Excess usage increased roughly 2.3 times in less than a month to a record 312.6 billion tokens on Oct. 18, as competitors’ volumes surge and critics demand dollar figures.
Onchain inference is evolving rapidly. Base-Based Surplus Intelligence dashboard shows daily tokens increasing from 133.6 billion on September 23 to 312.6 billion on October 18 (UTC), and 0xJeff said Dolphin “reached 32.2 billion after 1 week of API live”, up from “~14 billion tok/day”, he said. quoted three days earlier. The open question, again, is to what extent this demand is paid.
What’s the scoop?
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Pushback: Amos Meiri, co-founder of AntSeed, whose inference marketplace is a competitor, wrote “The number of tokens says almost nothing!” And said “At a minimum, we should demand transparent spending in U.S. dollars.” Surplus’s dashboard reports users’ savings, not their spending.
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Dollar bar: For example, Meiri retained Venice “with 500 billion tokens per day and $150 million ARR”. Onchain dollars elsewhere remain weak: AntSeed has ruler about $310,000 base since launch, keeping about $12,000 in fees.
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Larger image: Inference has become one of the most dominant intersections of AI and cryptography, with the latter offering benefits such as at a reduced price access to the model and some pseudonymity, paying from a wallet rather than an account linked to an email address, card or KYC profile.
David Christophe
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David is a writer/analyst at Bankless. Before joining Bankless, he worked for a series of early-stage crypto startups and with grants from the Ethereum, Solana and Urbit foundations. He graduated from Skidmore College in New York. He currently lives in the Midwest and enjoys NFTs, but no longer participates in them.
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