The circle of history always closes at the same point.
During the gold rush of the 19th century, countless prospectors flocked to California. The gold rush lasted for less than ten years, but Levi's, which sold jeans to the prospectors, has survived for two centuries.
At the end of the 20th century, many .com companies collapsed. However, Cisco, which set up routers and switches for websites, built its empire on the ruins.
Around 2010, with the explosion of the mobile internet, app entrepreneurs faced life-and-death struggles amidst fierce competition for traffic. In contrast, AWS, which provides foundational cloud computing power, ultimately profited from the entire battleground.
Today, we are entering the next round of this cycle: generative AI.
1/ A high-barrier gamble
OpenAI, Anthropic, Midjourney, and tens of thousands of AI startups around the world have poured enormous funding into this race.
Training a large model requires hundreds of millions of dollars, and the inference costs remain high, with a clear commercialization path still elusive. A model that is the star of the industry today may be surpassed by the open-source community tomorrow. An AI application that is hot today may also be easily replicated by tech giants tomorrow due to a lack of a competitive moat.
The fate of prospectors has always been binary.
So, in this AI gold rush, who is the one selling shovels?
2/ The shovel seller of the AI era
In every wave of technological gold rush, those who truly profit in the long run are not the prospectors, but those who sell the tools to them.
Core hardware layer: Nvidia
Jensen Huang knows well that he doesn't need to bet on which large model will ultimately win. He only needs to be certain that the training of all large models depends on GPUs.
With this simple and correct judgment, Nvidia has become one of the most valuable companies on Earth.
Infrastructure layer: Cluster Protocol
After large models are trained, they do not automatically become productivity. They still need to be called, routed, connected to data, verified through cryptography, and settled automatically by AI Agents. This entire pipeline from model to application is a necessary path for all AI applications to land.
Cluster Protocol is building this unified AI infrastructure layer on the Base chain.
▌Routing: An API that connects the entire open-source frontier
Cluster's OpenAI-compatible interface integrates over 500 AI models, including DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi, Llama, Mistral, GLM, and native 0G models, covering six major modalities such as chat, embeddings, image generation, TTS, STT, and reordering.
It does not bet on which model will win; it simply holds the route that all models must pass through.
▌Full stack: Five-layer architecture, one token
Most AI infrastructure projects focus only on one layer, while Cluster builds an end-to-end full-stack infrastructure covering computing power, data, inference, agent payments, and applications.
Its Data Marketplace turns datasets into held and tradable assets; GPU computing power can be used to host and deploy custom models. From data upload, model training, to model services, Cluster has connected the entire closed loop.
▌Privacy: Assembling the strongest technologies into a complete stack
Cluster organically integrates the most advanced solutions in the industry. Venice's zero-knowledge inference, Phala's chip-level TEE proofs, 0G's verifiable inference, and Mind Network's private payments based on FHE. These capabilities can all be accessed through Cluster's unified interface.
▌Payment: The most toll-like x402
AI Agents can call Cluster's API on the Base chain and complete payments on a per-use basis. No account registration is required, no pre-charging is needed, and the settlement process is open and verifiable. According to x402scan, Cluster is one of the most utilized servers on the x402 network in the past 30 days, with successful payment requests exceeding 130,000 and a settled amount exceeding $79,000.
▌Settlement token of the network: $CP
The value certificate of this network is the token $CP. It is used to pay for AI inference, GPU tasks, and dataset call fees. Users can also stake $CP to participate in network incentives and gain resource priority.
The community holds up to 40.38%, with no prior unlock for the team and investors at the launch.
On August 18, 2026, Coinbase Markets has added $CP to its asset onboarding roadmap.
3/ History always repeats itself
Looking back at these stories, it is not difficult to find a disturbing symmetry.
Prospectors bet on “if.”
If there is gold in this river, if this website can have users, if this app can retain people, if this model can ultimately win.
Shovel sellers bet on “no matter.”
No matter who finds the gold, no matter which website survives, no matter which model ultimately reigns, all must consume tools, computing power, channels, and settlement services on the way to the finish line.
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