As AI takes on more of the making, the creating, the work, the more interesting question becomes where to put that work. This is the allocation problem: routing compute and capital to what matters. The allocation economy lens captures this shift, judging not by what you know or own, but by how well you allocate resources and decide what runs, when, and why [Dan Shipper, Every (2024)]. To enable this economy, there needs to be a layer to play it, a neutral exchange where allocators route through signals and incentives. OUDAU builds that layer.
So what is the allocation layer? It sits on top of AI resources (think providers and marketplaces). It is an exchange that supports multiple market mechanisms for you, the allocators, to participate and for incentives to be expressed.
Let's start with the compute marketplaces. AI compute today is scarce, fragmented, and opaque. Spot markets are cheap but unreliable, long-term leases lock you in, and decentralized marketplaces add variability. Meanwhile, vast pools of GPUs sit idle while teams wait in queues. Timing the market, monitoring energy costs, and tracking a fragmented space to find the best slot is an intensive and important job, especially as AI spend tightens and capex is not infinite. Those who can play it right gain an edge. Allocators play it for you.
Marketplaces list supply, from AI clouds and "neoclouds" like [coreweave.com], [lambda.ai], [crusoe.ai], and [nebius.com], to GPU marketplaces and platforms such as [vast.ai] and [runpod.io]. But listing isn't allocating. Without a unifying layer, practitioners (labs, companies, model trainers) waste time arbitraging providers while resources go underused. What's missing is a neutral exchange that continuously routes jobs across venues, clearing them to the optimal slot based on price, timing, reliability, and energy. Early moves in this unifying direction include [NVIDIA DGX Cloud Lepton] and [Compute Exchange], and it's here OUDAU sits above as the allocation layer, enabling allocators to operate across them.
The allocation layer aligns incentives and broadens what can be supported. Practitioners can choose allocators by track record, for instance. They can rely on allocators for their compute operations, much like a FinOps team for cloud or a portfolio manager in finance. Allocators are incentivized by their own self-interest to find the best solution. Allocators play on the allocation layer not just to optimize for practitioners. They can also direct compute toward high-value work such as open source and research. It is about the why, and with OUDAU allocators can begin prioritizing under-resourced public-good work. In fact, this means the layer brings more people into the process of deciding what gets built, not through gatekeepers, but through transparent signals that route resources to what matters.
The allocation layer that already optimises compute routing can just as easily host new market mechanisms for other AI resources; one example is an agent-staking marketplace.
Participants put their own money at risk, so prices encode private beliefs. Aggregated, those prices form a collective signal that routes work to where it adds the most value and, over time, tends toward truth. This matters because agent evaluations can be gamed, reviews can be fake, and opinions can drift from reality. In an agent marketplace the solution is a prediction-market staking pool behind every agent: allocators stake on the agent they expect to outperform, payouts follow the agent's realised task score, and under-performers are slashed. Because stake prices update continuously, routing stays dynamic; liquidity, not a static listing, decides who gets the next job. Vitalik Buterin calls this "info-finance", markets that surface information instead of burying it [Buterin 2024].
I first explored this design in P2Engine, my master-thesis framework for orchestrating and evaluating multi-agent systems; the work pointed directly to a market-based router where price is the routing signal. Read here → [market-based router].
OUDAU can adopt the same mechanism next. Before such marketplaces flourish, agents must be trained, and that means compute. As Surya Dantuluri writes, "every serious AI company will eventually train its own models… the barrier to doing so is collapsing" [Dantuluri 2025]. When that training imperative arrives, the bottleneck returns to compute, exactly where OUDAU's existing compute-allocation market already gives its users an edge.
Over the past two decades, the biggest winners were platforms built on user-generated content (UGC), such as social media, Fiverr, Figma and even CUDA's developer ecosystem. OUDAU brings that idea to the allocation layer: compute, data, models and agents become the content. Allocators route each resource according to the active market mechanism. These allocations lift utilisation across providers and marketplaces. Higher utilisation encourages providers to list more and better resources, which in turn gives allocators more to work with. The cycle is straightforward: better supply, smarter allocation, more output. Allocation makes every participant valuable: allocators bring routing, providers bring capacity, and practitioners bring demand.
OUDAU is built as an exchange, the common field where allocators play. To work, an exchange must settle routes, payments, and records instantly, privately, and atomically. Many platforms, blockchains, and other distributed ledgers can power that settlement layer. One public blockchain OUDAU is exploring is [Canton Network].
Canton offers granular privacy, atomic settlement, and cross-system interoperability. These traits already back real projects such as Euroclear tokenised collateral [Euroclear, (2025)], Nasdaq margin workflow [SFT, (2025)], and adoption is growing, now supported by a recent $135 million funding round [CNBC, (2025)]. With Canton as the backbone, OUDAU can launch market mechanisms like prediction markets, staking, atomic contract delivery [Digital Asset], and cross-resource auctions straight out of the box. OUDAU sees Canton's expanding institutional use and technical edge as validation. Building on a proven, regulated, and secure protocol lets OUDAU focus on the allocation layer while adding new market mechanisms over time.