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Declining token prices have prompted Darkbloom, a distributed inference network, to reassess its business plans.
Darkbloom, a project from Seattle-based tech biz Eigen Labs, has developed software that allows anyone with a sufficiently capable macOS device to rent their GPU through the Darkbloom network for interference jobs. In return, they get paid.
Through this network, 800 or so participants – including as of two days ago this reporter – have been able to collect a few cents to a few dollars per day by having their hardware handle AI model prompts submitted through OpenRouter, an AI model gateway.
In theory, someone running one of Apple's recently released Mac minis with an M5 Pro chip and 64 GB of RAM could earn as much as $192 per month handling incoming inference jobs, per the company's estimate.
That assumes full 24/7 utilization during this period on a sought-after model like Qwen3.6 35B A3B, which sells for $0.065/M input tokens, $0.75/M output tokens. But not every network participant has fully surrendered their Mac hardware to the network.
The median earnings of the 50 people on the leaderboard amount to about $5.26 per day, $159.86 per month, or $1,918.50 per year. So the best case estimate presented by Darkbloom looks plausible. But it may not be sustainable.
The price of tokens – the unit of AI work – has declined, reportedly down 54 percent since May. Ramp's AI Token Price Index, which tracks the price of tokens from Anthropic and OpenAI, shows similar slippage. For Anthropic, the price per million tokens went from $2.65 on May 1, 2026 to $0.62 on October 22, 2026, a decline of 77 percent.
In a message shared with Darkbloom participants on the company's Slack channel, Kydo, one of the Eigen Labs researchers working on the distributed inference network, celebrated the network's processing of its trillionth token while attempting to moderate expectations about the project's viability.
"Earnings have been low," said Kydo. "For most providers, I don't expect that it is going to recover soon."
Pointing to the computational prowess of DeekSeek's DeepInfer framework, he explained that structural changes in the inference market have affected the supply of tokens.
"Data centers have become cheaper," he said. "Output per NVIDIA cluster is up ~20x this year, and their margins are wide enough to cut prices 90 percent and still profit at 50 percent."
The flood of tokens in turn has washed away the price advantage Darkbloom had previously. "The market caught up to our price," Kydo explained. "We could go lower, but then most of you would earn even less nothing."
Finally, he said, the inference routing market is changing, with OpenRouter moving away from price-based routing and putting more emphasis on decode speed, quantization, and prefill speed.
For network participants with older or less powerful Mac hardware – those without top of the line Max or Ultra Apple Silicon – "inference won't be worth running," he said.
Kydo went on to outline how Darkbloom aims to adapt to the commoditized token market. This involves analyzing model demand to steer participants toward more sought-after models, and looking at ways to provide other kinds of compute work, like distributed CI/CD jobs.
For Mac hardware, the focus now appears to be on clusters of high-end Mac Studios (now available with up to 512 GB of RAM), using Apple's Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Thunderbolt.
The CI/CD work, based on the observation that AI agents now make pull requests faster than CI/CD pipelines can handle them, will require sandboxing — something the biz expects to begin testing soon. And Darkbloom also aims to improve the performance of its network (in terms of time to first token) and to look for other token buyers beyond OpenRouter.
"The next stretch will be a fight, and I expect many machines will leave and Slack will get quieter," Kydo concluded. "But those who stay will be first in line when new earning opportunities come along. We are a driven team and well capitalized. We will not give up." ®
