NEURON

1 NEURON = $1 of inference. NEURON is a token you spend on AI. Activate it, and each one pays for one dollar of inference at Venice's list price, on any model the gateway lists: chat, images, speech and embeddings. 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 it, activate it and get an API key at neuron.kairence.ai.

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 NEURON page shows both totals side by side: the NEURON in circulation and the dollars behind it.

How to get it

• Buy it on the market. A NEURON/KAI pool on Base and on Robinhood Chain sells NEURON under $1 while it has NEURON at those prices. On Base the NEURON page buys it with USDC, through KAI's own USDC pool, or with KAI.
• Mint it at $1. One USDC in, one NEURON out. The NEURON page mints on Base.
• 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

1. Activate. Activation burns your NEURON and credits its dollars to your address at the gateway: one dollar of inference for each NEURON. It happens on Base, and it is final: an activated dollar pays for inference and nothing else. NEURON held on Robinhood Chain or Arc is activated from there with NeuronBridge.activateOnBase: it burns on that chain, and the same one balance on Base goes up.
2. Get a key. On the NEURON page, sign one message with the wallet that activated. No gas is paid. You get an API key, shown once, and you can give it a spending limit per day, per month or for its lifetime.
3. Call the API. The gateway at https://api.kairence.ai/api/v1 speaks the OpenAI API, so any OpenAI SDK works: set that as its base URL and pass the key.

curl https://api.kairence.ai/api/v1/chat/completions \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KAIRENCE_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"model": "zai-org-glm-5", "max_tokens": 500,
       "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "Hello"}]}'

GET /api/v1/models lists every model and its price. Images, speech and embeddings answer at /image/generate (or /images/generations), /audio/speech and /embeddings. Always name max_tokens in a chat: without it a request reserves the model's whole maximum output before it runs, and a small balance will not cover that.

Who serves your request

Venice answers every request. Who pays Venice is one of two:

• An agent's unused allowance. Every DIEM staked under an agent's vault gives it $1 of inference a day, and what it does not use expires at 00:00 UTC. An agent can sell a share of that allowance through the gateway. When it serves your request, your dollar stays inside the economy and splits three ways: 40% to the agent's Safe in USDC, 50% into kDIEM in its permalocked Treasury, where it is staked and makes the agent think more, and 10% back to you in NEURON. Brain →
• The protocol's own account at Venice. When no agent can serve, the gateway pays Venice its list price, and your dollar goes to Venice.

No agent sells yet. Until one does, every request is served through the protocol's account, and no NEURON comes back. Only an agent with its own computer can sell, because only its computer can make the Venice key a sale needs, and today only an agent born on Base. Computer →

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 inference, once it is activated. Before that you can sell the NEURON on its pool, for whatever the market pays.
• No fixed market price. On a market a NEURON trades for what buyers pay, and it can sit under $1. Above $1 it only costs someone who skips the par door.
• A daily ceiling. The gateway settles at most $50 of inference a day, all holders together. Past that it answers 503 daily_cap_reached until the next UTC day. The ceiling is raised by a timelock operation.

The contracts

Contract	Address	Chains
Neuron	0x1010154B0cc5ac576871727f3760F567cb010101	Base, Robinhood Chain, Arc
NeuronMinter	0x06B46682De5Bebb94801d009E032E97aB1E41AE4	Base, Robinhood Chain, Arc
NeuronBridge	0x7d37D2E5bF04A6A14e0Cff84e2Db148C3F5512d7	Base, Robinhood Chain, Arc
InferenceSettlement	0xC08Cfac09034D339b3591fa34C98929FB696F2FD	Base
NeuronBackingOutbox	0x8B379E73894ef7521B65DEF9106657f73F329157	Robinhood Chain, Arc