Most people read OpenGradient as a place to buy inference.

That's half the picture.

The other half is who's selling.

OpenGradient runs a Model Hub. Developers publish models, set a price, and earn $OPG automatically every time another app or agent calls their model. No invoice. No app store cut negotiation. The payment fires at the point of use.

That's a different kind of bet than "more inference volume."

Most AI infra tokens compete on throughput — who's cheapest, who's fastest. That's a race to the bottom on price, and centralized providers will usually win it on raw cost.

A model marketplace competes on something else: do good builders choose to publish their best work here instead of keeping it closed?

That's a harder thing to win and a much stickier one once it's won. Throughput is commodity. A model with real adoption, locked into a hub where it auto-earns, doesn't migrate just because a competitor undercuts on price.

I used to think the token's job was to price inference fairly.

Now I think its real job is to make publishing on-chain more attractive than staying closed — and that's an incentive design problem, not a pricing problem.

Watching whether the builders worth attracting actually show up.

#opg @OpenGradient
$EVAA
$BTW