01 A new commodity
Intelligence is becoming a commodity.
Today, has surpassed to become AI’s dominant cost, approaching 60% of all compute, up from roughly 30% in 20231Deloitte finds inference is roughly two-thirds of all compute in 2026, up from a third in 2023 and half in 2025. Deloitte, “More compute for AI, not less,” Nov 2025.
This explosion is driven by the extraordinary growth in token consumption volume, which is doubling every year and on track to grow more than 20× by 20302Goldman Sachs projects token consumption multiplying 24× to 120 quadrillion tokens per month between 2026 and 2030, about 2.2× per year. Goldman Sachs Research, May 2026. By revenue, the inference market is already over $100 billion, and is set to more than double, reaching $255 billion by the end of the decade3The global AI inference market is projected to grow from $106.15 billion in 2025 to $254.98 billion by 2030, a 19.2% CAGR. MarketsandMarkets, AI Inference Market 2025–2030.
This shift turns the output of a model into something an economist would recognize as a commodity. A unit of inference, one million tokens, is now bought and sold much like a barrel of oil or a kilowatt-hour of electricity.
We are standing at the cusp of commoditized intelligence.
02 The problem
The missing instrument.
Here is the problem. Every company that builds on AI now carries a large, growing, and unavoidable inference bill. When the cost gets big enough, predictability becomes a necessity.
In every other commodity market, that exact situation calls for a futures market: a way to agree today on the price you will pay tomorrow. For oil, electricity, and carbon, such markets exist.
For intelligence, none does.
03 The product
Two products. One market for intelligence.
An open futures market needs two things that build on each other: a public price for a unit of intelligence, and a place to trade that price forward. We are building both.
The Open Intelligence Index
A public, reproducible price for a unit of intelligence.
It rests on two definitions. The Standard Inference Token (SIT) normalizes one unit of model output to a fixed capability bar, so stronger models count for proportionally more. The Token Price Index (TPI) is the volume-weighted average of what qualified providers charge for it, with no single provider allowed to dominate the figure.
The SIT capability barqualifying
| MMLU | ≥ 86% |
|---|---|
| HumanEval | ≥ 67% |
| GSM8K | ≥ 92% |
The Token Futures Market
A cash-settled futures market built on the index.
Buyers lock tomorrow’s token price today; suppliers with spare capacity guarantee their revenue. Because the index is public and hard to manipulate, the whole market can settle against it. Since tokens cannot be physically delivered, every contract settles in cash against the TPI, exactly as electricity and compute futures already do.
A token futures contractcash-settled
| Underlying | TPI ($/SIT) |
|---|---|
| Settlement | Cash vs index |
| Tenors | 1 to 12 months |
04 Roadmap
How to build it.
A market like this cannot be declared into existence, and the sequence is the whole thesis. Each stage is cheap to run, proves out the next, and leaves behind an asset the eventual exchange is built on.
Match by hand Building now
Today the market is thin and sell-biased: with prices still falling, more parties want to lock in a sale than a purchase. So we do not open an order book and wait for one to form. We broker it. We find owners of spare compute willing to sell tokens forward at a discount, the natural shorts, and companies that want to fix their token costs, the natural longs, and we match them deal by deal. This takes little capital and carries little balance-sheet risk. More important, every trade we broker quietly builds the two assets that matter most: the price data behind the index (the TPI) and the capability standard that defines a unit of intelligence (the SIT). We leave this stage not as a broker but as the owner of the benchmark everyone else will have to price against.
Productize the deal Next
Once the matchmaking has steady flow and the index has a track record, we replace bespoke deals with one standard product: a redeemable voucher, a prepaid claim on future inference the holder can redeem for real tokens or resell to exit. Because it can always be redeemed for the real thing, arbitrage keeps its price honest and we never have to trust an outside oracle. This turns a hand-run brokerage into a two-sided market that scales without us standing in the middle of every trade.
Open the exchange Gated
With a proven index and a liquid voucher market, the full cash-settled futures follow, settling against the TPI and open to the speculators and market-makers who add depth. This is the prize: whoever owns the settlement layer for intelligence owns a toll on every contract written against it.