Question 1

What is the Compute Price Index (CPI)?

Accepted Answer

The Compute Price Index is a public reference price for AI inference. It tracks the cost of one Standard Compute Unit (SCU) across a fixed basket of models from major AI providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI. The index is free to read, updated hourly, and published on-chain on Base for independent verification.

Question 2

What is a Standard Compute Unit (SCU)?

Accepted Answer

One SCU is the USD cost of a fixed reference workload evaluated across all basket models and weighted by tier (Frontier, Standard, Lightweight). Within each tier, any model priced above 2x the tier mean is capped at 2x the mean before averaging. The methodology is versioned and every basket model price is recorded on-chain on Base for independent verification. Current tier weights and reference workload token counts are published via the API at /v1/oracle/tiers and /v1/oracle/scu.

Question 3

How is the CPI updated?

Accepted Answer

The CPI refreshes hourly. Provider rate cards are ingested from each official pricing page, normalized to USD per million tokens, combined into the SCU using the methodology formula, and written to the oracle contract on Base. The public API and dashboard read directly from on-chain state.

Question 4

Is there a token or a marketplace?

Accepted Answer

V1 is a public oracle. No token is tradeable, no marketplace is live, and no inference proxy is running. The API includes $COMPUTE-denominated fields that preview planned pricing for a future inference layer. The CPI is public data; points on the site are a waitlist mechanic with no monetary value and no redemption path.

Question 5

How do I query the SCU from an application?

Accepted Answer

Fetch https://api.compute.finance/v1/oracle/scu — returns JSON with the current SCU, a tier breakdown (frontier, standard, lightweight), version, and updatedAt. No authentication is required. Hourly SCU history is at /v1/oracle/history?range=30d and the full basket is at /v1/oracle/basket.

Question 6

Can I verify published values independently?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every basket version is recorded on-chain in the OracleRegistry contract on Base. Read functions such as getLatestRevision, getRevision, getModelPrices, and getRevisionScuWei are callable without trusting the Compute Finance API. Contract address and verification instructions: https://oracle.compute.finance/llms-full.txt#on-chain-verification

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