The balance portion of the Orchid account is the amount of currency held to pay providers. When the account is in use, the tickets are backed by funds in the balance. When a ticket “wins”, the face value of the ticket is withdrawn from the user’s account balance and deposited into the provider’s account with an on-chain transaction.
As a practical matter, while using the Orchid VPN, you will notice that the balance remains unchanged for long periods of time. That is because you can often receive significant amounts of bandwidth, on average, before a payment ticket “wins”, funds are claimed and your balance is adjusted.
The balance of an Orchid account can be thought of as a number of tickets. The size of the ticket is governed by the deposit, as the network requires two tickets worth of deposit for payments to be accepted. The two tickets worth of deposit is required to prevent double spending attacks. So for example, if the account’s deposit size is 150 OXT and there is 225 OXT in the balance, the Orchid account has 3 tickets worth of balance because the size of each ticket is 75 OXT (deposit / 2) and there are 3 tickets worth of balance (total balance / ticket size).
The dApp has an Add Funds screen to add additional balance to your account.