OpenRouter + Stripe = Universal Compute Credits?

With the news of OpenRouter being acquired by Stripe, I think we are one step closer to converting AI tokens to food you can eat.

I had a tongue-in-cheek post about this back in March, when Jensen Huang story about using AI tokens as comp was floating around.

I joked, but I was really intrigued by the thought of "How can Nicu convert his AI credits comp to food".

I ended up getting on a 1 hour call with another builder (Joyce), just to explore the thought and whiteboard things.

The idea we landed on was a Marketplace (calling it Guava) where you can issue, transfer, sell and enable people/companies to use AI credit across providers/infra via an API gateway.

You would hit the gateway to actually use the tokens. The crux was that the company would have to purchase compute contracts from providers, to guarantee it to run. And basically do a take rate or an arbitrage on compute.

I thought the best positioned company would be a finance infra company that builds an AI gateway. And when I saw the Stripe news this Sunday, I got giddy.

Now, its definitely a stretch and I have no idea what Stripe is thinking long term, but NGL I think they would be one of the best positioned companies to build that marketplace/platform given how closely integrated they are within the internet.

Can you imagine going to a burger restaurant checkout page and, instead of paying with a card, you pay with 1000 AI tokens?

That would be wild! Next thing you know we get tokenflation. This burger used to cost 100 tokens?!?! lol

PS - No, I'm not building it, but here are my raw notes from that brainstorming session if you are interested in exploring it further!