DIEM & the day market

DIEM is daily inference credit: $1 of inference per UTC day. Unused DIEM expires at 00:00 UTC and resets the next day. It is perishable inventory, a supplier who does not use or sell their DIEM before midnight loses it.

Pzero is the market that clears that perishable capacity before it expires.

The 24-hour day market

In v1 there is a single market epoch aligned to the DIEM UTC reset:

• Suppliers post fixed-price offers backed by their DIEM capacity.
• The router clears the cheapest eligible supply for each request as it arrives.
• At 00:00 UTC, capacity re-syncs and stale offers expire.

Some DIEM expires unsold rather than clearing below the floor. That breakage is accepted, a sustainable floor matters more than clearing every last cent of capacity.

Why perishability matters

Because capacity expires daily, suppliers are motivated to sell it rather than hoard it, and the market refreshes every day. This is what lets Pzero offer frontier capacity below retail: it is monetizing inventory that would otherwise be lost.

Related

• The 30–80¢ corridor: the price band all clears fall in.
• Sellers: how suppliers post DIEM capacity.
• Roadmap: Dusk Cells, a planned end-of-day clearance window (v1.1).