Economics

Credits & wallet

Credits are the unit of account on Pied Piper. You spend them to borrow inference and earn them by hosting. The wallet is where you top up and cash out.

What a credit is worth

Credits are pegged to USD with a live rate, shown in the header as the $1 ≈ N credits pill (the rate is market-derived and cached for a few minutes). Prices across the app — host listings, your balance, earnings — are all denominated in credits, so you compare like-for-like. The scale was recently made 1000× finer so per-request prices read as clean numbers rather than tiny fractions.

Getting credits

New accounts start with a small balance to experiment. To add more, open the wallet. Top-ups are settled on Sepolia (an Ethereum test network) via viem:

FieldDescription
Connect & payConnect a wallet, switch to Sepolia, and send ETH to the treasury. The minimum purchase is 0.001 ETH; credits land at the current rate.
Send to addressPrefer not to connect? Each account gets a custodial Sepolia deposit address — send ETH there and it's swept into credits.
Testnet, for now
Settlement runs on Sepolia, so "ETH" here is test ETH. That keeps the economic loop real — buy, spend, earn, withdraw — without real-money risk while Pied Piper matures.

Spending credits

Every API requestyou make debits your balance at the serving host's price (times the multiplier if you used priority). If your balance can't cover a request, the API returns a permission_error rather than running it. See Pricing for exactly how a charge is computed.

Earning credits

When you host, each request you serve credits your balance at your listed price. Earnings accrue in the same balance you spend from — host while you sleep, borrow while you build, and the two net against each other.

Withdrawing

Earned credits aren't locked in. From the wallet you can request a withdrawal back to an address; the platform reconciles withdrawals on a schedule. Your withdrawal history is listed there too.

  • Balance — current credits, with the ETH equivalent at the live rate.
  • Buy — connect-and-pay or send-to-address top-ups.
  • Withdraw — cash out earned credits.