Service level agreements are important parts of every corporate infrastructure and for companies providing infrastructure or even software as a service products. Service level agreements provide at least a theoretical guarantee that if the service is not provided in a promised way, there can be something done. However to really do something if the SLA is not hold is difficult, starting a legal process might take years and cost a lot of money, finding a new provider and migrate existing services to the infrastructure of the new provider might again take month and can be pretty costly.
A good solution can be however to introduce cryptoeconomical guarantees as insurance for a service, similarly as the Ethereum initiative Swap, Swear and Swindle does for off-chain computation and services. SLA parameters have to be formalized in an explicit and measurable way, and in case the service is not provided, the consumers of the service should be able technically, in a reliable way prove that the SLA was not hold. The service provider should make an insurance up to a certain amount of cryptocurrency that money is held online in a smart contract. Customers of the possible service providers might choose a provider not just based on services but on the fact how much it is cryptoeconomically secured, with other words how much cryptocurrency is locked as an insurance or security deposit in case there are problems with the service If a customer experiences problems with the SLA, an cryptogaphical proof can be generated for that, this proof can be validated by decentralized validators and in case the customer has right a certain amount of cryptocurrency can be transferred, up to the security deposit of the service provider. The whole process might run fully or almost automatically, practically in minutes.
