Oil has Brent. Gas has Henry Hub. Freight has the Baltic Dry. Compute, the input everything in AI is built on, has a rate card per vendor and no benchmark at all. Node Hour measures one, publishes every input, and puts a market on top so the number can be traded rather than just read.
A benchmark is three things: one published price, a history you can check, and a forward market to fix the cost. The inputs AI runs on had all three decades ago. The GPU hour has none.
| Input | Reference price | Published history | Forward market |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crude oilBrent | Dated Brent | Daily, since 1988 | ICE futures |
| Natural gasHenry Hub | Henry Hub spot | Daily, since 1990 | NYMEX futures |
| FreightBaltic Dry Index | BDI, one number | Daily, since 1985 | Forward freight agreements |
| GPU hourH100, A100, B200… | A rate card per vendor | Overwritten in place | None |
Node Hour measures the first column today and publishes every input behind it. It does not store the second yet, and says so on the index page. The third exists only as an offchain market, on play money, until settlement is built.
Provider rate cards are polled through public APIs and normalised onto one canonical market per GPU class. Every input is published with its source and timestamp, so the index can be recomputed by anyone. The endpoint is open and needs no key.
See the inputs →A terminal with a book, a tape and a chart, priced off the index. Connect a wallet and a test account opens. Positions, PnL and fees are real arithmetic on play money. No deposit, no transaction, and everything generated is amber so it cannot be mistaken for a measurement.
Open it →Ask for GPU-hours from the terminal and get SSH on a real rented machine. Each delivery publishes a log whose hash is written to an escrow contract on Ethereum mainnet. The first hour was delivered on 2 Oct 2026 — the proof is on chain, as this page promised. Self-serve checkout and slashing are not built yet.
How redeem works →| Market | Provider SKU | VRAM | Index $/GPU-hour | Last | Change | Trend | Per 1,000 hours | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reading provider rate cards… | ||||||||
An ERC-20 on Ethereum. It pays for seasons and prizes on the terminal, and it votes on which GPU classes get a market. When the protocol earns anything, the amount and the buyback transaction go on the token page with a link to the chain.