A friend asked me, is the AI Token distribution, transit, and aggregation platform a good business? After careful consideration, let me answer: 1) When it comes to intermediary aggregation platforms, the first thing that comes to mind is @ OpenRouter. My lobster helps me monitor some hot topics on a daily basis, and on average, it costs $20 a day (which is painful), while @ claudeai's PRO monthly fee is only $20, which sounds like a huge profit! But according to publicly disclosed data, OpenRouter has a GMV of $100M, and with a 5% markup, its monthly revenue is only about $40W. Roughly estimated gross profit of 10%?? The key is that most people who use OpenRouter are either repeatedly banned from Claude's official account or have a hard requirement to interface with multiple model APIs at the same time. However, these two points are too weak as a moat for OpenRouter; 2) Because the essence of OpenRouter is price arbitrage, buying tokens at low prices from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and then reselling them to developers at a higher price. But this is actually a transitional business. No major model manufacturer is willing to let middlemen charge tolls forever. Although Anthropic is not friendly to ordinary individual users, its direct service to the enterprise side: @ OpenAI has been optimizing the developer direct connection experience; In the future, as long as major companies have more convenient direct connection services and the differences in capabilities between models become smaller, the demand scenarios and profit margins of intermediary platforms will be immediately squeezed out; 3) But most importantly, native micro payment protocols based on HTTP status codes such as x402 and MPP are gradually accelerating their large-scale adoption as infrastructure matures. However, Token distribution payment is the biggest landing scenario that cannot be avoided. The ultimate vision of Agent Payment was to rewrite the inefficient service model of "person recharge ->platform forwarding", and use Agent automated payment to request Agent automatic allocation of quotas is the end game. Imagine that one day, when AI agents can attach payment vouchers and model factories can directly receive payments at the same time as making requests, what other reasons does the intermediate aggregation layer have? What do you think?