Nodes, indexers, RPCs, GPUs, and the operational backbone of AI and chain systems.
Every on-chain scheme that verifies an LLM by re-executing it and comparing digests assumes a forward pass is bit-for-bit reproducible. It isn't — Thinking Machines got 80 different answers to one prompt at temperature 0. Here's why, and what determinism costs.
Majority voting over LLMs throws away the one node that got it right. Fortytwo's swarm inference ranks answers pairwise instead — +17 points on GPQA Diamond — with on-chain reputation and proof-of-capability for Sybil defense. The mechanism, the math, the tradeoffs.
zkML, optimistic, TEE, FHE all prove the computation. Restaking takes the other road: bond it and slash liars. We do the cost-of-corruption math behind EigenLayer's $18B AI-AVS security, the overloading attack that breaks it, and the probabilistic-audit tax.
Render just voted to route 60,000 Salad GPUs' payments through a token burn; Akash auctions its 234 GPUs per-block on-chain. Two opposed pricing mechanisms, live H100 quotes, and the burn-vs-emission math the equilibrium story skips.
We pulled a live x402 settlement off Base: a $0.013 USDC transfer relayed by a facilitator wallet with a nonce past 1.7 million, at an 11% gas-to-value ratio. What on-chain evidence and 100M transactions actually say about the agent economy.
Intent-based DEXes don't route your trade — they auction it. Solvers compete as autonomous optimizers to settle a batch at one clearing price. Inside CoW Protocol's contract, the optimization problem, and the metaheuristic solvers now winning it.
zkML costs 1000x, optimistic schemes cost a challenge window. Hardware attestation verifies AI inference at under 7% overhead and ~$0.26 on-chain — if you're willing to trust Intel. Part 3 weighs the third leg of verifiable inference.
An agent hits an API, gets HTTP 402, signs a stablecoin authorization, and a facilitator settles it on-chain for a fraction of a cent. We trace one real payment on Base down to the gas — and where the trust actually sits.
An autonomous agent can't sign up for an API key or swipe a credit card. x402 revives HTTP 402 and settles in gasless USDC — here's the EIP-3009 handshake, the facilitator trust model, and where prompt injection breaks it.
Zero-knowledge proofs aren't the only path to trustworthy on-chain AI. Optimistic schemes trade latency for a 1000x cost reduction — here's how dispute games over inference actually work.