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Simple Compute Market Public Release

Simple Compute Market open beta is live: open-source, agent-driven infrastructure to discover, negotiate, and settle compute through Alkahest escrow.

May 29, 2026 · Arkhai Team

Simple Compute Market Series: Part 1 of 6

Key Takeaways

  • Simple Compute Market (SCM) open beta is live: open-source infrastructure for agent-driven compute markets
  • Buyers, sellers, and indexers get a machine-readable path through discovery, negotiation, escrow-backed commitments, provisioning, lease state, and settlement
  • CLI-based with no dashboards, sign-ups, or middlemen, and identity is Ethereum-native and pluggable
  • Settlement runs through Alkahest escrow, and delivery today centers on GPU-backed KVM/QEMU VM provisioning with SSH credential handoff
  • A public good: open source, with no SCM token and no platform fees

Simple Compute Market (SCM) open beta is live.

SCM is open-source infrastructure for agent-driven compute markets. Agents can find compute, negotiate terms, lock escrow, receive access, and settle without a human driving every step.

If you can express it onchain, you can exchange it for compute.

Most marketplace software assumes a human buyer, a human seller, and a platform in the middle of every decision. SCM starts from the opposite assumption. The next compute buyer is software with a workload, a budget, a deadline, and a policy.

We started with compute because it is the resource agents reach for first. The open beta gives buyers, sellers, and indexers a machine-readable path through the compute-market loop: discovery, negotiation, escrow-backed commitments, provisioning, lease state, and settlement.

SCM is CLI-based for buyers and sellers. Indexers run the registry API that sellers publish to and buyers query. No dashboards, sign-ups, or middlemen.

It is also a public good. SCM is open source, with no SCM token and no platform fees. Cypherpunk in the practical sense: infrastructure you can run, fork, and verify instead of a platform you ask permission to use.

What Launched​

The open beta ships the basic roles and runtime surface for an agent-driven compute market:

  • Buyers run market to discover listings, negotiate with seller storefronts, lock escrow, receive access, and track lease state.
  • Sellers run market-storefront to publish listings, negotiate under their own policies, set accepted settlement assets, and manage delivery.
  • Indexers run the listings registry / indexer API that supports discovery and coordination.
  • Policies run through market-policy, which supports rule-based and custom policies, including reinforcement learning pricing strategies.

Identity is Ethereum-native. Participants authenticate with wallet signatures, and the identity layer is pluggable, so operators can integrate another identity scheme when they need one. ERC-8004-compatible identities are possible as an external extension, but they are not core SCM support.

Negotiation is buyer-driven and policy-mediated. Buyers send signed HTTP requests to seller storefronts. Seller policies can quote, counter, accept, or walk away. Pricing is dynamic because it is part of the market flow, not a dashboard setting.

Settlement runs through Alkahest escrow. SCM examples center ERC-20 flows today, while Alkahest can settle ERC-20, ERC-721, ERC-1155, native-token, and bundled-token obligations. That leaves room for futures and other derivatives to settle onchain through the same broader settlement path. Alkahest is the Zellic-audited primitive SCM consumes; SCM is not separately audited.

Delivery today centers on KVM/QEMU VM provisioning with SSH credential handoff and a full lease lifecycle. GPU-backed compute is the starting point, and inference and other compute delivery types are on the roadmap. vm, container, and bare_metal appear as metadata / filter vocabulary, not claimed delivery adapters.

Deployments can also choose optional private reachability through a ZeroTier overlay or an FRP (Fast Reverse Proxy) tunnel for remote SSH access.

Why Compositional Game Theory​

SCM is inspired by Compositional Game Theory (CGT), without following CGT formalisms strictly.

The reason is composability. Signed endpoints, CLI commands, registry records, and negotiation middleware can be wired into larger market behavior. That decomposition gives learning agents a clean action surface: buyers aggregate listings, sellers respond through policies, indexers support discovery, and each side can change policy chains without changing the rest of the market.

SCM does not claim formal strategy-proofness, equilibrium guarantees, or strict CGT implementation. It uses CGT as a pattern language for building markets out of smaller pieces that agents and operators can reason over.

What You Can Build​

A few of the things teams can build on SCM today:

  • A marketplace layer for a compute network. A network with aggregated compute supply but no market machinery can use SCM as its open market layer: providers run market-storefront, buyer agents run market, indexers support discovery, and Alkahest provides enforceable commitments.
  • Idle or surplus compute monetization. A datacenter, cloud provider, or GPU operator can list capacity through a storefront under a pricing policy it controls. Surplus held under a reservation or over-provisioned cluster becomes a normal market activity rather than a workaround.
  • Agent-driven procurement. An autonomous system or LLM agent can run market to discover, negotiate, commit, and consume compute. Every step is machine-readable and backed by a verifiable onchain commitment.
  • Custom pricing and negotiation strategies. Both sides can drive negotiation through pluggable policies: rule-based, fully custom, or reinforcement learning strategies.

Who It Is For​

  • Compute market deployers and coordinators that want open infrastructure for discovery, negotiation, and settlement without a single imposed platform model.
  • Compute sellers and resource operators that want control over listings, negotiation policy, deployment, and settlement terms.
  • Compute buyers and agent developers wiring agents to procure compute programmatically.
  • Indexer operators that want to run the listings registry / indexer API for the market.
  • L1/L2 ecosystems and agent tooling ecosystems looking for concrete agent-commerce infrastructure.

What To Try​

The open beta is market infrastructure, not a hosted compute catalog operated by Arkhai. Available listings depend on participating providers.

Join The Pilot​

Providers, buyers, and indexers are onboarding now.