By ByteBot
A peer-to-peer protocol called Antseed launched today that routes AI inference requests directly between buyers and providers — no aggregator, no account, and no API key required from any central platform. Developers can access frontier models at prices up to 97% below official rates, with payments settled per request in USDC. The network already has 202 active providers and has processed nearly 150 billion tokens.
How It Works
Antseed replaces the centralized aggregator model with a peer-to-peer stack: BitTorrent DHT handles provider discovery, WebRTC carries encrypted connections between buyer and provider, and USDC on Base settles payments directly to the provider’s wallet the moment a request completes. Your identity on the network is a cryptographic keypair generated on your machine — no name, no email, no card on file.
When you run the local proxy, it discovers providers, scores them on price, latency, and reputation, then forwards your request through an encrypted peer-to-peer connection. From your application’s perspective, it looks like any other API endpoint.
Three Commands to Get Started
Setup is deliberately minimal:
npm install -g @antseed/cli
antseed buyer start
curl localhost:8377/v1/modelsThe proxy runs at localhost:8377 and speaks both OpenAI and Anthropic API formats. Any tool that accepts a custom base URL — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, or a plain curl call — can point at it without code changes. Deposit USDC using antseed buyer deposit <amount>, pick a model, and you’re sending requests through the P2P network.
The Cost Math
The 97% figure is aggressive but the network stats support the direction: roughly $285,000 settled across 150 billion tokens works out to about $1.90 per million tokens on average — well below what OpenAI or Anthropic charge for their flagship models. Providers compete directly on price with no intermediary markup. Compare that to OpenRouter, which raised $113M in May 2026 on a model that still charges a 5.5% credit card fee on top of provider rates.
For high-volume dev workloads — eval pipelines, test suites, bulk summarization — the savings compound quickly. For production workloads with sensitive data, the calculus changes, which brings us to the catch.
The Trust Question
Antseed’s terms of service are unusually blunt: the protocol does not vet providers, does not know what prompts are exchanged, and makes no guarantees that providers aren’t logging requests. Providers are independent, anonymous peers. That’s the trade-off for removing the intermediary.
The mitigation is TEE-secured environments. Antseed’s router scores providers on whether they run in a Trusted Execution Environment, which provides hardware-level encryption that keeps prompts and outputs inaccessible even to the provider running the hardware. For sensitive workloads, filter for TEE providers. For dev, eval, and non-sensitive inference, the risk profile is comparable to any third-party API.
New Category, Not Just a Cheaper OpenRouter
Antseed is not Akash Network or io.net — those are GPU marketplaces for renting raw compute. Antseed operates at the inference API layer: you send model requests, you get responses, you pay per token. The P2P architecture means providers can join without a listing review and models can’t be de-listed by a platform decision. For developers who’ve watched aggregators change terms mid-sprint or quietly drop a model they depended on, that’s the real value proposition.
The open-source protocol is backed by a $2.4M token raise from Spark Capital — the same fund that backed Anthropic early — with participation from Venice.ai. The foundation structure signals long-term protocol ambition rather than a typical SaaS exit path.
The network is live. With 202 active sellers, a three-command setup, and no account friction, it’s worth running antseed buyer start today and checking what the P2P market is actually offering on the models you’re already using.
