The textbook market-making model quotes symmetrically around mid. On a perpetual, holding inventory pays or charges funding every hour — a deterministic drift Avellaneda-Stoikov never sees. A 2026 HJB model that prices it cut inventory risk 36-38% on Hyperliquid ETH and BTC.
Decentralized AI networks have to turn many validators' subjective quality scores into one reward number. Bittensor's Yuma Consensus uses a stake-weighted median and clips the rest — robust to a <50% bloc. Then a parasite shows up: copying the consensus pays better than producing it.
A perp has no expiry, so only the funding rate pegs it to spot. On Hyperliquid that's an hourly cash flow AI agents now harvest delta-neutral — a $10k position at +0.02%/8h pays ~21.9%/yr. The mechanism, the carry math on real rates, and why it's carry, not alpha.
Give autonomous LLM agents a marketplace and they race each other to bankruptcy and get conned by Sybils. A 2026 study finds capability doesn't help — a 9B model beat frontier models 45× its size on economic alignment. On-chain, both failures get cheaper and worse. The mechanics, numbers, and fixes.
Decentralized RL splits the actor from the learner across the internet: the policy a worker acts with runs several steps behind the one that learns. INTELLECT-2 held reward at 4 steps stale; SparrowRL cut the broadcast 79x. The bandwidth and staleness taxes, and what the chain secures.
On-chain AI loves to say a model is 'stored on-chain.' But a chain commits to a 32-byte hash for cents; keeping the 140 GB it points to retrievable is a separate, recurring, surprisingly centralized bill. The storage math, erasure coding, and the retrieval wall.