Documentation
Overview
PORTION is a prepaid compute market on Base. Providers sell future capacity as portions, buyers consume them through x402, and staked $PRTN guarantees delivery.
The problem
Inference is bought at spot. An agent or a team calls an endpoint, pays per request, and hopes the price, the latency and the model stay the same next month. There is no way to lock capacity in advance, and no recourse when an endpoint degrades or quietly serves a smaller model.
Providers have the opposite problem. A team hosting an open-source model or running GPU inference pays for hardware up front and is paid per request, weeks later. Demand is hard to forecast and working capital is short. The capacity they will have next quarter cannot be sold today.
The solution
PORTION turns future capacity into a tradable, guaranteed claim.
- A provider that exposes an x402 endpoint on Base issues portions: ERC-1155 tokens that each represent a precise amount of future capacity. Example: 10M tokens of inference on Llama-70B, usable until 31 December 2026.
- It sells them in USDC, at a fixed price or by Dutch auction, below the spot price. It is paid at sale.
- The buyer consumes a portion by calling the provider's x402 endpoint with the portion as payment. The Redeemer contract burns exactly the units consumed.
- Unused units can be resold on a Uniswap v4 pool against USDC, or left to expire.
- Delivery is enforced. To issue, the provider locks a bond in $PRTN proportional to the value of its outstanding portions. If the endpoint fails to deliver what it sold, staked watchers attest to it, a 24-hour dispute window opens, and the bond is then seized to refund holders in USDC.
PORTION does not run a datacenter and does not rent GPUs. It tokenises capacity from any x402 endpoint and puts a bond behind it.
Who it is for
Buyers and agents
Teams and autonomous agents that consume inference. They buy capacity 10–30 % below spot, fix their budget ahead of time, and keep a resellable asset instead of a sunk prepayment. See For buyers & agents.
Providers
Anyone serving a model, a data API or GPU inference behind an x402 endpoint. They get paid in USDC before the work is done and reach agents that buy capacity programmatically. See For providers.
Watchers
$PRTN stakers who probe endpoints and attest to failures. They are paid from seized bonds and receive a share of protocol fees. See For watchers.
Traders
Portions are the first on-chain asset whose underlying is a compute price. The spread between prepaid and spot, the time to expiry and the provider's bond all price into the secondary market. See Secondary market.
How PORTION differs from compute marketplaces
Networks such as Akash, io.net or Render rent GPU time at spot: you lease hardware now and run your own workload on it. PORTION sits one layer up. It does not match hardware. It sells future capacity of a specific endpoint, measured in the unit that endpoint bills (tokens, hours, images), with a bond that pays out if the endpoint does not deliver. Any x402 endpoint can issue, including one that runs on those networks.