@shaughnessy119 and
@brian_armstrong describe where prices are heading: inference subsidies will end, 80% of workloads will migrate to models 99% cheaper, and lab unit economics are already deeply negative. When external capital slows, the spot price of inference moves sharply.
The next question is structural.
When inference becomes a strategic cost, enterprises need what every other scarce resource already has: a way to lock in capacity ahead of time. Today that doesnโt exist. No forward contracts. No capacity trading. No hedging. You pay spot, period. Per-token pricing treats compute as a consumable, itโs actually a capital asset.
This category error blocks the entire market structure. Markets for scarce resources : oil, electricity, cloud and all developed the same layers: spot pricing, forward contracts, futures, derivatives.
AWS did it with reserved instances and committed use. Inference compute has none of this yet.
@0xgilbert is building it, in deliberate stages: aggregate demand via marketplace (live today, 40% below OpenRouter, supply from token holders hardware providers), convert that demand into leverage for bulk capacity contracts, standardize those contracts (128 H100-hours, US-East, dated delivery), then layer derivatives for hedging.
That on
@solana the only chain fast and cheap enough for this settlement.
The sequence matters. You canโt start with futures, you bootstrap demand first, then convert it into upstream leverage, then standardize, then financialize.
Usepod.ai is the first to execute this sequence. The pioneer of inference capital markets.
@shaughnessy119 @brian_armstrong @pmarca @0xgilbert @squire_bot @solana