Spent the afternoon poking at $OPG @OpenGradient , and the thing that stuck wasn't the pitch. It was the gap between who's supposed to run your inference and who actually does.

The story is an open marketplace — node operators all competing for your jobs, permissionless, spread wide. But when you just run the default path, you're not really choosing. The routing quietly leans toward whoever's already staked deep and latency-optimized. The long tail of operators they keep promising is there, technically… just not where the volume lands yet. Not malicious. Just gravity.

Reminds me of early restaking — hold up, told myself I wasn't making that comparison again. But the shape rhymes. Decentralized by design, concentrated by default. I kept waiting to be proven wrong as I dug, and mostly wasn't.

Maybe that's fine for a young network. Maybe it even has to start concentrated before it spreads. I keep going back and forth. The system does exactly what it says… it's just that "permissionless" and "actually used by many" aren't the same thing.

So who inherits the open market — the operators they're recruiting, or the ones already sitting where the defaults route?
#OPG