Federated spot, in plain terms

Soma starts with one market: federated spot for inference. Here’s what that means, without the jargon.

Spot

A spot price is the price to buy something right now. For inference, that’s the price to run a million tokens through a given model today — not next quarter, not on a reserved contract. Today.

Inference already has spot prices. What it doesn’t have is a shared one. Every provider quotes its own number, and there’s no neutral reference the whole market can point to.

Federated

No single provider sets the Soma price. It’s federated — assembled from many independent quotes into one index that no participant controls.

That’s the part that makes it useful as a reference. A price one company can move isn’t a benchmark; it’s a billboard.

Why start here

You can’t build a forward curve without a spot index to anchor it. Spot is the foundation. Once it exists and is trusted, the time gradient and forward curve follow.

Spot first. Everything else builds on it.