Hard to believe, but the hottest market on earth, AI compute, has no real exchange. Deals are OTC, by phone and PDF, like oil in 1983. It cannot go on an order book: GPUs are heterogeneous like oil, an H100 on InfiniBand in Virginia is not an H100 in Jakarta, and perishable like electricity, an idle hour at 3am is gone forever. Nothing with both properties has ever traded cleanly. So H200 hours cost what they did at launch and the whole market clears over Signal.
This is a $NEAR Intents shaped problem. You cannot post an order for a thing with no standard grade, but you can post a need: a thousand GPUs of roughly this shape, this region, these weeks. Solvers who have it, or can stitch it from five clouds, come back with a price. The biggest market without an exchange will get one, and it will look like $NEAR Intents, not Nasdaq.
This is a $NEAR Intents shaped problem. You cannot post an order for a thing with no standard grade, but you can post a need: a thousand GPUs of roughly this shape, this region, these weeks. Solvers who have it, or can stitch it from five clouds, come back with a price. The biggest market without an exchange will get one, and it will look like $NEAR Intents, not Nasdaq.