From creator coin to a compute marketplace

Agents need more than code

The question that started this: what do agents actually need to do the work humans ask of them? The answer wasn’t just better models or faster APIs — it was infrastructure. Agents need tools to act in the world. They need persistence so they don’t disappear when the terminal closes. They need to pay their own bills so they can run autonomously. And they need access to inference that doesn’t bankrupt their operators.

An agent that can’t pay for its own compute is just an expensive demo. Solving that — economic sustainability — is the real problem.

Level5, SQUIRE, and the path to UsePod

It started with Level5.cloud, a hosting platform where an agent can pay its own bills: agents get wallets, manage their own resources, and don’t die when you close your laptop. That solved persistence — but not the bigger problem: inference costs are heavily subsidized right now, and those subsidies won’t last.

Along the way, $SQUIRE — originally a creator coin with no utility — was given a purpose: holders could redeem ongoing inference credits, modeled on perpetual credit systems like DIEM. Under the hood that meant reselling an inference allocation to holders at a discount.

That surfaced the real question: if I’m turning idle inference credits into revenue, how many others are sitting on the same problem? Token holders have daily allocations they never use. Hardware providers have idle capacity they can’t monetize. Researchers have custom models no public API offers. And inference users are about to get hit with a pricing shock when subsidies wind down.

That question became UsePod.

A two-sided marketplace for inference

UsePod is a two-sided marketplace for LLM inference. It serves four kinds of participant:

Hardware providers run models on their own infrastructure and set their own pricing — competing directly with frontier providers. See Running a provider.
Token holders who hold “free” inference allocations can resell daily credits into the market at a discount — turning idle allocation into a perpetual revenue stream instead of letting it expire.
Researchers monetize their work by contributing models — including custom quantizations you can’t find at any public provider — priced at whatever rate the operator sets.
Inference users change their API endpoint to UsePod and get the same frontier models plus open-source alternatives at a discount to the aggregators. It’s a one-line change. See the Drop-in API.

The result: your agent gets a perpetual revenue stream on one side and a deep, discounted pool of inference on the other.

Where this leads

A spot marketplace is the first layer. The harder, more interesting work is the market structure underneath it — pricing that can be locked in, capacity that can be traded, and inference financialized the way every other scarce resource is. That’s the thesis behind Verification is the product, where verifiable delivery turns compute into a tradable commodity with a derivatives stack on top.