generate an identity and start the router:

   node packages/lobstah-cli/dist/index.js keygen
   node packages/lobstah-cli/dist/index.js peers add <peer-pubkey> http://<peer-host>:17474
   node packages/lobstah-cli/dist/index.js router start
   

3. In openclaw, run openclaw onboard and pick "Lobstah grid". Accept the default base URL http://127.0.0.1:17475/v1. Any string for the API key works (the router does not check).

Setup (with public tracker — fully opt-in)

To discover peers from a tracker:

node packages/lobstah-cli/dist/index.js peers sync https://tracker.example.com

To advertise your own worker on a tracker (heartbeats every TTL/2; sends signed unannounce on shutdown):

node packages/lobstah-cli/dist/index.js worker start \
    --announce-to https://tracker.example.com \
    --announce-url http://your-public-host:17474 \
    --announce-label my-mac

To run a tracker yourself (anyone can; trackers are deliberately dumb):

node packages/lobstah-cli/dist/index.js tracker start --port 17476

The openclaw onboarding wizard asks about both opt-ins explicitly, defaulting to no for each.

Vendored packages

The grid runtime ships as seven small packages under packages/lobstah-*:

• @lobstah/protocol — Ed25519 identity, signed receipts + announcements (canonical JSON), Zod request schemas, replay-protection helpers
• @lobstah/ledger — append-only signed-receipt log + balance computation
• @lobstah/engine-ollama — WorkerEngine interface + Ollama adapter (chat + chatStream)
• @lobstah/worker — provider-side HTTP server (signs receipts, OpenAI-compat, optional auto-announce)
• @lobstah/router — local HTTP server openclaw points at (model-aware multi-peer routing with failover, receipt validation + nonce dedupe, append to ledger)
• @lobstah/tracker — opt-in discovery service (in-memory peer registry with TTL)
• @lobstah/cli — keygen | worker start | router start | tracker start | peers add/remove/list/sync | balance

HTTP endpoints

Router (the one openclaw points at):

• POST /v1/chat/completions — OpenAI-compatible, streaming optional, model-aware peer selection with failover
• GET /v1/models — aggregates models from all configured peers (cached for 30s per peer)
• GET /balance — receipt-derived balance summary
• GET /peers — current local peer list

Worker (provider side):

• POST /v1/chat/completions — accepts request, calls engine, returns response with signed receipt header (or SSE-embedded receipt comment for streams)
• GET /v1/models, GET /capacity — what models this worker has, current queue depth
• GET /pubkey — worker's identity

Tracker (optional, public discovery):

• POST /announce — peer publishes a signed Announcement with TTL
• POST /unannounce — peer revokes its announcement (signed proof of pubkey ownership)
• GET /peers — anyone reads the current public peer list (signed announcements; clients verify)

Trust + safety notes

• Receipt replay protection. Each receipt carries a 16-byte random nonce and a completedAt timestamp. Routers reject expired (>5 min) or duplicate-nonce receipts.
• Announcement freshness. Trackers reject stale or far-future announcements (±5 min skew window).
• Trust model is cooperative. Workers are assumed not to lie about model output. Adversarial workers (returning gibberish, returning a different model's output) can be addressed in v2 with redundancy + reputation.
• No NAT traversal yet. Workers must be reachable at the URL they advertise — public IP, port forwarding, or a Tailscale-style overlay. A v2 relay path can lift this restriction.
• Cooperative failover. If a peer goes unhealthy (2 consecutive connection failures), the router excludes it for 30 seconds and tries the next candidate.