Tokenomics: The Economics of AI
Every conversation about AI in 2026 — capex, capacity, jobs, geopolitics, valuations, margins — eventually collapses to the same atomic unit. The token. It is simultaneously the unit of cognition the model produces, the unit of compute the data center serves, the unit of price the lab charges, and the unit of value the enterprise extracts. Almost no other commodity in modern economic history has played all four roles at once. Oil came close in the twentieth century. Tokens are doing it in the twenty-first, and faster.
This piece is a structural read of the resulting economy — the tokenomics — built up from the technical reality of what a token actually is, then cascaded back through the layered AI stack until every part of the ecosystem can be reanalyzed through that lens.
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