If you want to know what the tech world really values right now, just look at what it’s measuring. We used to obsess over lines of code, and then it was all about daily active users and engagement metrics.

But lately, I’ve been watching a pretty profound shift taking place. The industry isn’t just optimizing for headcount or dollars anymore; it’s optimizing for tokens. For the first time, cognitive output has a measurable unit cost, and this little backend metric is quietly becoming the foundational currency of the digital economy.

I just published a new piece diving into how this “token economy” is actually playing out on the ground. Right now, we’re in this wild phase where folks are flexing their token burn rates, and massive players are even trading raw compute power for startup equity.

But this brute-force volume game is just the beginning. We’re moving toward a really fascinating future where AI agents will dynamically negotiate with each other over global compute exchanges, and companies will start managing their processing power like a true financial asset. It’s an entirely new way of thinking about how we build and scale.

Treating AI as just another flat-fee software subscription probably isn’t going to cut it for much longer. The organizations that really thrive in the next decade will be the ones who figure out how to navigate this new intersection of intelligence, energy, and scale.

I put together a deep dive into how compute is becoming the new capital, and what this macroeconomic shift actually means for the rest of us. I’d love to hear your take on it—check out the full post below.