ComputeIndex
WTI — the Watt·Token Index. An open method for measuring delivered work per unit of energy, and a contract specification for trading it.
A margin nobody can price.
A workload's margin is the gap between what it sells for and what it costs to power. Power traders have priced that kind of gap for forty years — they call theirs the spark spread, and it is why a generator can finance a plant before it knows next summer’s price.
Compute has no such instrument. There is no reference rate for the price of work per unit of energy, and no standardized forward to hedge it. Once a chip is racked its capital cost is sunk, and the marginal cost of the next workload is mostly the electricity it draws — so the number that decides the economics is not the price of compute or the price of power. It is the distance between them.
The U.S. interconnection queue holds roughly twice the capacity the installed grid serves today.
Latitude Media →PJM's capacity auction cleared about nine times higher year over year in a single cycle.
Utility Dive →WTI — the Watt·Token Index
Oil became financeable when it got a benchmark. Before Brent and WTI, crude moved through opaque concessions and private contracts; after, it moved through futures, covenants, and audit footnotes. The benchmark came first, and the capital followed it.
Compute is at the stage oil was before the benchmark. We are writing the two documents that stage needs: a method for measuring delivered work per unit of energy, and a contract specification for trading it.
WTI·FWD|tenor 3 / 6 / 12 mo|basis work, not silicon|margin daily mark|obsolescence class re-spec, not roll
Draft. Written to be implemented by anyone, including venues we do not run.
WTI·Ref
An open methodology for delivered work per unit of energy across chip class, region, and workload tier — published with a reference implementation and a dated calibration run against public nodal prices and proof-of-work telemetry. Not a live tape: a method you can run yourself, on a date we stand behind.
WTI·Spec
A public contract specification for a power-adjusted compute forward: unit definition, settlement source, tenor, margin treatment, and how a contract survives a hardware generation. Not a venue: the definition anyone clearing this trade will need to cite.
A benchmark in silicon expires on the next tape-out.
Every attempt to standardize compute so far has priced the machine: an hour of a named chip, split by term and cluster size. That number decays with each generation. An H100 is not an H200, training and inference depreciate on different curves, and a benchmark tracking the hardware has to be rewritten every time the hardware moves — precisely when collateral values and financing paths depend on it holding still.
Work does not decay. Beneath every token there is an irreducible thermodynamic cost to erasing a bit, and the ratio of useful output to energy spent is measurable in any generation, on any architecture, including ones not yet designed. That is the invariant a durable benchmark has to be built on. Our grounding is Proof of Entropy Minima, which measures work as entropy provably minimized, and the broader thermoeconomic framework it sits inside.
There is one forward curve on energy-denominated work
On Quai, miners can defer receipt of mined tokens by three, six, or twelve months in exchange for yield. That is a term structure on work, quoted at three tenors, with real counterparties taking the other side — as far as we know, the only observable forward curve on energy-denominated compute anywhere. We study it as a calibration input, and as evidence that the market clears.
Settlement in energy
A benchmark denominated in work invites a settlement asset denominated in the same thing. Our roadmap runs toward energy-denominated settlement on Qi — clearing a compute forward in the unit it is priced in, rather than translating twice through dollars. The controller economics that would make that safe are still open research, and we treat them that way: the index and the specification stand on their own.
The reference rate the instruments cite.
WTI·Ref defines the number. The instruments are what you trade against it — futures for the spot curve, bonds for the term structure, options for the volatility surface. The benchmark comes first; the contracts cite it.
Compute Futures
A perpetual, cash-settled index future producing the forward price surface.
Compute Options
Convertible claims whose premiums reveal the implied volatility of energy-denominated work.
Infrastructure
The facilities and endpoints producing the telemetry the index is calibrated from.