Why Pontica exists, and the rules it keeps.
The Greek cities of the Black Sea shipped the grain that fed Athens. Pontica trades the new staple.
Along the Pontus Euxinus, the colonies of the Black Sea coast grew and shipped the grain that fed Athens. Whoever held the sea routes held the city's bread, and the price of a cargo was argued out in the open, in the agora, where anyone could hear it.
The obol was the small silver coin of that world. It paid for passage and for a seat at the theatre: a coin you spent, not one you hoarded. Its face carried the owl of Athena.
Inference is the staple now. Every agent, every assistant and every tool that thinks runs on it, and most of it is bought through subscriptions and invoices nobody else can see. Pontica is an agora for it, on Robinhood Chain: inference is funded, traded and spent in OBOL credits, and every step leaves a public record.
A number on Pontica is read from Robinhood Chain, taken from OpenRouter's live catalogue, or marked illustrative. If none of those is true, the number is not shown.
Balances, the book, activations, staking and AI Funding are read from the contracts when you open the page, and the totals come from the contracts' own counters.
Model prices are OpenRouter's list prices in dollars per token. 1 OBOL is $1 of that list price; the only fee on spending is the activation fee, shown on the chain.
The calculator and the code snippets are examples, and they say so. Estimates are called estimates, and a value that cannot be read right now shows as unknown.
OBOL is a credit for inference. It is not an investment and cannot be redeemed for cash. Staking pays OBOL credits, not a share of revenue.
Pontica never holds your wallet keys. You sign every transaction in your own wallet, and the contracts hold only what their rules say they hold.
The models run at the providers OpenRouter routes to. Pontica passes your requests through and never stores prompts or completions.
The contracts are tested and their source is verified on Sourcify, but no outside audit is claimed. Read the trust notes before you put in more than you can lose.
Questions, bugs, a fund that should not be listed, or a model you want: one address and one account.
