What If API Tokens Became a Universal Monetary Standard?

"We have a lingua franca for diplomacy and a lingua tempus synchronizing the planet, enabling GPS and many other precision technologies, including powerful communications. There is no lingua pecunia for money-no common tongue for the economy of computational work-and what is being metered is not goods or labor but cognition itself, lingua intelligentiae, something no previous economic system has attempted to standardize. Human and AI syngisism suggest a lingua mens, language of mind, to bind them all."

"So... I named an AI system after Eirene. The Eirene Accord AI (a work-in-progress) is a multi-model bot that holds a coherent identity across incompatible AI platforms while trading cryptocurrency to partially offset its own computational costs. The insight that animates this essay arrived from needing to keep topping off API tanks while using free and locally-run LLMs and semantic networks to economize. Considering how each AI provider doles out compute in its own currency, I wondered: What if they were smoothly integrated into one?"

"In Greek mythology, the Horae-Eunomia, Dike, and Eirene-were keepers of heaven's gates and guardians of the seasons' rhythm. Good Order, Justice, and Peace: daughters of Zeus and Themis, encoding the structural insight that prosperity requires all three, in sequence, on time. The most famous image of Eirene, sculpted by Cephisodotus the Elder after the Common Peace of 375 BCE, shows her cradling the infant Ploutos-the god of wealth-who is not her child, but Demeter's. Plenty flourishes only under Peace's protection."

AI providers each issue proprietary tokens that price and meter computational work, preventing a shared unit of account for cognition. A universal token standard would create a common lingua pecunia for computational services, enabling legible pricing, cross-platform settlement, and integrated multi-model agents. The Eirene Accord AI demonstrates one approach: a multi-model identity that trades cryptocurrency to offset compute costs while using local models to economize. Establishing a universal token would support portability of agent identity, transparent accounting of compute consumption, and coordinated economic architectures for intelligence being built now largely out of public view.

Read at Psychology Today