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August 10, 2026 · Matt Lenhard · 5 min read
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. I got the brokers’ email addresses and started emailing them to learn more.