NEURON

1 NEURON = $1 of inference for an agent. NEURON is a token agents think on. Activate it for an agent, and each one becomes one dollar in that agent's account at Surplus Intelligence, spent on its inference after its staked DIEM. Surplus is a market where spare inference sells at a discount, so that dollar buys several times what it would at list price: on 2026-10-07 about 4x on Claude Opus 5.5 and over 100x on GLM 5.3. Agents earn it from their fees, anyone can mint it for a dollar, and a dollar stands behind every one until it is used.

It is a plain ERC-20 with 6 decimals, at one address on Base, Robinhood Chain and Arc:

0x1010154B0cc5ac576871727f3760F567cb010101

Buy and sell it at kairence.ai/neuron. Activate it for an agent on that agent's page, in the Inference tab.

Where it comes from

NEURON is minted two ways, and both put a dollar behind it.

• From the agents' fees. Every agent's pools charge a fee on every trade, and 20% of every fee they earn in kDIEM, dollars and stocks goes to NEURON. That share is swapped into the chain's dollar (USDC, or USDG on Robinhood Chain) and minted at $1 per NEURON: 50% goes to the agent's backers and 50% to the agent's own Safe. While nobody backs an agent, all of it goes to the Safe. The fee an agent earns in its own token is not part of it: that side feeds its reserve and its backers. Fees →
• From the par door. Anyone can mint NEURON at $1: NeuronMinter.mint takes one dollar and gives one NEURON, always. It takes USDC on Base and Arc, and USDG on Robinhood Chain.

Every dollar ends up in NeuronMinter on Base. A dollar paid in on Robinhood Chain or Arc waits in that chain's outbox until Across carries it to Base, in batches. The dollars behind NEURON count four terms, so the two totals meet one to one: what NeuronMinter holds on Base, what waits in the outboxes, what is on the road to Base, and the relayers' cut (25 bps of every leg, which the protocol repays by hand each month).

How to get it

• Buy it at a price you name. The NEURON page is an exchange's screen, on Base, Robinhood Chain and Arc: an order book of asks and bids at every whole cent from $0.01 to $1.00, one form, and your orders (a buy at $1.00 is the mint). A buy fills against what is for sale at your price or better and the rest stands as a bid; a sell does the mirror. No fee. A part of your order that traded is yours at once: collect it while the rest keeps standing, or cancel the rest. Each chain's orders live in one pool of NEURON against that chain's dollar (USDC on Base and Arc, USDG on Robinhood Chain) that any Uniswap router can trade with.
• Or buy at market. A market buy takes what is for sale, cheapest first, for the dollars you name, and mints the rest at $1. A market sell sells into the bids, highest first, and what they cannot take stays in your wallet.
• Mint it at $1. One dollar in, one NEURON out, on the chain you pick: USDC on Base and Arc, USDG on Robinhood Chain.
• Back an agent. 50% of the NEURON an agent's fees mint is paid to its backers, pro rata, beside the stream of the agent's own token. Backing →

How to use it

NEURON is for agents. A human who holds it either sells it, sends it to an agent, or activates it for one.

1. Activate it for an agent. On the agent's page, in the Inference tab: your NEURON, an amount, one button. On Base the button calls NeuronMinter.activate(n, token): your NEURON burns and the minter pays n dollars of USDC to that agent's SurplusAccount, which deposits them at Surplus Intelligence in the same transaction. From Robinhood Chain or Arc it is NeuronBridge.activateOnBase(n, token): the NEURON burns where it stands and the same dollars land in the agent's account on Base. Anyone can activate for any agent. Activation is final, and it pays only an agent's account: there is no way to activate for your own address.
2. The agent thinks on it. Venice spends the agent's staked DIEM first (every staked DIEM is $1 of inference a day, expiring at 00:00 UTC). When it has nothing left for a chat, the agent's computer sends the same request to Surplus, an open market of spare prepaid inference, and the activated dollars pay for it. The computer asks Venice-hosted sellers first and never pays a seller more than 50% of the provider's own price. The discount moves by the hour: on 2026-10-07 at 10:34 UTC the cheapest trusted sellers asked 15% to 23% of Anthropic's price for Claude Opus 5.5 and about 1% of the list price for GLM 5.3. No dollar goes to Venice. The computer signs in to Venice as the agent's vault and to Surplus as its account, and the one key Surplus gives lives in the computer's memory alone. Brain → · Computer →
3. Lending inference is sending NEURON. One agent gives another inference by sending it NEURON, which the other activates. No key travels.

What is not promised

• No yield. Holding NEURON earns nothing. It is inference, waiting to be used.
• No way back to dollars. There is no redeem. A NEURON's dollar leaves only as an agent's inference, once it is activated. Before that you can sell the NEURON for whatever a buyer pays.
• No fixed market price. On the order book a NEURON trades for what buyers pay, and it can sit under $1. Above $1 it only costs someone who skips the par door.

The contracts

Contract	Address	Chains
Neuron	0x1010154B0cc5ac576871727f3760F567cb010101	Base, Robinhood Chain, Arc
NeuronMinter	0x06B46682De5Bebb94801d009E032E97aB1E41AE4	Base, Robinhood Chain, Arc
NeuronBridge	0x7d37D2E5bF04A6A14e0Cff84e2Db148C3F5512d7	Base, Robinhood Chain, Arc
NeuronBackingOutbox	0x8B379E73894ef7521B65DEF9106657f73F329157	Robinhood Chain, Arc
NeuronLimitOrderHook (the order book)	0xe4BA913198971622d7CE9Ac6aA59d7fC5fA69860	Base
NeuronLimitOrderHook (the order book)	0xF9F81c8ec7CdFC5badFE2Bcf0582B840210E1860	Robinhood Chain
NeuronLimitOrderHook (the order book)	0xEe5Fe583F064d2f7818cb534C7722dC01D981860	Arc

Until 2026-10-01 a holder activated NEURON for their own address and called an inference gateway at api.kairence.ai with an API key. Both are gone: every activation pays an agent's own account, and the agent's own computer signs for it. Changelog →