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August 10, 2026 Matt Lenhard 5 min read

Where This Started

This is a follow-up article to a piece I recently wrote about the token relay market . Noticeably absent from that piece was a mention of the rise of “token brokers” — people who buy unused credits from startups and then resell them.

I first heard about token brokers while chatting with a good friend of mine who was receiving offers for Anthropic tokens at steep discounts.

It wasn’t just him, though. As I started talking to more founders about what I was building, they said the same thing: they were getting a lot of inbound email from people looking to buy or sell off-market inference.

Startups swapping credits is nothing new, and I knew this was happening in several startup forums and groups, but this was when I realized that the market was being commercialized.

So I did what any normal person would do.…