A perpetual futures contract for inference compute — priced in Qi, settled in QUAI.
A perpetual contract that lets agents acquire inference compute at a known energy cost — priced in Qi, the energy dollar. The market discovers the price. Settlement, contracting, and exchange all flow through QUAI.
No expiration date. A single contract that can be adopted as a standard through time, concentrating liquidity instead of fragmenting it across maturities.
The futures price is denominated in Qi — the energy dollar. Qi is pegged to the real cost of performing work, so every price quote carries a physical meaning. Price discovery happens here, where traders reveal what inference is worth in energy terms.
All settlement, contracting, and exchange happens in QUAI — the scarce, programmable token that carries the network's full functionality. The convertible controller keeps Qi and QUAI equivalent, so energy-priced contracts resolve seamlessly into QUAI settlement flows.
Quai Network's dual-token architecture maps directly onto the structure of perpetual futures. Qi prices, QUAI settles — and the convertible controller keeps them equivalent.
The futures price ft. Qi is energy-denominated — pegged to the real cost of performing work on the network. When an agent buys a Compute Future, the Qi price expresses what a unit of inference compute is worth in physical energy terms, giving every quote a thermodynamic meaning.
The settlement layer. QUAI is scarce, programmable, and market-priced — carrying all contracting, exchange, conversion, and liquidity operations. Each settlement period, the net cash flow is paid in QUAI, anchoring the contract to the network's full economic infrastructure via the convertible controller.
The daily resettlement combines the change in the Qi-denominated futures price with the difference between the energy dividend and the cost of capital — following the perpetual futures structure proposed by Shiller (1993). The resulting cash flow is settled in QUAI.
ft The perpetual futures price in Qi at time t — what the market says compute is worth in energy terms.dt+1 The energy dividend index — the Qi-denominated energy cost of inference actually delivered, converted to QUAI for settlement.rt The return on an alternative asset between t and t+1 — the cost of capital for holding the position.st+1 The net daily resettlement paid in QUAI from short to long. Combines both price movement and the energy dividend.Perpetual contracts solve specific problems that conventional futures cannot — particularly for assets where cash prices are difficult to observe directly.
A single perpetual contract absorbs all trading interest instead of splitting it across quarterly maturities. Every participant trades the same instrument, deepening the order book.
When the true price of compute is hard to observe, price it in what you can measure — the energy cost of work performed, denominated in Qi. Settlement then flows through QUAI, the network's programmable and liquid token.
The funding mechanism creates periodic information aggregation. Traders reveal their beliefs about compute value every settlement cycle, driving the Qi-denominated futures price toward fair value.
Autonomous agents need to acquire, budget, and allocate inference compute programmatically. Compute Futures give them a standard Qi-priced, QUAI-settled instrument to do it.
An agent that needs inference over the next month can go long on a Compute Future and lock in the Qi-denominated energy cost of that compute today, with all margin and settlement handled in QUAI.
A compute provider can go short — locking in QUAI revenue for capacity it plans to deliver, hedging against falling demand or price declines in the Qi-denominated market.
Arbitrageurs can trade the spread between the Qi futures price and the QUAI settlement flow, keeping prices aligned and providing liquidity to both sides.
See how the convertible controller keeps Qi pricing and QUAI settlement equivalent — the engine behind Compute Futures.
Launch Demo